[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 : 621 points
Date : 2021-02-22 17:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nationalgeographic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nationalgeographic.com)
| IgorPartola wrote:
| From my reading Mason bees are easier to maintain and are better
| pollinators than honey bees:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_bee
| dryd wrote:
| If you live in Washington State, you can help by planting bee-
| friendly flowers in your garden (if you have one). The Noxious
| Weed Control Board offers a pack of seeds for free!:
| https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/bee-u-tify
| 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."
| hertzrat wrote:
| > in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell
| themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have
| evolved)
|
| What tools did they fail to learn? If we went from a state of
| identifying species to not identifying them, and the major
| change is removing the taxonomists, isn't it arguable that they
| were doing fine if not better than without them?
| xipho wrote:
| Not sure I understand.
|
| A - we identified species B - we removed our ability to
| identify species
|
| A & B therefor
|
| C - we're better off
|
| ... doesn't seem to follow. Something is missing.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _This is not to say that species richness is not declining,_
|
| I continue to be baffled by how many take serious this rather
| arbitrary concept as though it actually mean something.
|
| Apparently _Clostridium botulinum_ as a species is purely
| defined by the ability to produce botulinum; many members of
| this species have acquired this trait by way of horizontal gene
| transfer and are otherwise vertically not specially related and
| vertically related strains that lost it recently are considered
| different species.
|
| The species of the neanderthal man has recently gone extinct,
| or not, depending on a sheer matter of semantics of whether it
| and the cro-magnon man are of the same species, or not.
|
| Similar arguments can of course be made for languages. A
| dialect with an army-and-a-navy being lost is a tragoedy; a
| dialect that lacks such being lost is inconsequential, -- for
| the former is a separate language, and the latter merely a
| variant of another.
| xipho wrote:
| Do you feel confident that you can apply an individual
| measure of meaning as to whether each of the 2 million +
| estimated species on Earth is "valuable"? If not, perhaps
| blanked statements _might_ be of use. For example all species
| that produce food, perhaps useful. All species that are part
| of an ecosystem that decomposes dead things so that we are
| covered in filth - also useful. Species that cause viral
| death- extremely useful to know about. Species that produce
| oxygen for us to breath, I 'm for them. Species that fix
| nitrogen so we can eat, count me. You get my drift,
| suggesting nothing matters/has meaning is a dead-end/non-
| starter argument.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| You assume that these traits necessarily lie on the
| arbitrary lines men have drawn between so-called "species".
|
| My point is that they do not, and that the line between
| different species indeed can be quite arbitrary, and can
| very often differ from one specialist to the other.
|
| Most of the earth's oxygen is produced by plankton, which
| is especially a place where some members of the same
| species produce said oxygen, and some do not.
| 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.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Means of production and money existed since the dawn of
| civilization. The law of Hammurabi discusses contracts,
| prices, private property, etc.
|
| Also, for example, Rome during the times of Roman Empire
| had to rely on imports of food from Africa because
| Appenine agriculture wasn't self-sufficient. And
| throughout history in Europe and Middle East trade was a
| big part of every complex society.
|
| These stories about feudal mode of production is just bad
| outdated 19th century scholarship.
|
| It also seems completely ridiculous to call modern states
| hyper capitalistic when in most countries 35-65% of GDP
| is controlled by the government (yes, even in the US).
| 100 years ago it was more like 5% of GDP and income taxes
| didn't even exist!
| esarbe wrote:
| I think you might be conflating trade with capitalism.
|
| The exchange of goods and services for a representative
| value (i.e. money) is not capitalism. That's just trade.
|
| Could you explain why you think that the percentage of
| GDP a government controls has anything to do with
| capitalism?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| I am not conflating trade with capitalism. I am
| explaining that the "feudal mode of production" was at
| best localized and relatively short period in the history
| of mankind. So contrasting capitalism with it is
| disingenuous because many periods in human history were
| more similar to what we have today than feudalism but
| there is often an implication that feudalism is the
| closest in time and place to the rise of capitalism and
| therefore it is the most similar one which is simply not
| true. If you look at the history of Rome it is much
| closer to what we have now in terms of its legal system,
| government expenditure, private relations, etc than
| feudalism. And they even had a similar sort of "capital"
| like private ships they used for trade that were very
| expensive, even though they didn't have a modern idea of
| a corporation.
