[HN Gopher] We haven't seen a quarter of known bee species since... ___________________________________________________________________ We haven't seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s Author : esarbe Score : 305 points Date : 2021-02-22 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.nationalgeographic.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.nationalgeographic.com) | xipho wrote: | As suggested by others the number of taxonomists, people who | could accurately identify species (many of which require internal | dissection, or molecular methods), who are actually working on | collecting and identify species has most certainly declined. In | many groups of insects there is at most a handful of experts | _worldwide_ who can take specimens to a species-level | identification. | | This is not to say that species richness is not declining, its to | say that in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor | (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world | why they are important, and why they require fixed, | institutionally-based funding to actually be able to provide the | services that would allow us to confidently state that data like | these are because of environmental change (again, they very | likely are) rather than a lack of experts in the field actually | doing basic research. | | In other words, it is extremely rare that universities (in the | US) actually hire what was once known as "alpha-taxonomists", in | part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell | themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have | evolved) in part it is a reflection of the (I would argue | "immense") short-sightedness of institutions. "We want answers to | complex questions! We've neglected to give scientists time to | think deeply, and research over decades to answer those | questions. Oh, we see." | esarbe wrote: | It's the unfortunate truth that in the hyper capitalistic | system we live in, everything that does not in the most direct | way result in value added is demeaned, discounted and cut. | | And we've also seen what happened to climate scientists warning | against the dangers of climate change for the past fifty years; | they were - from a large part of the media, politicians and the | public - at best ignored and more often belittled. | | So, I don't think it is the taxonomists or entomologists are | are fault for not screaming loud enough "WE ARE KILLING OUR OWN | LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM" from the top of their lungs. It is us that | is to blame. We capitalistic producers and consumers that have | put the profit motive over any cautionary principle when it | comes to health, safety and liberty. Just see how long it took | the general public to accept that a substance like lead in gas | is detrimental to health. It's ridiculous. | | Then again; who could have thought that two centuries of ever- | increasing predatory ecosystem exploitation could have any | negative consequences? | mulmen wrote: | We don't live in a hyper capitalist system. This hyperbole is | harmful to any conversation about making positive change. | | This is the intellectual equivalent of burning coal. Your | emissions have a cost that others have to pay. | jay_kyburz wrote: | I don't know where you live, but I would call US hyper | capitalist. Overly privatized into the hands of the 1%. No | health care. Everyday people mostly powerless and | government pandering to companies for political support. | | My country is not much better. | dpoochieni wrote: | That's not hyper-capitalistic, that's just | fascist/pseudo-feudalist. Throughtout history everyday | people have been pretty much powerless in any meaningful | way, always, no exception except maybe for early USA | history. | [deleted] | esarbe wrote: | I think if you look from a point in time of where the term | 'capitalim' was initially _heh_ coined, you will find that | it very much is a hyper-capitalistic society we live in. | | During the time when capitalism was first named an | overwhelming majority of the populaces' exchanges of | services and goods was not based on any capitalistic | exchanges. And with capitalistic exchange I mean the | exchange of good that were produced under a capitalistic | agreement where the means of production are not in the | hands of anyone with immediate social relations to the | person controlling the means of labor. Most of the people | were living and working in small villages, self-sufficient | to a large degree and wholly preoccupied with agriculture. | Goods and services were mostly produced in a feudal mode of | production, not in a capitalistic mode. | | Nowadays however, for a vast majority of the population of | most industrialized and developing economies of the world | this means of exchange is the primary - if not the | exclusive - means of procuring goods and services. | | So, I very much dispute that calling our society 'hyper | capitalistic' is hyperbole, despite of the two sharing a | prefix. | gedy wrote: | Recent non-capitalist political systems aren't any better at | stewarding the environment, so maybe it's something else | about humans. | Cd00d wrote: | > everything that does not in the most direct way result in | value added is demeaned, discounted and cut | | Yeah, back when I was working in pure research every time I | met someone at a party and explained what I was trying to | solve the follow up question _invariably_ was "what is the | application?". In general, in my experience, people don't | value the pursuit of knowledge or understanding the universe, | they value product. | hammock wrote: | >there is at most a handful of experts worldwide who can take | specimens to a species-level identification. | | We also have the internet now. Would be cool if you could | upload photos of bees someplace and have them identified. | AlexandrB wrote: | This already exists: https://www.inaturalist.org | throwanem wrote: | iNat is good, but crowdsourced, and anything but a panacea; | for example, I'm very confident in my identifications of | the _Auplopus mellipes_ and _Auplopus architectus | metallicus_ individuals I encountered and photographed last | year, but those (plus one braconid, of which I 'm | admittedly uncertain myself) are the only observations I | have on iNat that haven't had any species confirmations | from other users. (That's fair; I needed considerable | literature review to develop that level of confidence, and | I doubt most iNat users share the extent of my interest in | wasps.) | | Another option is BugGuide (https://bugguide.net), which | I've actually found more useful - it did me a lot of good | figuring out those auplopids. It doesn't provide any sort | of dichotomous key (that I've been able to find), but there | are a _lot_ of observations available, often with very | high-quality images, which helps a lot when specific | identification depends on subtle features. | | In general, though, hymenopterans and especially solitary | wasps are just difficult. There are many genera and even | whole families that are hard to tell apart with much | confidence. One of the first things you notice in the | literature is the importance to specific identification of | male genitalia, which are internal, practically | microscopic, and only even potentially useful if you have | the good fortune to happen on a very rare male of a | solitary wasp species - and even then, sexual dimorphism | can be such as to make a solid male identification useless | for spotting a female unless you actually observe them to | be in copula. (Female mutillids, aka "velvet ants", don't | even have _wings!_ ) | | All of which is to say, I would expect the more obscure | solitary bees to pose the same sort of difficulty. | cmehdy wrote: | Do you know of any place where one could simply | contribute? | | Bugguide seems to be North America only, but while I | stayed in a remote area of the Indio Maiz reserve in | Nicaragua I stumbled upon a spider that I haven't | identified in years and can't quite find any place to | simply share the photo[0]. | | [0] unknown spider on a banana leaf in eastern Nicaragua: | https://i.imgur.com/iFMJxtl.png | Symbiote wrote: | Isn't this the primary purpose of iNaturalist? | throwanem wrote: | Yes, iNat is worldwide and that's the first place I'd | try. | | That said, I wouldn't necessarily expect a whole lot. I'm | not even an amateur arachnologist, but my sense is that | spiders are about as complicated as hymenopterans, if not | more so; especially outside well-known families like the | salticids, it seems like it's not rare to find difficult | identifications. | Symbiote wrote: | The machine vision on iNaturalist is great, but it's not | necessarily adequate for distinguishing between insect | species -- there can be details that are difficult to | photograph, let alone identify from a casual user's | photograph. | | And we still need training data (i.e. identified by the | expert taxonomists) for future work. | bliteben wrote: | inaturalist really needs the funding to support videos | honestly. | xipho wrote: | I have been at talks by their devs. They candidly admit | it will never meet the needs (accuracy) to address | questions at this level of specificity. Some things will | be extremely successful, many (most) will not. | | Think of biodiversity as a curve, with a long tail. Will | AI on poorly taken images specimens work for the bell? | Probably. Will it actually get at the numbers at the | tail? Almost certainly not. This is largely because 1) | getting at the tail requires intimate knowledge of where | to find that biodiversity (the vast majority of | iNaturlaist pics are shockingly close to civilization, | where diversity may not be) and 2) intimate knowledge, | often of internal features or other non-imagable data, so | that one can actually record data that fits in the tail. | hinkley wrote: | I've seen plant identification groups, and the thing is that | a blurry picture of half the thing is not conducive to | accurate identification. | | When these are correctly identified, it's often because the | person has a particular investment in that exact plant. So if | the expert on irises or two-stripe bumblebees is offline at | the moment you might get crickets, or wild-ass guesses. | | There is something about video that makes it easier to | identify things. The object feels more three dimensional, I | suspect, which makes it closer to field identification. | | That said, we use camera 'traps' for very shy mammal species. | I wonder if we could tune those systems for bees. (A fox or | cloud leopard might run if the camera gears make noise, but | do bees give a damn?) | xipho wrote: | Not sure if a troll given I address this in the OP. You can't | just upload images. Internal dissections, DNA sequences, | imaging at SEM scale, all of these are not rare requirements, | they are the norm. Specimens have to be meticulously | collected, preserved, and vouchered in Natural History | collections as part of this process (Science should be | replicable to some degree). | | It's a wonderful aspiration to live in a society where anyone | will have the free time to "level-up" to a taxonomists level | of experience by making, literally, millions of observations, | then "power-up" with their free access to SEMs, sequencers, | high-powered microscopes and lighting, digital imaging | systems (etc.) then "farm for $" to get access to travel and | gear then gain "clan-clout" to navigate collecting policies | and permitting, etc. etc. Something to strive for, but sadly | not a reality anytime soon. | MattGaiser wrote: | Do they actually have lots of species which look the same | but are impossible to tell apart except for DNA? | dwiel wrote: | I occasionally use iNaturalist to help identify plants | and fungus while out on hikes. The community there has a | ton of specialists and it is extremely common to get | messages like this on observations that are months old. | Here is one I got this morning about a random mushroom I | took a picture of in the woods of Indiana: | | Russula sanguinea was described from a European mushroom | and therefore probably isn't here in North America at | all. The name has been applied to many red Russula in N. | A. adding to the confusion. Out west where it may be | sorted it is being called Russula rhodocephala which | itself is a lookalike for Russula americana but under | different trees according to Danny Miller here [1]. | Mushroomexpert's Kuo and Mycoquebec say that a lookalike | under oaks in the east is Russula tenuiceps or R. | sanguinaria under conifers/pines, but it is probably a | group of species, and also not the same as the European | one in the case of R. sanguinaria. We are trying to | downvote these identifications for this reason. | Hopefully, any people interested in identifying mushrooms | will pitch in and help to vote any Russula that is being | called Russula sanguinea in the eastern US back to genus | level anyway, but we are concerned with a few other | species too. Read fungee's journal post here [2]. Check | out the master list here [3]. Another thing that is | daunting for Russula ID, there are well over a hundred | known red Russula in the east, many are not named yet, | and, if they are, the name is not in use. | | [1] http://www.alpental.com/psms/ddd/Russula/index.htm | | [2] https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/fungee/46596-new- | ai-comp... | | [3] https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/computer-vision- | clean-up-wik... | dmix wrote: | I dabbled in mycology and identifying mushrooms is super | hard, probably one of the hardest taxonomy things. I | wouldn't want to be the expert in that field getting | asked all the time with a single iPhone photo. | | /r/mycology had to say stop posting "please identify this | mushroom" because it was so common. I'd imagine its | easier with insects. And you don't have as many people | who care because they aren't trying to eat them as often. | | I still like to ID random bugs I find in my house and | backyard and it's always a probability exercise. | | Those tree identification apps by taking a photo never | work. I used it at a UofT garden where every tree was | labelled and it got it wrong every time. So even the ML | is way off. | tp3 wrote: | I read genomic data collected for phylogenetic analysis | of non-hymenopteran species the way I do, I don't expect | to find a single specimen of that species that I haven't | seen somewhere else, either within my own field of study | or any other. It is possible that some new species of | hymenopteran may be found from genomic data, and that | this newly discovered species will then become a member | of the Hymenoptera, but it would probably not be of that | group we currently consider. That's the thing: the | current state of the hymenopteran phylogeny is that | although the species of hymenopteran I consider most | closely related to each other has been found in multiple | specimens from multiple populations, they are a diverse | group, with many examples of them from multiple regions. | That's the kind of thing we would expect to see from a | modern, large-scale genome analysis, but that is not how | I see it. | rmah wrote: | Yes. And to make it even more confusing, there are often | plants/animals that have wildly varying appearance but | are actually the same species: e.g. great | danes/chihuahuas or cabbage/broccoli | hospadar wrote: | Look into mushroom identification - many little brown | mushrooms (LBMs) are differentiated only by careful | microscopic analysis of their spores or DNA sequencing. | Mushrooms are especially difficult because many of the | potentially useful identifying features are only present | at certain (short - hours or a day or two) phases of the | lifecycle of the fruiting body. | tp3 wrote: | Finally, for those who think genomic/genetic studies are | being used inappropriately, consider that while they may | seem to me to be, in practice, just another sort of 'data | processing' (which they are not - they are often just | generalised (or even generalized), and their application | to new contexts is not that different to simply applying | similar analysis to previous contexts) it is possible, | for example, that, for example, the study of the DNA | sequences of fungi actually (if you want to make a | broader and very broad claim about fungus genomics) might | in the future yield, in this particular case, a much more | detailed, more reliable (and possibly more objective) | classification (if not entirely a direct one) of some of | the fungi and their eukaryotes in our immediate | neighbourhood. | | I've also got to say that for the same reason, I don't | have a lot of confidence in the 'fungal genomic analysis' | thing in particular, because, on the whole, it seems to | me to be so easily manipulated. | xipho wrote: | Good question, increasingly we can judge for ourselves. | Go to BOLD (COI barcoding) [0]. Search for "Apidae". | That's just one family of bees, in this case the one that | includes 27+ (IIRC, probably way off) subspecies