"Earth's Internet" attempts to document, reference as much of the natural world networking abilities and strategies as possible. Such Scientific findings are at odds with industrial scientific approaches maintaining our planet. Be warned. If your learning approach it based on Memes with short clever quips, you may be disappointed here.
Think of all sorts of Pacific Salmon varieties including the endangered California Steelhead Trout species. But there's more. In the deserts southwest historically there were once large six foot long native fish once called the "White Salmon" (Colorado Pikeminnow) & the recovering Razorback Sucker. What do all these native fish have in common ? They desparately need meandering river floodplains
Image - Carson Jeffres
SierraClub.org - July 16, 2012
Back in the 1970s, I was intrigued by an article from the Arizona Highways magazine article which told about a Native golden Apache Trout which almost went extinct were it not for the efforts of Biologists working with the Apache Indian Reservation. But they also referenced other native fish, even mentioning that some 35 different species of native fish once occupied the desert aquatic environments of Arizona. That was almost hard to believe. Like California, Arizona has dammed up it's rivers and channeled much of their watercourses to faciliate agriculture and urban sprawl. Take the river channel in photo on the right which has large tall levees on both sides to prevent the ancient floodplain from reappearing and reclaiming it's former territory. This area of Northern California is known as the Yolo By-Pass region where the floodplain is allowed to prevail once a year. Here below is a video of a very long elevated freeway section of Interstate 80 which allows the floodwaters to do their former inundation of the former wetlands landscape.
Of course there have been times (like the recent 1016/17 winter rainy season) when wetter than normal rainfall events have caused the rivers near the delta region to burst these levees in numerous places and reclaim former territories which are now towns, cities and other farmlands. This ends up in the News and the Army Corps of Engineers are called back to the reign in the power of Nature, saddle break it and force it to do what mankind wants and needs it to do. Very little of human infrastructure actually works with Nature instead of against it. Unfortunately humans are learning (too late) the correct course to take, but sometimes things in many areas are just permanently lost. There's no going back. But maybe with a few exceptions.
Image - Yolo County Flood Control - 1993
Here's a prime example above of those horrific flooding events in California's Central Valley back in 1993. Traditionally, almost the entire valley flooded in one way or another. This only happens now after long periods of rainy years where many of the reservoirs overflow their spillways and rivers run again freely with nothing to really block their former historical flow. If the flow is intense enough and more rains come, then breaches in these levees like the one above are common. Take a look at an article about a research study from U.C. Davis where solutions to Salmon decline have been found in rasing them in former floodplains.
The Solution to Restoring the Native Fish populations is restoring the Floodplains
Photos by Jacob Katz
Image - Plos.org
Using Rice fields as floodplain Nurseries
“This study demonstrates that the farm fields that now occupy the floodplain can not only grow food for people during summer, but can also produce food resources and habitat for native fish like salmon in winter,” said lead author Jacob Katz of California Trout. “Our work suggests that California does not always need to choose between its farms or its fish. Both can prosper if these new practices are put into effect, mimicking natural patterns on managed lands. By reconnecting rivers to floodplainlike habitat in strategic places around the Central Valley, they have the potential to help recover endangered salmon and other imperiled fish populations to self-sustaining levels,” said Ted Sommer, lead scientist for the California Department of Water Resources and a co-author on the study.
Using Rice Fields as Floodplains
Since 2012, a team of scientists has been examining how juvenile salmon use off-channel habitats, including off-season rice fields. The experiments provide evidence that rice fields managed as floodplains during winter can create “surrogate” wetland habitat for native fish. The team suggests that shallowly flooded fields function in similar ways to natural floods that once spread across the floodplain, supplying extremely dense concentrations of zooplankton — an important food for juvenile salmon. Foraging on these abundant and nutritious invertebrates, the young salmon grow extremely quickly, improving their chances of surviving their migration to sea and returning in three to five years as the large, adult fish. Take note of the succees above of the fish size after being released within the rice field for a month. Representative juvenile Chinook salmon before (top) and after (middle) rearing for six weeks on the Knaggs Ranch experimental agricultural floodplain on Yolo Bypass. Bottom picture is of a tagged Knaggs fish incidentally recaptured in a rotary screw trap in the Yolo Bypass Toe Drain 13 miles downstream of the release site four weeks after the termination of the experiment. These small fish have no real chance of survival in a large river channel. Too many predators in the deeper river and not enough food trsources for them as would be the case in large shallow bodies of water where the zooplankton and insects thrive in warmer shallow waters.
Jacob Katz, with California Trout, says growing bugs in rice fields could be part of the solution for boosting salmon populations in rivers statewide. 😀
So many of the native species of Colorado River basin native fish have disappeared for the very same reasons that have troubled the Salmon. Some are making a comeback and their story is not so dissilmilar to the Salmon rebound of California. The native fish above is the Razorback Sucker, but it itself is not the top predator. That would be the Colorado Pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus lucius) which ranged throughout the Colorado Drainage Basin as far south as the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona into Mexico where old west historical accounts of six foot long fish were said to be common. In fact it could rival any large Salmon, even called at one time by the common name, White Salmon. But the deeper waters of the modern Colorado River which has been controlled by dams and channelization to keep it from flooding into former floodplains has hurt the reproduction efforts of many of the native fish which once dominated the river. Below is the story of the Razorback Sucker as seen in the picture above.
Image - Biographic
Image - Biographic
The fingerlings here have been captured by the researchers using a seigning net along the shallows where small fingerlings would be located. While you look at this bag of small fish on the right, only four were actually Razorback Suckers. The others were Bluehard Suckers and Flannelhead Suckers. Both native and that is good thing, but their main goal was the Razorbacks. Apparently these Scientists captured both adult Razorback Suckers and larvae in the canyon, but they didn’t find any juveniles or sub-adults. Just mature adults and larvae. These adults were living in Lake Mead and moving up the canyon to spawn. But again, beyond finding the Razorback larvae, there were no larger juveniles which indicated a problem.