|
| Indeed, exchange is not always capitalistic exchange.
| Capitalism can be analyzed as a system defined by 3 core
| properties: (1) private ownership of the means of
| production (2) labor market (3) commodity market. This is
| what Adam Smith called "the system of natural liberty"
| and what Marx called "capitalism" (I am not sure he
| coined it, but he certainly popularized it). Hence, when
| the government uses spends money on big infrastructure
| projects or hires people to work on a mine, it has little
| to do with capitalism, thinks like that existed in
| Ancient Rome and even Ancient Greece!
|
| Compare our modern world to what we had 100-300 years ago
| when companies had personal armies. I don't see how we
| are live in anything close to "hyper capitalism".
| esarbe wrote:
| First; thanks for the thoughtful reply. This is why I
| really enjoy NH.
|
| Why do you think that the "feudal mode" of production was
| only localized and over a short period time? I would
| argue that since the agricultural revolution some 12'000
| years ago, most people that ever lived, lived in some
| kind of feudal system. Chinese feudalism is well
| documented back to about 1000 BCE. It is not unreasonable
| to assume that this is true for most of the cultures at
| the time; there are countless examples of how tribal
| societies change with the introduction of agriculture and
| how this in term leads to stratification and thus to some
| form of feudalism or another.
|
| But really; the point I'm trying to make is that the
| capitalistic mode and thus capitalistic exchanges are
| really something new in the history of mankind. Before
| the agricultural feudalism people weren't living in
| capitalism for sure.
|
| Rome is an interesting exception. And it really is just
| that; an exception. Yes, there were vast trading
| networks, bringing goods from all exotic places to the
| center of the universe, hundreds of ships transporting
| tons and tons of loot and slaves and culture. But only a
| very, very small percentage of the Roman populace was
| ever involved in such trades. Even in Rome (the
| republic/empire, not the city), most of the population
| was living in farmsteads, producing most of what they
| consumed themselves, trading surplus for additional
| calories or goods.
|
| Very few would have had any capitalistic exchanges, most
| of them would have had none at all. Yes, much of the
| Roman land was owned by the elite of Rome itself and even
| today's oligarchs would pale if they knew how rich Marcus
| Licinius Crassus was. But that ownership was very
| different from anything that we could honestly classify
| as capitalism. If there was capitalism in Rome, it
| probably was in the manufacturies and in the mines. (E.g.
| Terra sigillata was manufactured on a _ginormous_ scale -
| but only for a fraction of a percent of the population)
|
| And again; Rome in this shape existed for less than four
| hundred years. And for most of the world, Rome wasn't
| terribly important after that.
|
| So, if we go back to your (very apt) definition of
| capitalism, we can see that the three core properties
| really only arise around the year 1600 and 1700, at least
| in Europe. There we have the faint beginnings of a
| capitalistic system, akin to what imperial Rom might have
| had (for some time); wealthy merchants trading goods that
| - produced in a manufactory (1) by hired labor (2), are
| shipped and sold in a foreign market (3). Again; it is
| only a small fraction of the population that takes place
| in this value-adding. Most of the population is still not
| taking part in any capitalistic exchanges. Most of the
| population is still living a nasty brutish and short live
| in agricultural settlements; still producing most of what
| they consumed themselves, trading surplus for additional
| calories or goods.
|
| That's the time when the term 'capitalism' is termed. And
| I think it is quite different from what we have today;
| nowadays; most of all exchanges are capitalistic ones,
| for much of the population _all_ the exchanges are
| _exclusively_ capitalistic. This exclusivity is something
| that is new (since about ~70 years). And it is this
| exclusivity that I think is something that was neither
| obvious not expected when 'capitalism' was first being
| used to refer to systems that satisfy our three core
| properties.
|
| So, there you have my reasoning. I understand that you
| might not agree with my assessment, but I hope I was able
| to explain my reasoning for using such an inflammatory
| term as "hyper capitalism" to refer to the manifestation
| of capitalism we have today.