of what | we know as the honeybee. The important bit is the count | in "BINS", e.g. hypothesis of speciation typically based | on a single gene, COI. | | That's only the specimens that have been sequenced and | archived at BOLD. That doesn't include the various other | bee families, notably Halictidae, Colletidae, Melittidae, | and others roughly all the "sister groups" in the Apoidea | [1]. | | An example of why is this important? The Africanized | honeybee, known perhaps from bad horror movies, is | characterized (identified) as a hybrid of two species. It | can be more or less aggressive (to the point of killing | you if you don't GTFO) depending on then nature of its | DNA. Hybridization has blurred the limits of the species | in many areas, including in the US. Sequencing specimens | is the only way to confidently determine which of the | species you have, A (friendly bee honey), AB (grumpy bee | honey), or B (deadly bee honey) (gross simplification | here, not Mendelian). | | [0](http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BINSearch | ). [1](here: | https://www.catalogueoflife.org/?taxonKey=625GP) | throwanem wrote: | > The Africanized honeybee, known perhaps from bad horror | movies | | You're talking about _The Swarm_ (1978), which is | _absolutely_ so-bad-it 's-good. Fans of Michael Caine | will I think in particular find it rewarding, and I was | especially impressed with its frankly prescient treatment | of the drawbacks inherent in mass insecticide application | given that the ongoing research increasingly points to | exactly that as the culprit for pollinators disappearing. | artificial wrote: | Sounds similar to Jaws starting a shark panic. | throwanem wrote: | Well, you're considerably more likely to run into a wild | colony of "Africanized" hybrids than you are a great | white shark, for one thing. For another, while I wasn't | around at the time, I understand the movie was more made | in response to sensationalistic reporting than a cause of | it - I might be wrong about that part, though. | | That said, my understanding is that A. m. scutellata x A. | mellifera hybrids aren't unusually aggressive in nest | defense by the standards of social hymenopterans | generally, but only by the standard of the European | honeybee (A. mellifera). I can't claim close familiarity | with the relevant literature on bee hybrids, but from | what I have seen, their nest defense behavior seems | roughly comparable in aggressiveness to that of many | yellowjacket (Vespula, Dolichovespula) species. On the | other hand, a wild bee colony is likely to be one or two | orders of magnitude greater in size than a wild | yellowjacket colony, which means that a comparable level | of aggression in nest defense could pose a significantly | greater hazard. | | Using the figures from the Wikipedia article [1] and its | relevant source [2], it looks like A. m. scutellata x A. | mellifera are responsible for an average of around 15 | human deaths per year since the introduction of A. m. | scutellata into Brazil in 1956. So I don't really see | that there's very much to worry over here, in any case. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee | | [2] https://www.si.edu/spotlight/buginfo/killbee | whimsicalism wrote: | > imaging at SEM scale | | I can't see how that would possibly be a requirement for | determining the species of a bee. Wouldn't DNA be cheaper | and easier? | throwanem wrote: | Not at this time. Sequencing is cheap and easy, but | hymenopteran genomics is a young field with many more | open questions than answers; morphological taxonomy is | much more mature, and aided besides by highly specific | genital configurations which are, in no small number of | cases, the _only_ way currently known reliable of telling | two macroscopically indistinguishable species apart. Too, | in order to evaluate genomic relatedness precisely enough | to update taxonomy, you need your sequence database to be | broad as well as deep - unless you already have a broad | and deep sequence database of _other_ solitary bees, for | example, it 's hard to get very precise results out of a | given solitary bee's genome. It may not even tell you | anything you didn't already know. | | In any case, it's not rare in the literature to encounter | whole genera categorized almost entirely through analysis | of the males' aedagi, with microscopic imagery and line | drawings included to highlight features by which | distinctions are made. Some of these features are only | easily distinguished at SEM scale, so that's what is | used. | | That said, it's thought among at least some taxonomists | that these unique and incompatible genital configurations | may be the only thing that prevents interfertility among | individuals of these otherwise separate species. So it's | going to be really interesting to see what comes out of | genomics as applied to the Hymenoptera over the next | decade or so - something else that's not rare in the | literature is to encounter reclassifications and | rearrangements of large branches of the family's | taxonomic tree, as phylogenetic research heavily revises | prior results. Beyond that, there's a lot else coming out | of genomic research into the family, including a rare | example of heritable mutualism between a virus and a | eukaryote in the form of _Bracovirus_ [1] [2]. | | So, while yours is a fair question, there is a _lot_ | going on with hymenopteran genomics and phylogenetics | these days, and my understanding as an interested amateur | who does a great deal of reading in the literature is | that, for the moment at least, established taxonomical | methods still are likely to provide a more precise, | albeit still provisional, placement of an otherwise ill- | characterized species. In a decade or two, though, that | might no longer be the case. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracovirus | | [2] https://jvi.asm.org/content/87/17/9649 | whimsicalism wrote: | TIL! Really appreciate the detailed reply. The Bracovirus | tidbit is particularly interesting - it's nuts how | aggressively optimizing evolution is. | rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: | There's a bot on reddit that does this for mushrooms: | https://www.reddit.com/user/Mycology_Bot | | This xkcd from just a few years ago has already aged poorly: | https://m.xkcd.com/1425/ | riffraff wrote: | well, that comic is seven years old, if anything it'd been | accurate :) | TaylorAlexander wrote: | I have a controversial theory that society would be better off | if we made sure no one technically had to work to survive. | Working would provide income to improve your conditions | (serving as motivation), but food and shelter would be made | available to everyone no matter what. | | Under these conditions, anyone could study what they wanted and | volunteer to do things like this, and institutions could | provide support to them at little cost. | | I imagine we accomplish this by making the necessities of life | as cheap as possible, not by heavy state subsidy. | | Our need to squeeze profitable labor out of every person seems | actually counter productive. Anyway total aside... | jay_kyburz wrote: | People would stay at home, watch TV and become depressed. | | Instead we should pay people to study things they are | interested in, and then pay them to go apply those studies to | the real world! | | Give peoples lives meaning and purpose with valuable work! | jrsj wrote: | That's already what I'm doing _with_ a job so I 'd honestly | prefer to be able to do it without having to work | TaylorAlexander wrote: | People have said this but I really don't think that's true. | That doesn't seem to be what happens to wealthy people who | have all of their material needs met. People love to do | things. I think most people would "work" even if it was | volunteer work. But if they got injured or had a life | change, they wouldn't be screwed. | | People will find meaning. It's part of the human condition. | | It's only when you take someone who has been working day in | and day out for years and you give them a week off, and | they'll collapse on the couch and watch TV and feel bad. | Because they are exhausted and haven't developed any | healthy hobbies. But if it was their whole life, they | wouldn't stay on the couch forever. Also when you give a | worker a bit of time off, their friends are still working. | If everyone can take time off, people would meet with each | other. And that's the oldest human pastime. The company of | others. And it's free! | egypturnash wrote: | Most studies I've seen about basic income show that the | people on it go out and do shit. "Watch TV and become | depressed" is what you do when you _can 't_ go out (say, | because there's a pandemic going on) and also what you do | when you come home exhausted from working long hours at a | shitty job you hate. | criddell wrote: | > People would stay at home, watch TV and become depressed. | | Would you? I sure wouldn't. | Taylor_OD wrote: | Bug population in general is down massively. I worry about a | silent spring. | wishinghand wrote: | Anecdata, but I feel like I don't see that many bugs in general | since the 1990s (born in mid-80s). In my adult life I don't | bother buying bug spray or citronella candles anymore, | butterflies don't seasonally pass overhead, crickets are very | quiet in the fields, and picnics rarely get raided by ants. | alexfromapex wrote: | Please don't kill insects unless you really need to, I've seen | people on Facebook talking about destroying caterpillar nests | because they kill trees and it's not even true they might eat | some leaves but it's natural and doesn't usually kill the tree. | Now I hardly see the nests anywhere anymore and the butterflies | either. | feralimal wrote: | ... 'cos people are spending too much time looking at their | phones nowadays? | BlueTie wrote: | I built my house about 5 years ago in a subdivision. First year | on the back deck at noon there were a handful of bees buzzing | around and at dust I was getting eaten alive by mosquitos. | | After 5 years of watching my neighbors spray for mosquitos in | their lawn, and anti-grub stuff, synthetic fertilizer all spring | and summer -> they're all basically gone. | | When you think about all the forests getting knocked down to | build new houses not just in the US - but even more so in rapidly | growing 3rd world countries...it makes sense. | twiddling wrote: | Yeah, when we bought our house , we stopped the maintenance of | the backyard with chemicals that the previous owner did. | Planted more native shrubs and trees and now eight years later | we have got a pretty vibrant patch, with lots of birds feeding | on the bugs. | | Of course this has put me in conflict with my neighbors who | make snide comments about a poorly maintained yard... sigh | averageuser wrote: | I'm not sure what the consequences of this are, but it is a | pretty big deal. Bees are responsible for pollinating a lot of | plants, and if the bees are dying off, it could have devastating | consequences for the food supply. | | I'm not sure what the point of this article is. It's not like | we're going to be able to do anything about it. | esarbe wrote: | I have come to the conclusion that most of my colleagues, friends | neighbors and acquaintances are living in a stoically enforced | willful blindness. | | No one in their right mind can nowadays honestly