Image - Biographic
The only way to tell Razorback Sucker larvae (at the bottom) from more common cousins like Bluehead Suckers (top) and Flannelhead Suckers (middle) is through a microscope, using diagnostics like the density of back speckles and muscle fibers. So the other sucker species were doing okay, just not the razorbacks. The Glen Canyon Dam made the Colorado River simultaneously more stable, by eliminating massive spring floods, and more volatile, by instituting unnatural tide levels in the river. By tides we are basically talking about higher and lower water levels fluctuating regularly, something unnatural to this river canyon. In the Arizona morning, millions of people in Phoenix and other desert cities flick on their lights and air conditioners, then the dam managers crank up flows through Glen Canyon’s hydroelectrical turbines to meet power demand. But then at night they power back the turbines. These water level fluctuations in the river are called hydropeaking, because they cause the river to rise and fall by several feet each day. This messes with the aquatic ecosystem's biological food supply, especially for the tiny fish. More on that in a moment.
Image - Biographic
At several days old, larval Razorback Suckers have developed little more than digestive tracts, leading some biologists to dub them, "squiggles with eyes." Doesn't such scientific intellect speak just make your spine tingle and hairs stand up on the back of your neck ? Whatever. What they found was that the Colorado River canyon was almost completely bereft of mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies, river-edge specialists whose eggs are most likely to be exposed and desiccated by this hydropeaking. Tiny blackflies, which lay eggs in open water, are relatively unfazed by tides, but they don’t compensate fish for the loss of the more nourishing prey. Scarce food, more than perhaps any other factor (like larger predator fish), is what's holding native fishes back from increasing within their native habitat.
During our second day on the river, we pulled over to run our seines along a cobble bar. Nothing. Healy knelt to inspect the lifeless rocks. “In every other river, that cobble would be covered with caddis and mayflies and all kinds of algae,” he said glumly. “Here you don’t see anything because these huge tidal fluctuations leave it dry half the time.”
Even in the pre-dam era, Healy added, the Grand Canyon’s tight confines would have challenged larval razorbacks, which prefer to grow up in wide, shallow floodplains. What little habitat the canyon had once afforded, hydropeaking now erodes and dries out. “Razorbacks need warm, stable habitats full of food to get out of that larval stage,” Healy said. “They’re not getting that here.”
Unfortunately other than giving honorable mention to floodplain shallows back prior to dam construction on the Colorado River and lack of shallows for pond insects and the zooplankton which would feed the little Razoeback Squiggles and other fish larvae, the Biographic article goes no further with it than that. Too bad because creating such artificial floodplain settings would probably go along way in making successful larval transition into larger juveniles and sub-adults. Like the farm/floodplain experiments which have proved quite successful in fattening up small Salmon fingerlings on zooplankton like that in the jar above right and later on aquatic insects who appear later. Below you can see the various forms of large aquatic insect life that help the California Salmon move up the food chain. The Grand Canyon Park Service quite often sings the praises with great enthusiasm about the canyon’s bizarre native fish, defending them against the complaints of the sport fish anglers who’d prefer to see the place given over to rainbow trout. And that's probably one of the biggest obstacles to recovery. The original intent of satisfying sport fishermen who were used to game fish from back east. Brian Healy, their lead fish biologist for Grand Canyon National Park, said this about the sport fisherman, “You always get that one guy who says, ‘Well, can you eat ‘em? No? Then what good are they?’” Such a typical response reveals ignorance of how an aquatic system actually works. If the average farmer has little understanding of how a natural ecosystem works in supplying plants with nutrients and in naturally maintaining checks and balances for keeping pests under control and trusts only what Industrial Ag Science tells him, then why should your average fisherman be any different ??? 😞
animated illustration - fcps.edu
And that is the other issue is humans having this need to see instant gratification in the way they view something's worth or value to them. In the Pacific Northwest and in California, it's much more easy to argue for conserving the Salmon, a fish that sustains the Native peoples and keeping the multi-million dollar commercial fisheries in profit. But here in the Southwest, it is considerably harder challenge to make the case for the humpback chub and razorback sucker, two species that support no industry, provide no tangible ecosystem services from the average person's perspective (which exposes their ignorance), and are effectively invisible to the overwhelming majority of park visitors. And yet this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. The California river systems and other native fish there like the Delta Smelt, while not being a sport fish, do provide a further food source for larger sub-adult Salmon. And yet the idea of saving and preserving the Delta Smelt habitat is something controversial because of large scale industrial agricultural business interests and industrial water aqueduct construction interests.
Image - Ben Kiefer/UDWR
Take special note here of a native Colorado River fish called the Colorado Pikeminnow. This one in the photo on the right was caught by Logan Johnson who is holding a Colorado Pikeminnow on the Middle Green River in Whirlpool Canyon which is a tributary river north of the Colorado River. From the historical accounts and oldest photographs in existence regarding this fish, the one Logan here is holding is a juvenile by comparison to old photographs of fishermen holding six foot long Pikeminnows from their head to the ground. Such sizes no longer exist, but this really illustrates how such a western fish could have been a large game fish which is supported by the smaller less desirable sucker species we've been discussing. Again, all of this aquatic life starts with small tributaries and floodplains.
Image - Tom Teske & Google Earth
Image - Tom Teske
The image above is Tom Teske's of El Centro novice attempt to show the lake level near the beach. The view is toward Fish Creek Mts. But I believe he's done a very good job of illustrating the expansive shallows of the ancient Lake Cahuilla shoreline. This area would have been a prime spawning habitat area of shallow floodplains along ancient Lake Cahuilla's western shore. Incredibly, the Cahuilla Indians constructed numerous shallow fish traps, for which several bones of native Colorado River fish were present possibly by the millions. These fish traps above right are up near the city of Indio/Thermal in the southern Coachella Valley. In both traps and camps sites where the Cahuilla peoples lived, many of these fish bones have been found. I have no doubt that the larger Colorado Pikeminnow (formerly Colorado Squawfish) were in present in Lake Cahuilla in the deeper portions of the ancient lake, but the Humpback Chub and Razorback Sucker were smaller and apparently spawning along the shoreline. Clearly the Cahuilla Indians would have easily observed this shallow spawning behaviour. I've also seen this Razorback spawning habit in the sandy shallow shorelines of Lake Havasu along the California and Arizona border. So have others. Who hasn't as a kid figured out how to trap fish with cobblestone river rocks in a small stream and tried to catch them in a bucket ? We use to devise simplistic contraptions like that. The natives would have also made some type of special reed basket fishtrap for scouping up their prey like the one below I referenced from the Oakland Museum.