|
| Thanks for having this exchange and thanks for making me
| work for it. ;)
| overkalix wrote:
| > everything that does not in the most direct way result in
| value added is demeaned, discounted and cut.
|
| Correction: everything that is not _perceived_ to add value.
| The amount of bullshit and inefficiencies that are rewarded
| with exorbitant salaries is simply astonishing.
| esarbe wrote:
| Agreed. It's all about perception, not about actual value
| added. Just see e.g. the costs of environmental pollution
| that are not even considered when 'calculating' the added
| value.
| gedy wrote:
| Recent non-capitalist political systems aren't any better at
| stewarding the environment, so maybe it's something else
| about humans.
| [deleted]
| esarbe wrote:
| Alas, there might be some truth to that.
| 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.
| readams wrote:
| This is a great example of how our biases can lead us to make
| mistakes like this. If they had looked at this and the numbers
| pointed the other way, they would certainly have looked at the
| denominator in hopes that the number of people identifying the
| specimens had gone up by more than the amount of observations.
| Just a great lesson to everyone when trying to do science.
| 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.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > I dabbled in mycology and identifying mushrooms is
| super hard, probably one of the hardest taxonomy things.
|
| There are a lot of mushrooms that are very easy to
| identify, and learning edible mushrooms is imho a lot
| easier than learning edible plants. But if you pick up
| mushrooms at random then yeah, it's generally extremely
| difficult.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| A big part of learning what mushrooms are edible is
| identifying the ones that can harm you.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| I mean out of the 2,000 mushrooms in North America, there
| are all of 20 or 30 that are seriously poisonous. So it
| doesn't take all that long to learn the most harmful
| ones. Especially since you don't even need to know
| whether or not a mushroom is harmful, only if it looks
| vaguely like one of the harmful ones.
| 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.
| oasisbob wrote:
| Fungal taxonomy is especially interesting.
|
| Some argue that latin binomials should be abandoned, see
| "Against the naming of fungi":
|
| https://doi.org/10.1016/j.funbio.2013.05.007
| 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.
| underbluewaters wrote:
| Yes, and this even applies to vertebrates and can
| sometimes work in reverse. I was part of a team of
| research divers that did fish counts in California. This
| was in the early 00's so in several instances genetic
| research found that seemingly identical fish were
| different species depending on region. In one case groups
| of fish that looked quite different turned out to be the
| same species. Very frustrating when you are putting in so
| much work underwater!
|
| That whole experience made me very skeptical of citizen-
| science projects once I knew how much training was
| required to do good work. While they are a great
| compliment to professional research they are no
| replacement (though often funders are treating citizen
| science as just that).
| 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
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Well, you're considerably more likely to run into a
| wild colony of "Africanized" hybrids than you are a great
| white shark
|
| Are you? They attack rarely (although are thought to have
| done so fatally a few weeks ago here in NZ) and aren't
| even seen usually, but they are close to popular beaches.
|
| https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/123902863/four-reported-
| great...
| throwanem wrote:
| Well, according to UFL's International Shark Attack File
| [1] and the CDC [2] respectively, on average 4.3 humans
| die worldwide per year of shark attacks, vs. an average
| 62 humans in the US per year of stings from hymenopterans
| excluding ants.
|
| Given that the shark attack stats cover a period 25 times
| as long as that for the bees, wasps, and hornets, I do
| feel like "considerably" is a fair choice of adjective
| here.
|
| [1] https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-
| attacks/maps/world/
|
| [2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/pdfs/mm6829a5-
| H.pdf
| lostlogin wrote:
| You're measuring attacks, I'm talking of being in close
| proximity.
|
| Probably people die of bee stings more than sharks
| attacks here in NZ, but those bees certainly aren't
| africanised. I suspect most US deaths aren't all from
| africanised bees either but that's going to be hard to
| prove.
| 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.
| throwanem wrote:
| It really is! The more you read about it, the more
| interesting it gets, too - for example, while the virus
| is vertically transmitted, that doesn't happen by the
| ordinary route of mother-to-daughter infection. Instead,
| the viral genome is _integrated into_ that of the wasp,
| as are genes that code for a unique type of ovarian cell
| that 's specialized to act as a viral replicator.