deny that we are | moving, slowly but ever accelerating, into a human-made ecosystem | collapse that no one is able to stop before it is too late. | | But still people are finding ways to weasel out of actually | making the conscious effort of accepting the fact that we - as a | species - are killing ourselves. Either by denying the facts - | the climate is not changing, the animals are not dying, the | rivers are not poisoned! - or by ascribing to some kind of | techno-utopism where everything will be fixed in the future. | | I'm wondering if this is part of psychological coping mechanism; | that the fact of our species ending is such a trauma that we - | even though we cannot deny it in all honesty - have to suppress | our own conciseness from realizing the direful consequences for | every single person we know and love. We have to deny reality, | because the implications of accepting the facts are just to | painful. And so we continue this charade of daily going to work | and shopping and comparing our income to those of our neighbors | and continue our meaningless competitions for status and rank. | | I think deep in our hearts most of us know that it is really far | to late. | | And that's why we cannot admit the truth. | ip26 wrote: | I don't know what sociologists & psychologists would say, but I | think the group action problem continues to be a big hurdle. | There is a tremendous variety of changes I & my spouse would be | willing to make, costs we would be willing to pay- except if | only we do it, it makes not one iota of difference. (Our | compromise has been that we focus our efforts on positive | changes that also save us money, like insulation, efficiency, | shade, biking, etc) | | Frankly it's also currently a lot of _work_ to constantly make | all the "right" choices. Taking the "right" actions would be | significantly easier with a stronger "systems" solution. For | example, a carbon tax or neonicotinoid ban would instantly make | it zero-effort to buy low-carbon or bee-friendly. | | Consumer-choice oriented campaigns like the Rainforest Alliance | et al are absolutely well intentioned but the message of saving | the world through our purchasing decisions may have indirectly | disenfranchised our capacity for collective action. | thwarted wrote: | "Humans had their chance, and nature selected them... for | extinction." ~ paraphrasing Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park. | | Human intelligence is a product of evolution, and that | evolution apparently didn't provide us the kind of attributes | that would keep us from destroying ourselves or our environment | (or destroying ourselves is some kind of evolutionary | advantage, but that's the kind of assessment that can only be | made by whatever comes after us). | pokeymcsnatch wrote: | Surely you're the enlightened one and everyone you know is | willfully blind. | | Or maybe they're pragmatic and begrudgingly accept that to | maintain any semblance of modern life, they have to participate | in however society functions *now*. | | I'm in no position, financial or otherwise, to go off-grid, | ride my bike everywhere, delete my car, home cook every meal | with locally grown ingredients. Or to decrease my energy | consumption through buying less VPS time, buying and using test | equipment, parts, protypes made overseas with no pollution | regulations. I can do better than I'm doing now, but not by | much unless there truly is some massive, global-level, snap-of- | the-fingers change. Reason being, if I do, it's essentially | self-harm, like a social suicide. I suffer, I lose jobs, | contracts, my livelihood, relationships, etc while the rest of | the world happily moves on without me. Which yeah, it fits the | idea of your of complaint. | | The majority of your acquaintances who you've written off as | stuck in the dark ages don't have the ability to make the | extraordinary changes that you demand for removing that label. | Your statement was more philosophical than demanding specific | action, but ignoring the reality of humans and human society so | you can shit on us from your tower is not helpful. | [deleted] | alberth wrote: | As a kid, whenever we'd take a family road trip - the front | windshield would be splattered with smashed bugs. | | Over the winter holidays, I drove 9 hours and don't believe a | single bug was in my windshield after that long drive. | | I don't know what's happening with bugs but could it be related? | dragonwriter wrote: | While changes to insect populations are a thing, it could be in | part that your car is more aerodynamic than the ones you rode | in as a kid. That would reduce bug impacts, and increase fuel | efficiency. | rodiger wrote: | As someone who lives in a fairly seasonal environment, how can I | help? | ciconia wrote: | Last year I installed a beehive in our garden. Didn't take their | honey, didn't treat them for Varroa. In the midst of winter I was | sure they were all dead. Then a few days ago temperatures shot up | to about 18degc and suddenly they were back, basking in the | sunlight and buzzing around the hive. Made me so happy... | | Seriously, I've come to understand that contrary to what most of | us seem to believe, it's not about what we can do to minimize our | negative impact, but rather what we can do to have a positive | impact on our environment. Not just ecologically, but also | socially and politically. | yawz wrote: | Depending on where you are they may not be out of the danger | zone yet. Here in Colorado we regularly get mid-to-high 60F | days and I know people who lost hives as late as April. | | You didn't take their excess honey, but I assume you still | inspected to give them room otherwise they