Bird droppings

The element phosphorus, like nitrogen, is essential to plant and animal life. Although phosphorus was not identified and isolated until 1669, phosphorus-containing materials have been used as fertilizers since ancient times, usually from bird droppings, fish, and bone. The first phosphoric acid was made by treating bone ashes with sulfuric acid. This marked the beginning of the commercial fertilizer industry. Eventually, mined phosphate rock, a poor fertilizer by itself, was substituted for bones as a raw material for phosphoric acid in the mid-1880s. 

It is a gram-negative, spherical (0.4-0.6 fim diameter) bacterium. Survival of the bacteria outside the host depends on the source infected fluid from eggs—52 h bird droppings—a few days bird feed—2 months glass—15 days and straw—20 days. The natural reservoir is birds. This is a biosafety level 2 agent. It is highly communicable from infected birds to people. 

Before World War I, tbe main source of nitrates for human use was from large deposits of bird droppings in Peru and sodium nitrate from Chile. These sources were becoming scarce and expensive. Then Fritz Haber (1868-1934), a lecturer in a technical college in Germany, began to experiment with ways to manufacture ammonia. Haber knew that ammonia could he easily converted to nitrates and other useful nitrogen... 

What do you dislike... Seagulls leave droppings that are difficult to remove. The window withstands bird droppings. 

The window glass withstands bird droppings. 4 (16) The window glass withstands salt and sand. 4... 

FIGURE 4-33 A wet-dry atmospheric deposition collector commonly used for acid deposition monitoring. The roof over the wet bucket opens only when precipitation is sensed, thereby minimizing the collection of debris, bird droppings, etc. The dry bucket for collecting dry deposition is not a very close approximation to natural surfaces and yields results of uncertain meaning. 

Because the new acrylic finishes required minimal polishing by the auto owner, the finishes were subject to water spotting. When water, or bird droppings, dried on the hood and trunk in the hot sun, permanent etches were left on the finish. Incorporation of longer ester chain methacrylates into the polymer backbone resolved this problem by rendering the coating more hydrophobic and also imparted improved flexibility without loss of hardness, when used in conjunction with special plasticizers. 

It s good news for plants to have birds eating their berries, as the birds drop or excrete the seeds and so enable the plants to spread. Birds are attracted to bright red yew berries, for example. They swallow the fruit, but then spit out the seed, which has a poisonous (and bad-tasting) coating. 

Rylander R., Goto H., Yuasa K., Fogelmark B. and Polla B. (1994) Bird droppings contain endotoxin and (1-3)-P-D-glucans. Intemat. Arch. Allergy Immunol., 103, 102-104. 

These animals do not make urea rather, they convert all their waste nitrogen to uric acid (Figure 23.17), the concentrated white solid so familiar in bird droppings. Some desert mammals, such as the kangaroo rat, which never drinks water but rather lives off metabolic water, also convert some of their waste nitrogen to uric acid to conserve the water used in urine. 

In aquatic animals, ammonia diffuses out through the skin, but land animals excrete excess ammonia as either urea or uric acid. Ammonia is excreted by humans who are on high-meat diets as a strategy to conserve Na+ and K+. Excess PO4 and SO4 that are produced from phosphoproteins and sulfur-containing amino acids are excreted as ammonium salts Na+ and are exchanged for NH4 in the kidney. The excretion of urea requires a plentiM supply of water as it is normally excreted in solution, whereas uric acid is very insoluble and is excreted as a sohd. Thus in animals in which weight, or the conservation of water, is important (e.g., birds and desert animals), excess ammonia is excreted as uric acid. This is the white material in bird droppings. 

Around the end of May, depending on weather conditions, pupae, buried in the soil beneath the cherry trees the year before, develop into fruit flies. They emerge from the ground and fly up into the trees, where they feed on bird droppings and tree resins. In about five days, they lay their eggs under the skin of the unripe, straw-colored cherries. In about ten days, the eggs hatch within ten more days, they are full-sized larvae. This brings us to about the third week of June. 

The next step in the catabolism of heme is the reduction of biliverdin to bilirubin. Birds, reptiles, and amphibians are quite happy to excrete water-soluble biliverdin directly—hence the green colour of bird droppings—but not mammals or fish. 

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