Image - Tome Teske
These traps above are some other unique fish traps on the western edge of ancient Lake Cahuilla further south in Imperial county and are radically different from those of the Indio fish traps further north. Certainly the stones are much different. Altogether they have discovered around 69 of these traps on the shallow flats. I've posted an example of a common native American fish trapping basket that may have been close to what the Cahuilla would have built and used. Interestingly they have found the bones of native the Colorado River fish down here as well. Ninety-eight percent of the fish bones found at these archaeology sites are bonytail chub and razorback sucker which we discussed above. Both of these fish thrived in the warm, productive, plankton-rich environment of Lake Cahuilla. Remember, such shallows afforded these tiny delicate babies an opportunity to fatten up and move upwards in the food chain where insects would have become part of their diet. The reeds and other tules would have offered protection from predators, though many would have become food sources for many other lifeforms like birds. Still once big enough, they would have moved out into deeper water only to become prey for the top predator, the Colorado Pikeminnow. Also something else to ponder, with open access from the outflow of lake Cahuilla south of Mexicali to the Sea of Cortez by means of an extremely expansive delta, who knows what else may have entered the lake from the sea at one time. Perhaps the endangered almost extinct Vaquita porpoise and other fish we know almost nothing about. Some fish do migrate from sea to fresh water and back again. There is so much we will never know. But floodplains play major roles if only people will utilize them again. Fortunately the present system as it stands now has no future. Only then will things heal to the point of recovery and improvement far better than they were before.
What was once the Colorado Delta Floodplain once was (1905) and what it is today (2017)
"...Even predators as small as spiders can have considerable impacts on not only plant diversity, but ecosystem processes as well..." May 7, 2017 This little guy in the upper lefthand corner is a Pisaurina mira nursery web spider. As you know, spiders prey on insects for their food and grasshoppers are part of that diet. Given their choice of various plants for food, grasshoppers will preferentially feed on some plants more than others. These researchers found that grasshoppers prefer to eat grasses, but when these nursery web spiders are present, they will switch to another field and change their diet to other plants like Goldenrods. The Goldenrod often dominate an area where they grow, but in the presence of invading hungry grasshoppers who start munching on these plants, they chew holes and open up their monoculture canopy, which allows other plants an opportunity to thrive there as well. So apparently spiders do play an important role in the biodiversity of many plant ecosystems. An article on this was published by the In Defense of Plants journal below.
"How Spiders Increase Plant Diversity"
Image - InDefenseofPlants.com
"It's the shift in diet itself that has ramifications throughout the entire ecosystem in question. Many goldenrod species are highly competitive when left to their own devices. If left untouched, abandoned fields can quickly become a monoculture of goldenrod. That is where the spiders come in. By causing a behavioral shift in their grasshopper prey, the spiders are having indirect effects on plant diversity in these habitats. Because grasshoppers spend more time feeding on goldenrods in the presence of spiders, they knock back some of the competitive advantages of these plants.
The researchers found that when spiders were present, overall plant diversity increased. This is not because the spiders ate more grasshoppers. Instead, it's because the grasshoppers shifted to a diet of goldenrod, which knocked the goldenrod back just enough to allow other plants to establish. It's not just plant diversity that changed either. Spiders also caused an increase in both solar radiation and nitrogen reaching the soils!
In knocking back the goldenrod, the habitat became slightly more open and patchy as various plant species of different shapes and sizes gradually established. This allowed more light to reach the soil, thus changing the environment for new seeds to germinate. Also, because goldenrod leaves tend to break down more slowly, they can have significant influences on nutrient cycles within the soil. As a more diverse set of plants establish in these field habitats, the type of leaf litter that falls to the ground changes as well. This resulted in an overall increase in the nitrogen supply to the soil, which also influences plant diversity.
In total, the mere presence of spiders was enough to set in motion these top-down ecosystem effects. It's not that spiders eat more grasshoppers, it's that they are changing the behavior of grasshoppers in a way that results in a more diverse plant community overall. This is a radically different narrative than what has been observed with examples such as the reintroduction of wolves to the greater Yellowstone ecosystem yet the conclusions are very much the same. Predators have innumerable ecosystem benefits that we simply can't afford to ignore."
Great News for Biodiversity right ? 😍 Well not so fast! 😬
Three days later after I read that wonderful article from the folks at "In Defense of Plants," who wrote about how these fascinating insect mechanism interactions which set off change reactions of events which leads to healthier biodiversity within plant community ecosystems, "Science Magazine," then comes out three days later with an article I had seen elsewhere about insect numbers disappearing. Now pay close attention, this was not about extinction, but population numbers dropping dramatically. This is something I've seriously wondered about with regards not only insects, but many lifeforms and even touched on this very subject once before in this post here where I noticed insect disappearances in my mother's yard where we do not used ANY harsh chemical pesticdes of any kind, including synthetic fertilizers. One outstanding strange thing that is now obvious is the total absence of the native red harvester ants in her backyard which is a third of an acre. Since I can remember as a kid since 1961, we always had 15 or 20 red harvester ant colonies for which my folks always tried to spray and eradicate with never any success. Prior to leaving the USA and moving here to Sweden in May 2006, there were only two actual colonies that I knew of. It caught my attention then and I went around and counted. Now there are none. There are also none across the street where there has always been a very wide dirt strip. Even up on Rattlesnake mountain at the end of the street I found none, only black harvester ants. But I also notived that the sow or pill bugs were very limited and even earwigs were gone. Again, we never spray with the synthetics:
There are also other loss of living lifeforms I've wondered about over the last few years like mycorrhizal fungi. Many would think the microbiological world is safely tucked away in a hidden darkness and in numbers so incomprehensible that it would make it impossible for the microbiome to be harmed. Really ??? I also wrote another piece about the disappearance of a certain specific mycorrhizal fungi truffles I use to collect in and around Anza California where I use to live. For two decades every Spring & Summer (after the first arrival of monsonnal thunderstorms) I would collect mature truffles for their spores to inoculate plants I grew on my acreage and restoration projects I involved myself with locally. Suddenly in 2001 I could no longer find them. I had also previously begun to notice pine and oak trees dying off in the same location before the fungi truffle disappearance. Now large numbers of those pines are gone except for a few and the oaks that still remain are sickly or dead, even Scrub Oaks. So I wrote about that experience as well:
The two articles below is a bit more spooky. This has happened over time, but so slowly that most people "take no note." Wow, where have we heard that before ? This scenario reminds me of the story about the frog put in a pan of water where a low fire is slowly heating up the water. By the time the frog realizes what has happened it's too late. His goose is cooked. That's about where we are now and that is what the researchers are finding in the article below. It's not so much lack of biodiversity or extinction, but a huge loss of bioabundance.
