New York's Water Filled With Invisible Shrimp | Hacker News Reader

New York's Water Filled With Invisible Shrimp

consumerist.com

47 pointstomeast32 comments

This came up a few years ago.

It resulted in an interesting debate about whether NYC water was kosher to drink. When I heard about it, the question was still being debated, and I don't know how it turned out. (Not being Jewish or religious, it wasn't particularly material to my life.)

Oddly enough it turns out that the water was unquestionably kosher to drink before the local Jews were told about the arthropods. But once they had been told, there was a real question about whether they could continue to drink it. The reason for this is that there is a dispensation for breaking the dietary rules out of sheer ignorance. But once you know the rules, you are responsible for following them. The classic example being, if I recall correctly, the case of a blind man who didn't know that he had been eating pork.

Funny how I read this in the morning on reddit and it travelled to Gizmodo, then to the Consumerist to finally get to HN.

I found the top comment on reddit[1] very interesting, although it's actually a wikipedia citation [2]:

The copepods can be added to water-storage containers where the mosquitoes breed. Copepods, primarily of the genera Mesocyclops and Macrocyclops (such as Macrocyclops albidus), can survive for periods of months in the containers, if the containers are not completely drained by their users. They will attack, kill, and eat the younger 1st and 2nd instar larvae of the mosquitoes. This biological control method is complemented by community trash removal and recycling to eliminate other possible mosquito-breeding sites.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d7pso/look_what_i_f...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copepods#Water_supplies

This business about added is wrong. Maybe they could be, but they aren't. They are there naturally.

Not only could they be added, but they have been. See for example this article about a program in Vietnam where they have been used to control the mosquito responsible for Dengue fever.

http://www.ajtmh.org/cgi/content/full/72/1/67

There are many more examples on Google...

I was talking about New York specifically.

If I sold bottled water in NYC I know what my advertising campaign would be about:

    Feel like drinking an arthropod today?
    No? Then buy our Bottled Water(TM)"

Except that most bottled water is local tap water, so you would be doing false advertising.

Yes, but most of the brands probably don't bottle in NYC. So they probably don't share this particular problem. But what do I know? Maybe they all have arthropods.

That's why you have to insist on http://tapdny.com . (I know, it's filtered.)

Not if you filtered it. Filtering is a cheap and easy process.

Most bottled water is processed tap water. Dasani, for instance, is filtered through reverse osmosis. Some others go through distillation. The result is dramatically cleaner water, at least before bottle leachate makes its showing.

I'm actually surprised that HN or any tech site falls for the "just tap water" bit, as if H2O from a mountain is more unique than H2O from a tap.

Those things aren't bacteria; they're huge. Even a coffee filter would get most of them.

NYT article from 2004 discussing the same exact organisms:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/01/nyregion/there-s-something...

The last thing we need is another reason for people to be buying bottled water when tap is perfectly safe, cheap and environmentally friendly.

You ingest far worse things every day. This is intellectually interesting, but I fear it will cause people to overreact.

Haunting comment from Reddit thread yesterday:

"On the grand scale of things, these are about a "3" on a scale of 1-10. Start looking at everything you eat, drink or breathe in an average day under a microscope and besides being obsessive, you'll realize there are a lot of things that should best not be looked at under magnification. The only harm these will do is psychological."

Not haunting at all, to my mind. Our concept of what is "clean" and obsessiveness, both personal and societal, is built on terrible mental models that don't fit reality.

While not directly related, seems appropriate:

Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made. --John Godfrey Saxe, 29 March 1869

If you're haunted by that, don't study microbiology.

The human body, consisting of about 100 trillion cells, carries about ten times as many microorganisms in the intestines. [1]

The total number of bacteria on an average human has been estimated at 10^12 [2]

ref: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_flora

There are also FDA "allowable" levels of insect parts and rodent hairs in food.

I'm going to recommend that you don't read this link, then:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_bacteriotherapy

I wonder if that's why the pizza and bagels taste better in NY

You're not the first person to have that theory http://www.slashfood.com/2005/09/26/new-york-pizza-is-the-wa...

That's a little bit too Gladwellian for me to hazard, but still a possibility.

I wonder how vegetarians, particularly vegans, in NY have responded to this, given that bottled water is often tap water.

Opportunity for a vegan stillsuit startup?

Of course if you did distill your water, you'd just be killing the shrimp and then not eating them. A correctly-designed filter is what you'd want.

It's an interesting question, actually: how many animals do you kill every day if you're trying not to? Let's limit it to multicellular animals, but with the shrimp in your drinking water plus the insects you breathe in, and everything you step on, and whatever might be lurking in your (non-meat) food, I'd say the typical vegan has killed a lot of animals today.

It may depend on why someone is a vegetarian.

If they simply do not want to eat anything that may be considered meat, however broadly defined, then eating micro shrimp might give them trouble.

If they avoid eating meat insofar as they do not want to cause the suffering of some creature, then shrimp may not be an issue.

http://www.wesleyan.edu/wsa/warn/singer_fish.htm

Much like "atheist" or "capitalist" , "vegetarian" gets used to describe a number of situations that are not all interchangeable, but for which there are often not many good, easily grasped, alternatives. (Though I seriously do not get the "vegetarian who eats chicken" thing.)

For myself, if someone offered me vat-grown meat I'd have no moral qualms eating it, though I think I lost the taste for meat sometime ago.

I refer to myself as a vegetarian, but I'm sure there's some longer, more complex, not-worth-the-trouble term or phrase that more accurately describes my conditions for what food I'll consume.

You can't be vegan, all you can do is aspire.

If they're 1-2mm long, surely they should be visible with the naked eye if you look closely?

They're also transparent, the image uses stained samples.

An aside about staining, the dyes created for the textiles industry during the industrial revolution had the neat side effect of advancing biology greatly. As each dye binds to different things in a cell it allows scientists to glimpse the inner workings of the cell.

You'd still see [the effects of] a 2mm something swimming in your glass of water if it was 100% transparent. Reflection, refraction, wake ...

Too bad it's not full of visible shrimp. Those are worth money!

Reminds one of the invisible clams in Scientology.

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