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Boston's Morning Newsletter
Why Nantucket is testing out mushroom-based buoys
Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from WBUR's daily morning newsletter, WBUR Today. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, sign up here.
Congrats to all the amazing runners who tackled the Boston Marathon yesterday! We’ll have more on the race results below. But first, now that the show on land is over, let’s turn our eyes to the sea:
Shroom boom: Nantucket is testing out an unconventional material for its buoys. The town is putting 135 new “MycoBuoys” made from mushrooms along spat lines this summer. The buoys are made of mycelium, the root-like fungal network that is underground the fruiting body of a mushroom (aka the part you’d see on a pizza). It’s a nontoxic and compostable alternative to traditional plastic-based buoys.
- Zoom in: Nantucket’s Natural Resources Department monitors the island’s commercial bay scallop fishery and supervises shellfish research for the town. Part of their work involves putting out spat collectors, which provide a hard surface for baby scallops to attach themselves and grow. “Each line of spat collectors has three buoys on it,” Tara Riley, the shellfish and aquatic resources manager for Nantucket, told WBUR’s Amy Sokolow. Around 150 buoys float in the harbor annually, Riley added.
- So, what’s the problem? “The buoys that we have are traditional styrofoam buoys, and they degrade over time, which equates to microplastics in the water … [which] affects different shellfish processes and reproduction,” said Riley.
- How long will the new buoys last? Riley said they hope the MycoBuoys will last for the entire season, about five to eight months. Her department is looking forward to tracking whether their nontoxic properties improve the number of bay scallops collected this year.
- Go deeper: Learn more about scientists’ hopes for mushrooms in this Here & Now segment with mycologist Paul Stamets.
Dang, that’s fast: Ethiopian Sisay Lemma took gold in the Boston Marathon men’s race with a runaway finish in 2 hours, 6 minutes, 17 seconds. That’s good for the 10th fastest time in the race’s 128-year history. (Lemma was even on pace to set a course record after the first 13.1 miles.) And he wasn’t the only one cruising across the Copley Square finish line yesterday. Here’s a look at the other winners:
- Hellen Obiri won her second-straight woman’s title, after holding her lead in an exciting sprint down Boylston Street against fellow Kenyan Sharon Lokedi. Obiri is the first woman to win back-to-back Boston Marathons since 2005.
- Despite taking a tumble in Newton, Swiss racer Marcel Hug won his seventh Boston men’s wheelchair race with ease. Hug’s time — 1 hour, 15 minutes and 33 seconds — smashed the all-time course record (which he set himself last year) by 90 seconds.
- British breakout Eden Rainbow-Cooper won the women’s wheelchair division — her first major marathon victory. The 22-year-old is also the first woman from England to win Boston.
- Scroll through this photos post for a full recap of the day. (And of course, don’t miss all these clever signs and the special marathon-themed Make Way for Ducklings display.)
Feeling the heat: While it was a great day to watch the marathon, the warm weather was rough for those running it. WBUR’s Martha Bebinger reports medical volunteers treated an estimated 2,000 runners primarily for heat-related reasons, as afternoon temperatures in Boston surpassed 70 degrees for the first time this year.
- Zoom in: Many had cramps and nausea linked to dehydration; some even got dizzy or disoriented and fell. There were at least 40 cases of heat stroke. And one medical tent hit capacity twice. The marathon’s medical coordinator Chris Troyanos told Martha that about 90 people were taken to local hospitals — a number he expects rose overnight as the effects of dehydration set in.
- Troyanos credits the efforts of the marathon’s 1,900 health care volunteers: “To have so many licensed medical professionals and non-licensed people donate their time and do what they did,” he said. “I mean, they’re heroic. You can’t beat that.”
P.S.— We have a new podcast coming soon. Listen here to the trailer for Last Seen‘s upcoming fourth season, “Postmortem,” a look inside the Harvard morgue scandal. The five-part narrative series — hosted by WBUR’s Ally Jarmanning — explains what happened at Harvard, explores the dark origins of our nation’s medical schools and tries to answer this question: How should we treat the dead — and who gets to decide? Follow Last Seen wherever you get your podcasts.