could easily have | swarmed. | searine wrote: | >didn't treat them for Varroa. | | That's fine if they're fine, but if the hive gets infected and | you let them fester they can do a lot of damage to other hives. | | https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/08/03/backyard-beekeeping... | yawz wrote: | That is true. I've been dealing with Varroa in the US since I | started beekeeping. I've lost many hives because of Varroa. I | ran my own experiments treating some hives and not treating | others, trying to see if nature would allow me to select the | strongest (Varroa-resistant) colonies and selectively breed | them. I didn't succeed. | tptacek wrote: | Social and political effects aside, is it ecologically positive | to introduce more honey bees to America? | | (I think honey bees are fine). | crazydoggers wrote: | Some breeds are more hygienic and will do more at keeping mite | infections to a minimum. | | For instance here in Texas we have BeeWeavers which do really | well against mites: | | https://beeweaver.com/our-breed/ | | That said no bee breed is 100% resistant. To breed the | resistance that this breed has took a very long time and active | management like killing susceptible drones to artificially | select for the trait. It's not going to happen with one hive. | | And as others have said you might do more harm than good by | letting a hive get badly infected, spreading heavy infection to | other hives. You should definitely actively manage it. | | With the beeweavers I still get some mites, and you need to do | a mite count. Typically a mite count of 3% is in danger and | needs treatment. | andrewstuart wrote: | That's the unsurprising outcome of our relentless poisoning of | insects, which continues unabated today. | | Humans think about certain things as being infinite, until they | aren't: | | forests are so big we could never impact them | | oceans are so big we could never impact them | | the atmosphere is so big we could never impact it | | the weather system is so big we could never impact it | | there's so many insects we could never impact them | | etc etc | yboris wrote: | Humans suck (at least via intuition) when it comes to | exponential processes. E.g. - people think a 2% growth rate of | population in a town is good, but that means in 35 years it's | double of what it was! | learnstats2 wrote: | Interesting to note that population of central boroughs of | London (which is used as a canonical example of population | growth and overcrowding in Europe) is roughly half what they | were 100 years ago. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London | _Borough_of_Islington#De... | | And likely decreasing now again, as people find less cultural | benefit of living in an expensive city during an ongoing | pandemic. | | I don't think population size or density is really the | problem - the problem is poor planning to account for changes | in population size or density. Consistent 2% growth should be | relatively easy for politicians to manage. | MisterTea wrote: | > Humans think about certain things as being infinite, until | they aren't | | I think the real issue is that humans DONT think beyond their | own needs. You have people who think having a picture perfect | green lawn is somehow an achievement. If its not perfect, you | must be a lazy sack of crap or have no pride. Think Hank Hill | from the animated TV series, King of the Hill. | | Same goes for gardens and so on. To achieve this they poison | the earth again and again and again. Continuously spraying and | pumping all sorts of life destroying chemicals into the air and | ground. Just so they can stand on their porch, arms akimbo, | nodding in satisfaction of the holocaust they just unleashed | against multiple forms of life, both insect and plant. All for | a crappy lifeless lawn. | | If grass needed bees to grow you can be sure we'd be up to our | eyeballs in bees. (I come from NYC/Long island so I'm more | familiar with urban earth poisoning. I'm sure farming has as | great or a much larger impact as well. Just my POV) | redisman wrote: | If every suburbian yard was filled with native plants, wild | bees would be doing amazing. Reminder to everyone, only | honeybees can forage on a wide variety of flowers. Most bees | can only consume native flowers to the area. | dwiel wrote: | Actually in many suburban and exurban places, more chemicals | are used in lawns than in farms. On farms they have to watch | their costs since they have very tight margins. A person | spraying their yard every so often may get 2x or 3x what they | need, just to be "safe" and then go ahead and spray any left | overs until it is all gone, because why not. Same goes with | fertilizer. | | This isn't to say that farms don't have this problem, they | definitely do. | mint2 wrote: | I disapprove of that unnecessary lawns and hoa sterile | "gardening". Like they mandate planting rules or hire | "gardeners" to maintain a landscape in a sterile, generic | state but there is no thought or reason to it. What hoa had | their landscaping designed by ecologists with the environment | in mind? It's hoa boards who don't care but just want | something standard and cheap and to put as little | consideration into it as possible. All for the | "Maximize/maintain house value" lie. Minimum effort at a | cheap bland environment harming aesthetic does not maximize | value. | rapjr9 wrote: | There's another possible explanation for insect decline | unrelated to insecticides, a global thiamine deficiency: | | https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/01/vitamin-... | | The root cause seems to be an unknown problem with bacteria | that produce thiamine at the base of food chains, as