|
| And that's just one example! I could give more, like the
| effect the virus has on the wasp's reproductive host, and
| how it's honestly surprising that Peter Watts hasn't
| written a novel about that yet - I'm always happy to talk
| at length about wasps, or at least to whatever extent my
| interlocutor of the moment is happy to listen.
| Dylan16807 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).
|
| Take the comment a little more gently. You didn't really
| address that by just saying "many of which require internal
| dissection, or molecular methods". And even with this
| followup, it's not fully addressed. Dissection takes an
| expert, sure. But DNA extraction doesn't require deep
| knowledge about the species. And preservation requires
| skills but not taxonomy skills. Does SEM imaging for this
| purpose usually require _species_ expertise?
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong overall here, I'm just saying
| there are pretty obvious points where the average person
| won't know the answer or which of these skills end up
| mattering the most.
|
| > 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
|
| I don't think that's what they were suggesting.
| xipho wrote:
| My apologies if it sounded harsh, I read it and a "go
| look it up on Wikipedia" type concept flashed in my head.
|
| > But DNA extraction doesn't require deep knowledge about
| the species.
|
| The act of extraction doesn't, but interpretation of the
| results does. So to does actually knowing where to get
| the specimens in the first place. So to does building up
| experience knowing where to look, how to collect,
| building up a feeling for the diversity and variation in
| the group you study. Without these tools in hand all the
| images, sequences, and assays etc. in the world will a)
| cost you way more than anyone wants to pay and b) will
| have you floundering around in a giant pool of dirt-
| common species that are well known rather than pulling
| that series of uncommon and ultra-rare specimens and
| making a contribution that really extends our knowledge.
| It takes years to know where to focus precious time, this
| isn't peculiar to taxonomy.
| 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 :)
| titzer wrote:
| Care to provide a reference to this declining number of
| taxonomists? Because you've made a long reasonable-sounding
| argument, but there are a _lot of_ reasonable-sounding
| arguments that don 't have any empirical evidence.
| xipho wrote:
| Sure [0], [1], [2], [3] can give you a hint at the keywords
| to search for. "Taxonomic impediment" is often used, it will
| let you dig deeper (though I don't like the term for various
| reasons). The topic has been raised for decades. I was part
| of the NSF program PEET [4], my peers and I got the best
| training in the world. Some of us are fortunate enough to
| good or great jobs in taxonomy. I can think of none that are
| strictly alpha-taxonomists (their primary research output
| being species descriptions). For example, if you did a PhD
| that was an epic 500 page monograph of the description of
| 100+ new species and covered 400 species total referencing
| science and specimens dating back up to 250 years, you
| wouldn't be a prof now. If you did a diverse, but necessarily
| less comprehensive PhD on a bunch of topics, maybe a couple
| new species, maybe a little molecular phylogeny, perhaps a
| database, a little of this, a little of that, and some of it
| was very buzzy- you'd have a fighting chance. This isn't
| really surprising, and I'm not making a real value-judgement
| on either approach. BTW- the problem is not that we've run
| out of species to descr
|
| [0](https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/61/12/942/390
| 232) [1](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/latest-
| endangered-speci...) [2](https://zslpublications.onlinelibrar
| y.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...)
| [3](https://academic.oup.com/jcb/article-
| pdf/35/6/729/10346383/j...)
| [4](https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5451)
| titzer wrote:
| Thanks for the links.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _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_
|
| Without disputing your claim, why is this _taxonomists '_ job?
| Imagine spending 10-15 years of academic work to get a PhD and
| become _the_ world expert on something important but obscure,
| and then being told you need to market yourself to the general
| public and devote a significant portion of your time to
| answering stupid questions (as in 'who cares about this boring
| stuff' as opposed to 'what is the airspeed of a pigeon').