In the days gone by decades ago, normal windshileds (or windscreens) would have often appeared as the photo above. It require frequent stops (when bad enough) to use the window cleaning services at the closest petrol stop.
Photo By Paul Henderson (2013)
Yoday that has all changed. This photo above is becoming more common. The update above from Canada and Britain is interesting, but they are tending to blame more cars on the roads. Folks, there is more going on than more cars on the roads as the post below informs us. But it's an interesting read anyway.
Fireflies, like these shown above in a forest in the Netherlands, have disappeared from some areas in North America and Europe where they were once abundant. The photograph to the right shows Hover flies, which are often mistaken for bees or wasps, are important pollinators. Their numbers have also plummeted in the nature reserves of Germany. Now take very special note here, I said Nature Reserves, not urban landscapes or rural agricultural areas where you would expect such a scenario to be the cause. Sounds like designating something a National Monument is a wasted endeavour which only serves to sugar coat and smokescreen to the public that all is well in the world when all is not well. With all the angry eco-protest marches happening everywhere, we are forced to swallow a sort of religous blind faith-based chant which goes like, "There is peace, there is peace, when they is no peace." The article below starts off by telling a story of the good'ol days when you drove your car and masses of bugs covered the bumper, grill and especially windscreen (shield) of your automobile. For me the worst place for buggageddon was always driving down into the Imperial Valley's industrial agricultural landscape. The insaneness of having to periodically stop at a gas station and cleaning my windscreen a couple of times before I even arrived at my ultimate destination of El Centro was annoying. But now many have noticed the lack of bugs on the windscreen and so have I the last couple of times we have gone through there. So what gives ? What's changed ? That's the whole point of this article.
Where Have All the Insects Gone ?
Of the scant records that do exist, many come from amateur naturalists, whether butterfly collectors or bird watchers. Now, a new set of long-term data is coming to light, this time from a dedicated group of mostly amateur entomologists who have tracked insect abundance at more than 100 nature reserves in western Europe since the 1980s.
Over that time the group, the Krefeld Entomological Society, has seen the yearly insect catches fluctuate, as expected. But in 2013 they spotted something alarming. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by nearly 80%. Perhaps it was a particularly bad year, they thought, so they set up the traps again in 2014. The numbers were just as low. Through more direct comparisons, the group—which had preserved thousands of samples over 3 decades—found dramatic declines across more than a dozen other sites.
Many losses reverberate up the food chain. "If you're an insect-eating bird living in that area, four-fifths of your food is gone in the last quarter-century, which is staggering," says Dave Goulson, an ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, who is working with the Krefeld group to analyze and publish some of the data. "One almost hopes that it's not representative—that it's some strange artifact."
No one knows how broadly representative the data are of trends elsewhere. But the specificity of the observations offers a unique window into the state of some of the planet's less appreciated species. Germany's "Red List" of endangered insects doesn't look alarming at first glance, says Sorg, who curates the Krefeld society's extensive collection of insect specimens. Few species are listed as extinct because they are still found in one or two sites. But that obscures the fact that many have disappeared from large areas where they were once common. Across Germany, only three bumble bee species have vanished, but the Krefeld region has lost more than half the two dozen bumble bee species that society members documented early in the 20th century.
Members of the Krefeld society have been observing, recording, and collecting insects from the region—and around the world—since 1905. Some of the roughly 50 members—including teachers, telecommunication technicians, and a book publisher—have become world experts on their favorite insects. Siegfried Cymorek, for instance, who was active in the society from the 1950s through the 1980s, never completed high school. He was drafted into the army as a teenager, and after the war he worked in the wood-protection division at a local chemical plant. But because of his extensive knowledge of wood-boring beetles, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1979. Over the years, members have written more than 2000 publications on insect taxonomy, ecology, and behavior.
The society's headquarters is a former school in the center of Krefeld, an industrial town on the banks of the Rhine that was once famous for producing silk. Disused classrooms store more than a million insect specimens individually pinned and named in display cases. Most were collected nearby, but some come from more exotic locales. Among them are those from the collection of a local priest, an active member in the 1940s and 1950s, who persuaded colleagues at mission stations around the world to send him specimens. (The society's collection and archive are under historical preservation protection.)
Weighty disappearances
The mass of insects collected by monitoring traps in the Orbroicher Bruch nature reserve in northwest Germany dropped by 78% in 24 years.
Tens of millions more insects float in carefully labeled bottles of alcohol—the yield from the society's monitoring projects in nature reserves around the region. The reserves, set aside for their local ecological value, are not pristine wilderness but "seminatural" habitats, such as former hay meadows, full of wildflowers, birds, small mammals—and insects. Some even include parts of agricultural fields, which farmers are free to farm with conventional methods. Heinz Schwan, a retired chemist and longtime society member who has weighed thousands of trap samples, says the society began collecting long-term records of insect abundance partly by chance. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, local authorities asked the group for help evaluating how different strategies for managing the reserves affected insect populations and diversity.
The members monitored each site only once every few years, but they set up identical insect traps in the same place each time to ensure clean comparisons. Because commercially available traps vary in ways that affect the catch, the group makes their own. Named for the Swedish entomologist René Malaise, who developed the basic design in the 1930s, each trap resembles a floating tent. Black mesh fabric forms the base, topped by a tent of white fabric and, at the summit, a collection container—a plastic jar with an opening into another jar of alcohol. Insects trapped in the fabric fly up to the jar, where the vapors gradually inebriate them and they fall into the alcohol. The traps collect mainly species that fly a meter or so above the ground. For people who worry that the traps themselves might deplete insect populations, Sorg notes that each trap catches just a few grams per day—equivalent to the daily diet of a shrew.
