Talk:Biofouling

Untitled
I'm not comfortable changing what needs to be changed, but the Epibiosis link redirects to this same article. Not sure if the link is unneccesary or if it is supposed to point somewhere with more info. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.214.164.53 (talk • contribs) 23:56, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I removed the wikilink and commented it. The material and different bio system point of view merits a separate article. Some organisms exist in symbiosis with others and do not regard their neighbors as "fouling" their activities.  Others do, and have developed their own biofouling strategies as cursorily described in the biomimetic antifouling coatings article  J JMesserly (talk) 17:09, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Issues in REFERENCE section
The Vietti, P. (Fall 2009) citation is improperly formatted, and the URL leads to a dead external link. I ran into several issues while trying to fix this. I am not familiar with Wikipedia policy/procedure for this situation, and don't currently have the time to search the Help and Category pages for answers. So I am leaving what I was able to find here, with the intention of coming back to this later. Others are welcome to fix this citation, if you get to it before I do.

The intended citation is for the Fall_2009 issue of Navy's CURRENTS environmental magazine. The online location of that magazine has been moved since this citation was first created, and is now at http://greenfleet.dodlive.mil/currents-magazine/. Unfortunately the archives for the magazine only go back to 2011 (see left side of that linked page), so the cited Fall 2009 article is not available there. Nor is that 2009 article or the issue that contains it available via archive.org (Wayback Machine) using either the new or old URL. Nor could I find the article online via a general web search.

Because this citation is referenced repeatedly in the article, I spent a fair chunk of time looking for it online, but no luck (so far). The only thing I could find that has an identical title is a June 2009 press release, which was issued before the Fall 2009 article publication, but for all I know both were based on the same U.S. Navy data. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sharl928 (talk) 01:03, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

Error in History section
I'm not sure how to correct this as it'll need a rewrite. It states that the earliest written example of fouling was written by Plutarch. But the next paragraph says an Aramic record was found dating back to 412 BC. Plutarch died like 120 AD so there's an error here somewhere - his wasn't the first written example if the Aramic record stands.

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20111005011946/http://www.enviro-navair.navy.mil/currents/fall2009/Fall09_New_Hull_Coatings.pdf to http://www.enviro-navair.navy.mil/currents/fall2009/Fall09_New_Hull_Coatings.pdf

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External links modified (January 2018)
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20131203040257/http://www.biosciences-labs.bham.ac.uk/callowj/ent/Carman%20et%20al.%20Biofouling%202006%20doi.pdf to http://www.biosciences-labs.bham.ac.uk/callowj/ent/Carman%20et%20al.%20Biofouling%202006%20doi.pdf

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Unsubstantiated fatuous arithmetic on top of bad economics
With fuel typically comprising up to half of marine transport costs, antifouling methods are estimated to save the shipping industry around $60 billion per year.

This failed verification on the citation given. The only financial assertion I was able to find was this one:

Vessels can require as much as a 40 percent increase in fuel consumption to counter the added drag. For the Navy, that translates into roughly one billion dollars annually in extra fuel costs and maintenance to keep its ships free of barnacles, oysters, algae and other debris.

My larger point, however, is that these claims need to be taken with an ocean of salt in the first place.

Consumer culture teaches us to think about "save" as a monadic operator. $5 cheaper than what? Save 10% versus what, precisely? One argument specified, the other argument left floating in space. (Sufficient for most purposes, the floating operator can be adduced in the form "$5 less than what we thought we could bilk you for last week, which we will again try to squeeze out of you next week, but for today, the getting—if still not precisely good—is at least less bad". And the reason it devolves to this equilibrium is the universal need in retail for two prices to coexist almost simultaneously: one of those who pay attention, and another for those who don't.)

When you encounter claims such as "our product X saves industry Y Z-illion dollars per year" the mathematics is generally ill-formed.

If you had a crystal ball, you could legitimately calculate the difference between two equilibria on the supply and demand curves.

But this is complex, because without the anti-fouling paint, the cargo ships themselves would be designed for different optimal cruise speeds, striking a completely a different trade-off between delivery time and fuel costs. Under some combination of deterioration in timeliness or cost, the demand point for marine shipping would decline, relative to other solutions (other forms of transit, less oversea manufacturing in the first place, less aggregate demand for products that can only be viably manufactured in remote locations, etc.)

But we don't have such a crystal ball, so we calculate something easier—and vastly more ridiculous: if this class of product disappeared tomorrow (a narrow, economic rapture weirdly confined to a single product category) then in order for the shipping industry to pretend nothing had really happened at all, they would have to increase their direct costs (mostly fuel) by an extra $60 billion per year. But they would never do this, because it's nowhere close even to the short-term equilibrium point, and it's completely insane relative to the long-term equilibrium point.

You get a nice, big number to pat yourself on the back for having an indispensable product, but it's really just fatuous puff language, because the underlying math makes not coherent sense—not any more than $5 off your laundry soap, as compared to some sudsy and imprecise notion of the product category as a whole (and the unsavory price we got away with charging the unwary last week). &mdash; MaxEnt 15:45, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Fungi? No significant mention.
Cards on the table: I know little about this topic. However, a BBC News story, which appeared today, talked of the presence of a "fungus" halting the berthing of a cruise ship in Australia. This sounded highly unlikely to me (quite possibly poor reporting?) so I checked this article, and the only mention of fungal growth was as a 'larger organism' causing biofouling, which was uncited. It created the image in my mind of a hull covered in mushroom fruiting bodies. I therefore removed mention of it for the time being with this edit.

A search for supporting sources seemed to suggest some fungi such as Aspergillus and some yeasts actually have anti-biofouling properties. See here. Elsewhere, filamentous fungi have been identified as fouling diesel tanks see here. So what's the true involvement of fungi in biofouling?

I raise this in the hope that interested editors might be motivated to address, one way or another, how fungi are (or are not) associated with biofouling. Nick Moyes (talk) 23:27, 1 January 2023 (UTC)