|
| If I understand your 3rd paragraph correctly, maybe the real
| problem here is university administrators ending up actually in
| charge of things rather than as mere functionaries whose job is
| to facilitate the academics' goals, mysterious as those may
| be.Every single academic person I know loathes the
| administrators of their institutions (as a class rather than at
| the individual level, though I can think of exceptions) but
| seem helpless to displace them.
| z77dj3kl wrote:
| Because that's unfortunately how the world works: you have to
| sell to people the importance of what you do.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Because if you want to make a living you either have to do
| something that people are asking for, or you have to convince
| people that they _should_ be asking for. If the world doesn't
| see taxonomists' worth on their own, it _is_ up to them to
| educate us if they want to keep their jobs.
|
| We don't have unlimited research funds and they need to play
| the game just like everyone else. Taxonomy has a tougher time
| of illustrating value compared to cancer research (as one
| example), but they still need to convince people that they
| should be funded.
|
| Hopefully the field will figure this out before there is a
| crisis. As a recent example, the field of public health
| usually struggles to get funding compared to individual
| medicine. Before the COVID-19 pandemic very few people saw
| the value in having robust public health policy, agencies,
| and research, especially when they considered that they could
| add a new wing to a hospital or buy ambulances with the same
| money. Public health as a field did a poor job of convincing
| people that the field had something valuable to offer.
| Hopefully taxonomy can figure out how to convince the world
| that they offer something valuable before they go extinct
| (pun intended).
| hertzrat wrote:
| This is an argument against specialization. You can't do
| extremely difficult things while spending 20-30 hours a
| week on business management, public outreach, and
| fundraising. Since that's the world were living in, might
| it explain how our tech progress has gotten less impressive
| in the last 2 decades?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| So they should band together and hire a PR firm, it's
| possible for something to be your responsibility without
| having to do the work yourself.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > they should band together and hire a PR firm
|
| Maybe they should do it, yes, and I'm being 100% serious.
|
| That would solve a lot of newspapers abuse, always
| delighted to sell a history about crazy eccentric being
| chased by bees in some jungle, fourty years after falling
| in a pond at 8Yo.
|
| Journals seen politics or sports(wo)man as clients (they
| pay), but scientists... are products. They don't pay. Is
| a never-ending caricature.
| coliveira wrote:
| So now you propose that scientific researchers fight each
| other using advertisement and PR campaigns, and spend
| more of their already small grants, just to do what they
| were trained to do? Who would benefit from this other
| than PR companies?
| pishpash wrote:
| So it is _somebody 's_ job to sell to the public, but it
| may not be the researchers'.
| 3131s wrote:
| > * Because if you want to make a living you either have to
| do something that people are asking for, or you have to
| convince people that they should be asking for. If the
| world doesn't see taxonomists' worth on their own, it is up
| to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs.*
|
| No, no. The excuse for ignorance is not to blame the only
| people that have actually worked toward solutions to the
| current, ongoing extinction event. People that devote their
| lives to entomology, biology, ecology, and related fields
| have already done their part.
|
| Endless propaganda and reality distortion has made everyone
| not care about plants and animals. This along with similar
| corporate and governmental mindfucking initiatives has made
| everyone go crazy.
| yw3410 wrote:
| Isn't your hypothesis dependent on the fact that there is a
| way to convince the public at all? The alternative tends to
| be more enticing.
|
| Humour me; how would you have convinced the public that a
| pandemic was a real risk before it happened; such that they
| would need to fork out more money for taxes?
|
| How would you have convinced someone before 2008 that
| regulating part of the finance industry might be somewhat a
| good idea; such that they would have to reduce profit on
| their pension funds?
|
| And how do you convince someone, /today/ that climate-
| change might have quite far-reaching consequences; such
| that they'll need to pay more for consumer goods?
| rorykoehler wrote:
| Words cannot describe how much I disagree with this point
| of view. If we've let capitalism devalue non-profitable
| knowledge and rot society to the point that what you say is
| the general consensus we have truly started our decline as
| a civilisation and the only way from here is down.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| I agree with you.
|
| Science making is bound to go wrong if it needs regular
| people's approval to be done.
|
| Electricity would never have been a thing if we adopted
| that behavior from the get go
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from
| this sort of thing and give them room to work, instead of
| retroactively justifying their existence and life choices
| to pundits or politicians in search of a soft target.