Sorg says society members saved all the samples because even in the 1980s they recognized that each represented a snapshot of potentially intriguing insect populations. "We found it fascinating—despite the fact that in 1982 the term ‘biodiversity' barely existed," he says. Many samples have not yet been sorted and cataloged—a painstaking labor of love done with tweezers and a microscope. Nor have the group's full findings been published. But some of the data are emerging piecemeal in talks by society members and at a hearing at the German Bundestag, the national parliament, and they are unsettling.
Beyond the striking drop in overall insect biomass, the data point to losses in overlooked groups for which almost no one has kept records. In the Krefeld data, hover flies—important pollinators often mistaken for bees—show a particularly steep decline. In 1989, the group's traps in one reserve collected 17,291 hover flies from 143 species. In 2014, at the same locations, they found only 2737 individuals from 104 species.
Since their initial findings in 2013, the group has installed more traps each year. Working with researchers at several universities, society members are looking for correlations with weather, changes in vegetation, and other factors. No simple cause has yet emerged. Even in reserves where plant diversity and abundance have improved, Sorg says, "the insect numbers still plunged."
A Weather Station for Biodiversity
Researchers in Germany hope to develop a set of automated sensors that will monitor the abundance and diversity of plants, animals, and fungi with the help of pattern recognition and DNA and chemical analysis.
V.ALTOUNIAN/SCIENCE
Changes in land use surrounding the reserves are probably playing a role. "We've lost huge amounts of habitat, which has certainly contributed to all these declines," Goulson says. "If we turn all the seminatural habitats to wheat and cornfields, then there will be virtually no life in those fields." As fields expand and hedgerows disappear, the isolated islands of habitat left can support fewer species. Increased fertilizer on remaining grazing lands favors grasses over the diverse wildflowers that many insects prefer. And when development replaces countryside, streets and buildings generate light pollution that leads nocturnal insects astray and interrupts their mating.
Neonicotinoid pesticides, already implicated in the widespread crash of bee populations, are another prime suspect. Introduced in the 1980s, they are now the world's most popular insecticides, initially viewed as relatively benign because they are often applied directly to seeds rather than sprayed. But because they are water soluble, they don't stay put in the fields where they are used. Goulson and his colleagues reported in 2015 that nectar and pollen from wildflowers next to treated fields can have higher concentrations of neonicotinoids than the crop plants. Although initial safety studies showed that allowable levels of the compounds didn't kill honey bees directly, they do affect the insects' abilities to navigate and communicate, according to later research. Researchers found similar effects in wild solitary bees and bumble bees.
Less is known about how those chemicals affect other insects, but new studies of parasitoid wasps suggest those effects could be significant. Those solitary wasps play multiple roles in ecosystems—as pollinators, predators of other insects, and prey for larger animals. A team from the University of Regensburg in Germany reported in Scientific Reports in February that exposing the wasp Nasonia vitripennis to just 1 nanogram of one common neonicotinoid cut mating rates by more than half and decreased females' ability to find hosts. "It's as if the [exposed] insect is dead" from a population point of view because it can't produce offspring, says Lars Krogmann, an entomologist at the Stuttgart Natural History Museum in Germany.
No one can prove that the pesticides are to blame for the decline, however. "There is no data on insecticide levels, especially in nature reserves," Sorg says. The group has tried to find out what kinds of pesticides are used in fields near the reserves, but that has proved difficult, he says. "We simply don't know what the drivers are" in the Krefeld data, Goulson says. "It's not an experiment. It's an observation of this massive decline. The data themselves are strong. Understanding it and knowing what to do about it is difficult."
The factors causing trouble for the hover flies, moths, and bumble bees in Germany are probably at work elsewhere, if clean windshields are any indication. Since 1968, scientists at Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research center in Harpenden, U.K., have operated a system of suction traps—12-meter-long suction tubes pointing skyward. Set up in fields to monitor agricultural pests, the traps capture all manner of insects that happen to fly over them; they are "effectively upside-down Hoovers running 24/7, continually sampling the air for migrating insects," says James Bell, who heads the Rothamsted Insect Survey.
Between 1970 and 2002, the biomass caught in the traps in southern England did not decline significantly. Catches in southern Scotland, however, declined by more than two-thirds during the same period. Bell notes that overall numbers in Scotland were much higher at the start of the study. "It might be that much of the [insect] abundance in southern England had already been lost" by 1970, he says, after the dramatic postwar changes in agriculture and land use.
The stable catches in southern England are in part due to constant levels of pests such as aphids, which can thrive when their insect predators are removed. Such species can take advantage of a variety of environments, move large distances, and reproduce multiple times per year. Some can even benefit from pesticides because they reproduce quickly enough to develop resistance, whereas their predators decline. "So lots of insects will do great, but the insects that we love may not," Black says.
Other, more visible creatures may be feeling the effects of the insect losses. Across North America and Europe, species of birds that eat flying insects, such as larks, swallows, and swifts, are in steep decline. Habitat loss certainly plays a role, Nocera says, "but the obvious factor that ties them all together is their diet."
Some intriguing, although indirect, clues come from a rare ecological treasure: decades' worth of stratified bird droppings. Nocera and his colleagues have been probing disused chimneys across Canada in which chimney swifts have built their nests for generations. From the droppings, he and his colleagues can reconstruct the diets of the birds, which eat almost exclusively insects caught on the wing.
The layers revealed a striking change in the birds' diets in the 1940s, around the time DDT was introduced. The proportion of beetle remains dropped off, suggesting the birds were eating smaller insects—and getting fewer calories per catch. The proportion of beetle parts increased slightly again after DDT was banned in the 1970s but never reached its earlier levels. The lack of direct data on insect populations is frustrating, Nocera says. "It's all correlative. We know that insect populations could have changed to create the population decline we have now. But we don't have the data, and we never will, because we can't go back in time."
Sorg and Wägele agree. "We deeply regret that we did not set up more traps 20 or 30 years ago," Sorg says. He and other Krefeld society members are now working with Wägele's group to develop what they wish they had had earlier: a system of automated monitoring stations they hope will combine audio recordings, camera traps, pollen and spore filters, and automated insect traps into a "biodiversity weather station". Instead of tedious manual analysis, they hope to use automated sequencing and genetic barcoding to analyze the insect samples. Such data could help pinpoint what is causing the decline—and where efforts to reverse it might work best.
