Pile On, Azi!

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New Yorkers Coming Together

The Working Families Party and Tom Golisano, not to mention Charles Barron.

I Can’t Believe This Is New York City!

New York should really have its own county fair, with an agricultural competition:

A Queens woman has taken homegrown fruits and vegetables to a whole new level by cultivating a 6-foot-long zucchini in her backyard.

Green-fingered Apollonia Castitlione grew the giant Long Italian zucchini during the warm summer months using nothing more than fertilizer, water and a little TLC.

“I’ve had my vegetable garden for 26 years, but I never saw anything so spectacular,” said Castitlione, who’s 5 feet tall. “I didn’t put Miracle Grow on it, nothing, just a little bit of 5-10-5 fertilizer, water and my time.”

Castitlione, 48, said she noticed the giant fruit was growing longer than usual last month when it suddenly shot up a couple of inches in as many days.

She then went on vacation to Boston for the weekend and returned to find it had shot up another 1.5 inches.

At last count, the zucchini was just over 6 feet . . .

Encyclopedia Brown And The Case Of The Mislabeled Sushi

Taken with mercury fears, it could mean the end of sushi. Will pork belly be next? Time will tell:

Many New York sushi restaurants and seafood markets are playing a game of bait and switch, say two high school students turned high-tech sleuths.

In a tale of teenagers, sushi and science, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, who graduated this year from the Trinity School in Manhattan, took on a freelance science project in which they checked 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting.

They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

What may be most impressive about the experiment is the ease with which the students accomplished it. Although the testing technique is at the forefront of research, the fact that anyone can take advantage of it by sending samples off to a laboratory meant the kind of investigative tools once restricted to Ph.D.’s and crime labs can move into the hands of curious diners and amateur scientists everywhere.

The project began, appropriately, over dinner about a year ago. Ms. Stoeckle’s father, Mark, is a scientist and early proponent of the use of DNA bar coding, a technique that greatly simplifies the process of identifying species. Instead of sequencing the entire genome, bar coders — who have been developing their field only since 2003 — examine a single gene. Dr. Stoeckle’s specialty is birds, and he admits that he tends to talk shop at the dinner table.

One evening at a sushi restaurant, Ms. Stoeckle recalled asking her father, “Could you bar code sushi?”

Dr. Stoeckle replied, “Yeah, I think you could — and if you did that, I think you’d be the first ones.”

Ms. Stoeckle, who is now 19, was intrigued. She enlisted Ms. Strauss, who is now 18.

Their field technique was simple, Ms. Stoeckle said. “We ate a lot of sushi.”

Or, as Dr. Stoeckle put it, “It involved shopping and eating, in which they were already fluent.”

They hit 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores in Manhattan. Once the samples were home, whether in doggie bags or shopping bags, they cut away a small piece and preserved it in alcohol. They sent those off to the University of Guelph in Ontario, where the Barcode of Life Database project began. A graduate student there, Eugene Wong, works on the Fish Barcode of Life (dubbed, inevitably, Fish-BOL) and agreed to do the genetic analysis. He compared the teenagers’ samples with the global library of 30,562 bar codes representing nearly 5,500 fish species. (Commercial labs will also perform the analysis for a fee.)

Three hundred dollars’ worth of meals later, the young researchers had their data back from Guelph: 2 of the 4 restaurants and 6 of the 10 grocery stores had sold mislabeled fish.

At Some Point You Finally Ask Yourself, What Are Those Things Doing There Anyway?

And then you realize that you know very little about the maritime industry. It’s like that abandoned car in the vacant lot down the street except no one seems to notice — until now:

On Monday, two City Council members and a state assemblyman announced their disgust with what they called a growing problem: abandoned construction barges and other vessels left to rust, buckle, leak and eventually sink to the bottom of remote corners of rivers and tributaries feeding Jamaica Bay.

In January, the National Parks Service estimated that about 190 abandoned vessels — many of them small boats, apparently privately owned — had been left to rot in the 25,000 acres that make up Jamaica Bay. Since then, about 40 vessels have been removed, said Brian Feeney, a Parks Service spokesman.

In a news conference held by the East River in Manhattan on Monday, City Councilmen David Yassky and Eric Gioia said that abandoned industrial barges had become a threat to the health of city estuaries.

“For too long, it’s been the Wild West in New York Harbor,” Mr. Yassky said.

Since 2006, the officials said, one company in particular has repeatedly tugged barges into Newtown Creek, in Brooklyn, and other New York rivers and bays, to let them rot. Mr. Yassky said the company, Pile Foundation Construction Co., of Hicksville, N.Y., was pursuing what he called an intentional “abandon-and-sink strategy” within the city, and must be stopped.

Earlier: How Dare You Barge Right In Here!