|
| It seems like we're already having a crisis (ie the
| collapse of ecosystems) and in any case it shouldn't take a
| crisis to get supposedly-responsible people to think ahead
| and do risk mitigation etc. I mean, I have no scientific
| qualifications or special training other than curiosity and
| a willingness to plough through papers and follow
| citations, and it disturbs the hell out of me that I seem
| to have a much better grasp of environmental and fiscal
| systems than most policymakers. This idea that we should
| sacrifice all our institutions built up over centuries on
| the altar of economic competition ( _knowing_ the existence
| of perverse incentives and short-termism) is clearly Not
| Working.
| Ekaros wrote:
| But we still need to somehow allocate funds to that
| insulating academy. We can't just give them blank checks
| to spend on whatever they want.(In current economy maybe
| we could, but that is beside the point)
|
| So it is also part of that process that someone there
| provides the politicians good reasons to spend money. Now
| how to do this sanely is complex question, but it is step
| of process that needs to exist. Or we might end up
| funding astrology and likes...
| marmaduke wrote:
| > whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from
| this sort of thing
|
| This might be how it was before, but in a lot of fields,
| your success going forward is directly proportional to
| the valuation of the impact of your work so far. This as
| you note invites perverse incentives.
| 7800 wrote:
| That's not the point of higher education.
|
| Their jobs are to instruct. As part of that these other
| roles developed and became expected.
|
| However, like healthcare, privatization got to a point
| where the money made a difference more than the research
| and other roles. This is not a failure of capitalism,
| business, or anything of that sort; it was just a problem
| of taking things that were considered important out of
| the equation, because they were not understood or
| justified; and we're allowed to scratch our heads over
| this and wonder why, but it's simply that it happened;
| things sometimes fail.
|
| Should we guard against this?
|
| Probably, yes.
|
| Could it be crowdsourced?
|
| Probably, yes.
| marmaduke wrote:
| Academy is not the same as higher education. The other
| part is people doing research and no teaching. These are
| people who then publishes their findings in journals for
| others to see.
|
| And if we're talking about public universities, these
| researchers are already crowd sourced.
| 7800 wrote:
| In the US there is no academy, to my knowledge. It's
| another word for school.
| marmaduke wrote:
| Right, I was reading it as academia, so, sure strictly
| speaking, there's academy which is just a school, and
| academia which connotes fundamental researcher,
| literature scholars etc who may never teach.
|
| The comment I replied to read as if they meant academia,
| not academy.
| eecc wrote:
| Even of they figured it out, if the admins decide to axe
| your department to sell the building and make a rich profit
| out of it you're toast. That's how the Universiteit van
| Amsterdam decided they had to close a whole Linguistics
| department: it wasn't hip and they needed the money to pay
| for the new posh Economics development, for which they had
| plunged the institution in a debt spiral. So the
| socialistish - thorn in the side - folks wasting their time
| in endless mental masturbations about Hungarian literature
| lost their offices.
|
| Didn't matter the whole faculty revolted and occupied the
| administration's office, eventually the time was ripe for
| the police to break the protest and everything moved on as
| planned.
|
| In 30 years this country won't have a clue about Eastern
| Europe and will have to comfort itself with its heritage of
| prejudice. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| coliveira wrote:
| This is a reflection of a crazy society that sees everything
| as a "product" that needs to be "advertised". If there is a
| scientific branch that needs no explanation of its importance
| is taxonomy. If a nation is stupid enough not to understand
| the importance of this, then it should not even label itself
| a modern, civilized society.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| That's seems a bit unfair. It's not about "products" or
| "advertising", or society being stupid, there has to be
| communication from researchers to wider society, research
| has to be allied to education.