Paying attention to what E. O. Wilson calls "the little things that run the world" is worthwhile, Sorg says. "We won't exterminate all insects. That's nonsense. Vertebrates would die out first. But we can cause massive damage to biodiversity—damage that harms us."
Update May 20, 2017: Sithsoniaan Tropical Research Institute
Credit: Chung Yun Tak
Credit: Saskya Van Nouhuys
I'm interjecting this tropical research report here because it is relevant to the importance of insecting leading the way ecosystems are sustained in balance. Using plasticine caterpillar models like this one in the photo above and at right at the Smithsonian's ForestGEO site of Tai Po Kau in Hong Kong, researchers discovered a global pattern of higher predation at low elevations and low latitudes. Clearly what we consider pest insects are those insects thaat eat plants we like in our landscapes, gardens and farms. But we should also acknowledge that there are beneficial natural components which eat such pests. First thing that comes to most people's minds are such predators as birds & anmals, but that is not what these researchers found. Insect predators are the most important abundant predators of pest insects in the wild as this study below found. So when loss of Bioabundance of predatory insects takes place, our goose is cooked and the only real winners in the perverted sense as all the Agro-Chemical & Biotech Industries. As sick & horrific as that sounds, it's nevertheless the truth.
Predators are Real Lowlifes
Insects drove the trend, not mammals or birds. “As someone who has studied insect biodiversity in the tropics for most of my life, I wasn’t surprised that insects were responsible for most of the predation observed,” said Yves Basset, leader of the ForestGEO Arthropod Initiative at STRI.
The team put out almost 3,000 model caterpillars for four to 18 days at 31 different sites from Australia to Greenland at different altitudes, from zero to 2,100 meters above sea level. Based on characteristic marks left by predators in the clay, they could tell whether the models were attacked by birds, mammals or insects.
This should be a wake up call, but most likely it will generally fall on deaf ears. Mere handfulls of interested ones will click "Like" on some Enviro-Facebook page, but mostly it will go unnoticed. The average human being hates bugs and buys into the industrial science marketing of "An only good Bug is a dead Bug." Think back on those RAID commercials. Synthetic Pesticides are incapable of differienting between and good and bad insect. Most don't care. They want bugs gone. Seriously, walk down any Home Depot, Lowes, Hornbach, Bau Haus or other local hardware store and the only viable healthy garden solution they offer is a science-based synthetic toxic option. No instruction or education of ever building a biodiverse system in your garden thru biomimicry. There was a reference to E.O. Wilson at the end of the article. These days everyone seems to want to worship the ground that E.O. Wilson walks on as something hallowed. The 80+ E.O. Wilson, is a Harvard professor of evolutionary biology who made his celebrity claim to fame back in the 1970s with his study of social species in two books, The Insect Societies and Sociobiology. He is internationally acknowledged as "the father of sociobiology" and is the world's leading authority on ants. Hence I can understand why Gretchen Vogel who wrote the article referenced him in the last paragraph where she quotes him as saying "we must pay attention to the little things that run the world." Sure enough in his book, Diversity of Life, E.O. Wilson stated:
“Most life on land depends ultimately on one relationship: the mycorrhiza, the intimate and mutually dependent coexistence of fungi and the roots systems of plants.”
His point of course was that the importance of these beneficial fungi should not be underestimated. So okay, he has some good points on why our understanding of Nature's micro-world should be better. I totally agree. But then at other times he does an about face and turns right around and out of the other corner of his mouth tells the world that Industrial Agriculture's Biotech World is the only thing that can save Nature. In 2011 in an interview in "EarthSky Journal," E.O. Wilson said:
"And within science, this is going to be a century of biology. We are entering an age of synthesis. So many discoveries have been made in biology in the cell, at the molecular level, and on up to the development of organisms."
"And we need all the biology and all the advances we can find in agriculture, especially. We’re going to have to switch worldwide to dry land agriculture. We don’t have enough water in enough countries to feed all those people and to restore soil to arable condition. So this means that we have to have genetically modified organisms. I’d take that as a given. Some people don’t like the idea. But that’s one of those necessities brought about by the human condition."
Clearly the very thing Wilson here is advocating is the very thing that is killing biodiversity and bioabundance. E.O. Wilson like Bill Nye will never admit that because supporting biotech world is paramont in keeping hold of their science celebrity darling icon status. Bill Nye was once opposed to GMOs, but then one day Monsanto showed him the light. More than likely he was ushered into a back room and explained the facts of life by the good'ol boys club about what he should do to keep that status quo as a celebrity icon if he knew what was healthy for him. Both Wilson and Nye are also staunch advocates of the"Agrument from Poor Design" religious dogma. I use the term religious here because there is nothing scientific about it. It's done more harm to the natural world and held back real world sustainable eco-green technological innovation more than anything else. Both men are also part of the new secular attitude espoused earlier by Edward Abbey who believed mankind is worthless and desperately needs culling if not outright removal. Although both men do not see either of themselves as part of that problem. Nobody questions these science celebrity icons and they should. Unfortunately, E.O. Wilson's and Bill Nye’s intolerant worldview seems to be rubbing off and infecting many of today's Gen-X and Millennials (think of turmoil & uncertainty) which might explain some of the insane chaos which is a common component of today's world.
Well, getting back to insects and the two artcles. A couple years ago Germany (one of the biggest users of palm oil) expressed self-righteous indignation towards Indonesia for cutting down their country's rainforests and replacing them with palm oil plantations. The Indonesian leader also fired back exposing Germany for destroying 70% of Germany's original forests. Sure enough that is true. What forests that do exist have become industrial forestry plantations, with only those few scattered nature reserves which we spoke of earlier. This is also true of most of industrial Europe including Sweden. This may well account for the drop in not only insects, but also other wildlife. So blame cannot be put squarely on the shoulders of industrial science, but also these science celebrity icons whom they go to bed with figuratively speaking to promote their technology. For all the public shouting and fingerpointing these celebrities do at the average human being for not being eco-green, they themseves are the blind leading the blind. These icons need to be exposed for what they really are. As for the average person, follow the lead recommended by the first article from the "In Defense of Plants" people. Learn how nature works and biomimic that in your own landscape or garden. As far as the bigger picture, this world's leadership (irrespecitive of the ideological worldview) needs to be completely eradicated soon. If that doesn't happen, then nothing will be saved.
