[HN Gopher] We haven't seen a quarter of known bee species since...
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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
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