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| I think his point is that it should be the government job
| to promote these kind of things to society
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| To act in a stupid manner means to ignore obvious
| reality.
|
| Society is the collective sum of its individuals.
|
| Our collective sum of individuals is acting in a way
| which ignores the very obvious reality that it's quickly
| destroying the biome on which we are dependent.
|
| Therefore, I would say that our society _is_ being
| stupid.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| Right, I fully agree with that, but that's not what the
| comment I was replying to said: the parent said that
| society (in a nation) was stupid for not recognising
| [what is to parent] the self-evident importance of the
| scientific specialisation of taxonomy. And sure, that is
| important, but equally so are thousands of other academic
| specialisations. The point is that a specialisation has
| to communicate their importance to wider society, has to
| educate. That isn't a new thing, or capitalism, or a
| creeping anti-elitism, or productisation of universities,
| or whatever. It's just something that has to be done.
| Calling people idiots because they don't pay attention to
| a specific specialisation among thousands -- what is
| gained from that? It feels good to do that, but it
| doesn't help, it doesn't change people's bearing. It may
| be that people are just really, really thick! We'll just
| say that instead of communicating the importance of
| something!
|
| And I get that ignorance may be societally self
| destructive. That there are cultural/economic/societal
| systems that actively suppress communication
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I think it's moving in the right direction in countries with
| national parks. I certainly can see that in France we still
| have working taxonomists, and that they even band to create
| FOSS for managing their work (TaxHub, Geonature 2, Geonature
| Citizen, etc).
| xipho wrote:
| Your observation is bang on. I have expressed and argued this
| point of view to our community as well. I'm not sure there is
| an easy answer. I advocate strongly for a system that rewards
| doing something well, as an expert, and not being asked to do
| more. I don't want to be asked to design Mars landers,
| gourmet food (well, that might be fun), flight control
| systems, car brakes, etc. I do want to have pride and
| recognition for my hard work.
|
| Tangentially I expressed the frustrations of being asked to
| do more at a recent meeting. Talk slides for the curious [0]
|
| [0](https://github.com/mjy/presentations/blob/master/2020/tdw
| g_t...)
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I like your TaxonWorks platform. It feels like an important
| step towards a general empirical research infrastructure,
| eg the basic framework seems like it might be applicable in
| numerous non-bio fields, from (say) geology to sociology.
| xipho wrote:
| Thanks, that's nice to hear. There are certainly
| generalizations that have arrisen, we're not building
| this out of thin air but with reference to a lot of work
| done over decades (semantics, standards, pre-existing
| tools). It's open source, there is significant
| infrastructure there that could be grabbed and re-
| factored or extended to meet other needs. Of course the
| whole project is also a test of the oft stated, rarely
| proven "open-source it and people will join/contribute"
| too ;).
| xwolfi wrote:
| But the stupid people asking stupid questions are also the
| poor dudes with barely a future for their children giving a
| bit of what they earn so you can focus.
|
| I mean, people hate rich banking elites so far removed from
| society providing obscure services to each others. What do
| you think they think of intellectual elites complaining of
| stupid questions by the people who paid them ?
|
| You want funding you explain why. You don't want to explain
| why, accept nobody cares. It's because there's no absolute
| good in nature, nothing an expert can do to increase global
| knowledge is as necessary as the same guy growing lemons if
| society desires lemons more than knowledge. Make them desire
| knowledge more than lemon, THAT is part of the job.
| xipho wrote:
| I'm not sure that comparing the derivative products of very
| rich people to a fundemantal understanding of the Earth we
| live on is a fair comparison.
|
| Suggesting we must sell everything feels short-sighted.
| Knowledge of the Earth benefits everyone in the long run.
| We should collectively have the intellectual capacity to
| acknowledge this.
|
| For example [0] there are cases where a semingly-obscure
| wasp, describe by a seemingly obscure person, for an
| audience of seemingly a handful of people, turns out to be
| critical to the lives and livelihoods of many, many people.
| The knowledge that lead to this discovery came from the
| passion of the taxonomists who dedicate their lives to this
| gathering of foundational knowledge, not from those who
| best knew how to sell themselves as useful.
|
| [0](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201124-the-tiny-
| parasit...)
| xwolfi wrote:
| You just sold it to me, though. Before, I thought only
| lemons mattered.
|
| See my point ? You have to tell your taxpayers why you
| spend their taxes, they can't guess it. And if they know
| nothing abt what you do with it, they'll just vote for
| the next magical unicorn telling them they're actually
| stolen by a conspiracy of elitist universities.