well as | some invasive species (which for example caused big problems in | the Great Lakes in the USA). Thiamine is pretty fundamental to | life so it might explain the decline in insects as well as the | other effects described in the above article. Reading about | thiamine antagonists it seems sulfates can destroy thiamine: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine#Antagonists | | "Rumen bacteria also reduce sulfate to sulfite, therefore high | dietary intakes of sulfate can have thiamine-antagonistic | activities." | | Sulfates in the environment are one result of burning coal. So | it is possible that one side effect of burning coal for decades | is the food chain has been interrupted at the bacterial level, | reducing the amount of thiamine available. If true, I'm not | sure if that would be easy to fix; at the very least it would | probably require coal burning to stop immediately and perhaps | manufacture of thiamine and distribution of it in the | environment, which could take a decade and might be somewhat | risky with side effects if done on a large scale. If it really | is coal burning causing thiamine deficiencies over wide areas | it should be easy to tell by looking for thiamine deficiencies | downwind of coal burning plants. | esarbe wrote: | It's an unfortunate consequence of our biology. We're not | thinking machines, we reproduction machines. Thinking was never | even tacked-on, it just was just a side-effect from our (quite | amazing) capability to abstract and model the systems around us | to make predictions about them. The monkey systems around us. | | So, all in all it's not surprising that we lack the necessary | algorithms to correctly deal with the dangers that come from | being a species that found the ultimate exploits in the game of | life. | quesera wrote: | There's also the unfortunate belief that "earth was created | for our use", which blesses the exploitation of all available | resources. | | This idea has floated around since well before | industrialization, but the negative effects were localized | until then. | | So we're simple reproduction/consumption machines -- and that | is our highest calling. Woe be to those who would disagree. | sep_field wrote: | The Earth does not belong to us, rather we belong to the | Earth. The Earth is more important than we are, we should | put the Earth's needs ahead of our own needs. We must stand | up for the rights of the Earth, or else human rights will | be impossible to maintain. | esarbe wrote: | Well, it's romantic to think that there's a higher calling | for humankind. And I guess that for the story-telling | narrator in our head who is interpreting and commenting the | events unfolding in front of our eyes, it's just impossible | to not treat the entity harboring it as very, very special, | unique and bestowed with destiny. | phobosanomaly wrote: | Great comment. | | Just wondering what you meant by this phrase: | | > _The monkey systems around us._ | esarbe wrote: | I consider to be very convincing the theory that most of | our capacity for reasoning actually revolves around the | modeling of other humans' thought processes. Together with | language (which allows us to 'groom' many people at once, | where individuals from other ape species have to groom each | other one by one. Grooming as in 'interact to bond and | build cooperative associations') it has allowed for | incredible cooperative achievements. | | So; monkey systems -> other humans, albeit flippantly. | jibcage wrote: | Even if we manage to address climate change in time, I worry | we've already missed the boat for addressing the accompanying | ecological collapse that seems to be rapidly accelerating. | zests wrote: | As soon as the "ecological collapse" stops, extensive | speciation will occur. Nature always wins. There's a lot to be | hopeful about even when it seems like there might not be. | radford-neal wrote: | "The sharpest decrease occurred between 2006 and 2015, with | roughly 25 percent fewer species spotted" | | This short time scale doesn't seem to fit with climate change | being the cause (assuming that the decrease is actually real at | all, not an observational artifact). | toss1 wrote: | Yup, but I'll bet a significant sum it corresponds with | tonnage of neonicotinoid and other pesticide production | (application). | | This is truly a problem that free markets will never handle, | by design | | The market is great at identifying the utility of aggressive | pesticides. Need found, production started, pricing, & | distribution - insect crop damage 'solved' (for some values | of 'solved'). | | Discovering that this 'solution' actually breaks the food web | will also be 'solved' by the free market, as the last | remaining produce that requires those pollinators spike from | $/bushel to $/gram levels. | | But, that will fail to create more production when | pollinators are extinct, and even if they could be | ressurrected from DNA libraries, the poisons are still | spread. | | Oh, and all the customers also died | | Yes, regulation is massively inconvenient, and apparently | inefficient, and one can _always_ find egregious bad | examples. But intelligent regulation is necessary for our | survival. | esarbe wrote: | Yes. Capitalism is not a viable survival strategy for a | species. | toss1 wrote: | And of course, any post that goes against the libertarian- | ish hivemind immediately gains downvotes with no comments | jrsj wrote: | just stop complaining and solve the problem with LISP ;) | shmageggy wrote: | Is there a link to a non-subscribe-walled version? | 40four wrote: | Reader mode in Firefox worked for me ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-22 23:00 UTC)