Update 2018 --->>> Anyone else noticing this too ??? 😲
"the outward bounds of something as distinguished from its internal regions or center"
If you've been reading this blog for very long, you know I value having an open minded peripheral view of nature as opposed to the often Tunnel Vision approach many scientific researchers take. I have two examples here of different approaches to research studies and their outcomes which were based on either broad observational viewpoint or a narrow minded tunnel vision approach. I've often had numerous discussions with defenders of the industrial science business model approach to agriculture versus a biodiverse perennial plants and mycorrhizal soil system approach. The response to the observed evidence outdoors based on the reality of how nature maintains and sustains has always been met with, "Your evidence confirming an observation is evidence that your observation is wrong." Well not is so many words, but these are the very people who are religiously hung up on "evidence-based science" and "peer-review." Pure unadulterated blind faith belief in both of these states as an only means at arriving at a truth can be easily debunked by viewing the effects on Nature. Below are the two contrasting approaches as to how science is done, with the later example being the most universally common ne practiced and the degradation of our Earth's ecosystems are evidence that the first approach should become more well funded.
Scientists follow seeds to solve ecological puzzle
Mice hammer a rare native plant by feasting on its seeds, but their spoliation is human-enabled
Credit: Molly Kuhs
"Scientists Tiffany Knight and Eleanor Pardini in restored dune habitat at the Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County, California. Plants native to the area, such as the Tidestrom's lupines that surround them, are adapted to stiff winds, dune blowouts and winter storms at sea."
Credit: Eleanor Pardini
Up in Marin County in northern California at the Abbotts Lagoon in Point Reyes National Seashore, there is a sand dune ecosystem where a rare low growing spreading flower called, Tidestrom's Lupine (native), is being eaten from existence a, Deer Mouse Peromyscus maniculatus (also native), but which also prefers the seeds of another more common larger Lupine called, Chamisso Bush Lupine (again also native). The basic dilemma here was that there was a decline in the rare Lupine populations around these sand dunes. The situation was so dire that realistically it was thought they would go extinct. The mouse was eating both types of Lupine seeds and even preferred the larger more common Bush Lupine seeds, but the smaller low growing Lupine was still the one that was declining. But they eventually determined that Humans were in actuality the enablers of the imbalance that had taken place between various NATIVE components of the ecosystem. That was the interesting part. Incredibly, this was not one of those textbook cases of some foreign exotic plant or animal wreaking havoc on some California ecosystem. True, a European Beachgrass was utilized in an attempt to stabilize the sand dune, but they could well have chosen any native California bunch grass with the same imbalanced result. These were native organisms out of balance struggling within a familiar ecosystem for which as the researchers explained, "the spoliation was human enabled." One native California organism pitted against another. What I love most about this article were the well thought out questions that drove the researchers which the author published at the beginning:
"What bothers a plant? Why are some plants rare while others are common? Are the rare plants simply adapted to rare habitat or are they losing the competition for habitat? Are their populations small but stable, or are they dwindling?
And how can scientists usefully frame these questions when there are so many possible variables?
One way is to compare related — or congeneric — species that have many traits in common but also differ in some ways. This clears out enough underbrush that carefully designed experiments can provide answers."
"The common Chamisso bush lupine holds its seed pods above the ground or hides them in the middle of its shrubbery. This lupine’s architecture makes its seeds less vulnerable to predation while they remain on the plant."
Credit: Steve Kroiss
This little native Deer Mouse at right was at first glance the trouble maker. In the old days the rule of thumb from the Scientific Orthodoxy would be to recommend without question a science-based synthetic pesticide to eradicate the Mouse. Problem solved! But was this little mouse really at fault ? Nature is loaded with all manner of living things which do not think, reason and scheme like humans. They are however incredibly sophisticated complex biological machines being run and directed by an informational communications network (DNA) & complex sensory system which responds to environmental cues. The researchers found that some time back a human decision was made by the Park Service to prevent dune erosion by planting a type of beachgrass. Apparently there were a combination of domino effects that went negative. It would seem the beachgrass provided safe haven for the little Deer Mouse who felt safe and embolden to venture out and eat the seeds of the rare Tidestrom's Lupine. But two years into the study the Park Service then removed the beachgrass to save another bird's (Plover) nesting site. Here is a description of what happened next:
The removal of beachgrass has already taken the pressure off the rare lupine. There are two reasons for this, Pardini said. One is that Tidestrom’s lupine is adapted to a disturbed habitat and needs wind and dune blowouts to thrive. The second is that with the beachgrass gone, mice have to take bigger risks to take lupine seeds.
“Tidestrom’s lupine is popping up like crazy in the restored areas,” Pardini said. “The seed germination rate is very high, survival rate is extremely high, it’s reaching high densities in the restored zones, the plants are huge and they’re extremely fertile.”
You can read the rest of the entire article on your own. It's loaded with lots of interesting reading. But now lets take another look at the second approach to research which at the beginning on the surface appears to be a faster way to shortcuts, but in reality holds back valuable strides forward. Especially when urgency is the motivating factor.
Fighting World Hunger: Robotics Aid in the Study of Corn and Drought Tolerance
Credit: Gui DeSouza
Credit: Gui DeSouza
This next study is an old one. This ongoing insistence that only biotechs can find the answers to drought resistence in preparation for future climate change. But in this case it takes an unnecessary course of direction. The attempt here is to get a little too cute with electronics. Robotics right now is a hot topic and all industries are looking at them to save time and money. The article and video they provide starts out justifying the research by the all too common cache phrase, "In the fight against world hunger . . " They then continue on with numbers and stats along with a dire prophetic warning of time running out.
"Developing drought tolerant corn that makes efficient use of available water will be vital to sustain the estimated 9 billion global population by 2050."
So the message here is that developing drought resistent corn crop varieties can only be accomplished with robotics facilitated by a $20 million grant and hopefully something positive will just happen by 2050 to save the world from hunger ? By contrast most of the early mycorrhizal research decades ago was done outdoors in a natural environmental setting. Being outdoors provided Mycologists and other researchers to observe the reality of how nature really works. Scientists (Mycologists) watched, observed, pondered and formulated numerous questions not just on the fungi alone, but their interaction with every other living thing around them. What has always beens a puzzle to me is why the mycorrhizal soil management systems approach has never been as well funded as the industrial science approach to bland boring monocultures ? But that's not really what industrial science is all about. Their goals are entirely different from tradtional study and research, take a look at a quote mentioned in the video at time spot 1:08:
"We're trying to automate as much as we can. We're trying to install networking so we can do everything from the Lab -- we can remotely log into the devices, collect images, download the image and all that so that we don't have to go to the field as much."
The industrial approach is all about what they imagine to be shortcuts provided by this robot which might mean greater returns on investment. The study on the mouse vrs the Lupine had no such monetary funding or future $$$ ambitions to motivate those researchers involved. But seriously, Robots to identify heat stress in plants ??? Question: Does the average farmer really need a robot to tell them which corn plants are stressed and which ones are doing fine ? Look at the pic above. All this continual talk of Biotech research work going into finding that right drought resistence gene has always been a complete waste of time. There has been for 1000s of countless years a tool Nature has always had available for dealing with drought resistence in plants. That would be the various varieties of mycorrhizal fungi who have a vested interest in the health and welfare of their hosts. So why the high techie robots ? Yes, in these modern times, fungi are probably not as sexy and sophisticated as modern technological advancements like robots, but their function as mutualistic partners with crop plants is far superior to anything biotech scientists or robotics engineers could ever do to problem solve quick solutions just around the corner, let alone a decade or two away. Our planet Earth doesn't have a decade or two. Pursuit of a mycorrhizal approach is in reality the real shortcut. The biggest roadblock is that a genetically modified seed comes with a lot of required aftermarket baggage ($£€) like a plethora of synthetic fertilizer inputs, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, miticides, etc which do nothing more than provide the promise of obscene profit for a handful of giant chemical corporate entites. Now to be completely fair here, I'm sure this Associate Professor, Gui DeSouza, and his intelligent engineers are conscientious people and know their electronic gadegtry stuff very well. But modern Science's biggest problem is wanting to do almost everything inside of some Laboratory. Much of today's Science left the outdoors decades ago. That's not to say that there are no scientists today who no longer practice outdoor research, because many still do. The researchers at the Dune site proved this to be true. But I highly doubt any of these industrially motivated guys have much understanding of underground soil mycorrhizal networks and their relationship with any plant let alone crop plants.
The direction the prevailing industrial Scientific Orthodoxy is to white wash the bad news to the public by their propagandizing which is almost identical to the words of warning by Patrick Henry who himself was quoting from a biblical text of(Ezekiel 13:10) where false prophets were suckering the common people into believe the coming dire situation was really not all that bad. Our present dire reality is that this world doesn't have until 2050 to find solutions. There's no luxury of time to piddle around, beg for funding for pet projects and problem solve for profit. Ecosystems are deteriorating faster than ever before and have been for some decades. The picture I often use above from the University of Florida and Mycorrhizal Applications Inc testing the product MycoApply with multiple blend of fungi species points a glaring spotlight on how this drought & heat stress resistence can be dealt with in one season on many corn (& other crop) varieties that they already know will grow well in hot climates. It also exposes what a real propaganda sham this biotech search for that illusive mysterious drought resistent gene really is about. If their goal really was about feeding the world & food security, the mycorrhizal approach would be snapped up instantly. What this is really all about, is Industrial Agriculture in bed with Industrial Science trying desperately to keep a status quo monopoly on agribusiness. As that is the case, they are stubbornly committed to a tunnel vision industrial answer approach and not any peripheral view of anything outside of their narrow minded small inner circle of elitest ideas.
Speaking of Sand Dunes
The beauty of the animal, plant & bird dilemma at the Sand Dune Project was that these researchers did spend quite a bit of time outdoors for four years. They also came up with not only great questions one after another based on observations, but also created some beautiful terminology along the way to illustrate and expose the multiple ways humans have managed to screw up the environment even without introducing any invasive exotic non-native species of plants, birds or animals. Expressions like, "subsidized native predators" & "spoliation is human enabled," which fits nicely with Martin Luther King Jr's, "sincere ignorance" & "conscientious stupidity." Take a look at their final thoughts in the Dune/Beachgrass/Mouse/Lupine research:
A Final Twist
"A final twist Ironically, the beachgrass was removed not to help the rare lupine but rather to help the endangered western snowy plover (Charadrius alexandrinus nivosus). Just as the lupine lost germination sites to the grass, the plover lost nesting habitat.
And both the lupine and the plover suffered from subsidized native predators.In the case of the lupine, the predator is the deer mouse; in the case of the plover, it is the common raven (Corvus corax),
“Corvid populations have been exploding worldwide since the 1970s,” Pardini said. “You can see it in the Christmas birdcount data. One reason is that they feast on the refuse people provide.
“So the emerging story about human intervention and the ravens is analogous to the one about the grass and the mice,” she added. In both cases, people are subsidizing a species that is upsetting the balance that once existed between other species: on one hand two lupines, in the other two birds.
The summary sheds light on so many things. Humans have not only subsidized various forms of invasive species which have brought about environmental ruin to many areas of our Earth, but they've also somehow managed to pit one native organism against another unintentionally. Previously most all native things have lived in almost perfect balance for 1000s of years. Suddenly, a form of new freedom promising scientific enlightenment bulls it's way onto the world scene 150+ years ago and we find ourselves as an actual slave to it's death dealing consequences. The beauty of the Lupine/Mouse study on those Northern California sand dunes illustrates how humans can truly unmask and expose the cause and over a long period of time use the powers of observation within peripheral viewpoint of an entire environment, inspire numerous thought provoking questions and come up with a nonsynthetic pesticidal solution for creating back the natural balance again. Giant corporations are easy big targets to blame because of their extraordinary size for expossure. But what really frightens me are all those small to medium size property owners out there who still buy into the rat poison advertisement indoctrination as a first option in arriving at problem correction. Take a rural drive almost anywhere and look how the average property owning citizen lacks the understanding in taking a natural balanced approach to maintaining the ecology of their land. This is the kind of approach that should be easily taught in elementary school through high school (secondary school) long before a student gets to college. Just think of all the unnecessary baggage they wouldn't be lugging with them when they finally do go to a University ? 😵