|
| Expecting people to be clever just because they exist is
| optimistic at best :)
| rorykoehler wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I support basic income. It
| will be an unshackling for the intellectually curious.
| They may be small in numbers but they're the ones who
| move everyone forward.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| Maybe we should have people collectively decide on who they
| want to represent them and then those representatives could
| allocate funding depending on what societies broader
| strategic goals are.
|
| The reason for the mocking tone of the above is that we
| have always solved this problem centuries ago yet somehow
| now everyone has decided they want to live in a crypto-neo-
| feudalist society that cares only for profit and stock
| price and screw everything else. Government will never work
| if we do everything we can to sabotage it at every corner.
| Enough is enough. We either fix this now or we resign
| ourselves to a dark future.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't expect the average person to be fully appreciative
| of every Science! thing that I find interesting. But I do
| think that an important goal of education and of a polity
| is to communicate and inculcate the value of intellectual
| inquiry for the common good.
|
| That gets lost when we treat private gain as the only valid
| goal. It's not just a matter of getting people interested
| in something they might otherwise not care much about, but
| of overcoming the BS and outright lies put out by people
| who set out to attack institutional infrastructure and
| deliberately mislead the public.
|
| We just had an example with the big freeze in Texas where
| various news commentators and political figures chose to
| lie to the public about why the electricity had
| catastrophically failed. And we've been seeing for the last
| year in less obvious form with people deliberately
| downplaying and misrepresenting the risk factors around
| coronavirus. Fraudsters and propagandists are literally
| willing to kill other people for political and fiscal gain
| by creating negative information externalities.
|
| We need a better response to this than just shrugging and
| saying 'oh well, that's just how things are.'The Way Things
| Are is serving us poorly as a society.
| 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!
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| That's probably true. Look at the mental impact furlough
| schemes have had on people
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I don't think that applies here. Furlough happens in a
| world where everyone must work, and then they are
| prevented from working at their chosen job.
|
| In a world where food is free, no one would be prevented
| from working. They would choose whatever job they liked,
| only they would have the freedom to say no if they
| wanted. But that would be their choice. Furlough is
| forced upon them, and there's no free food down the
| street they can pick up for lunch or dinner.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| Have you managed to isolate the mental impact of furlough
| from the mental impact of the pandemic and possibly
| killing granny if you go out to meet people?
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| I think I've mostly stuck to the rules and was never
| furloughed. Problem with he granny argument is that they
| are their worse enemies for carrying on as usual in spite
| of risks
| 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
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| What is your job was to walk through a forest identifies
| different kinds of Bees!
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Seems like quite a lovely life!
| 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!
| kiliantics wrote:
| > That doesn't seem to be what happens to wealthy people
| who have all of their material needs met.
|
| Exactly! Do people not realise that the whole reason we
| have any science in the first place is because of these
| people? Before there was any kind of middle class, these
| were the only guys with the freedom to pursue knowledge
| for the sake of knowledge, thanks to living comfortably
| in other respects, and they did it.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There are plenty of people who are born into means such
| that they realistically don't need to worry about being
| hungry or homeless, and they still get up and go to work
| each day.
|
| Nobody needs the threat of hunger or homelessness to
| motivate them to live normal lives.
| 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.
| kiliantics wrote:
| it's what you do when you are physically and/or mentally
| exhausted each day after toiling for 8+ hours to make
| someone else richer
| criddell wrote:
| > People would stay at home, watch TV and become depressed.
|
| Would you? I sure wouldn't.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Agreed. I actually found a less than full time
| engineering job so I could spend more time working on
| personal educational work. I'm building a self driving
| off road vehicle from scratch in my spare time and
| learning all kind of stuff about machine learning in the
| process. I work so hard on it (for free, with no
| intention of commercializing it) that I'm constantly
| reminding myself to slow down and try to "do nothing". I
| work 20-30 hours a week at my paid job and then spend
| another 10-20 hours a week working on what I call
| research (intensive educational hobby) by my own free
| will. I would never just sit around on the couch and get
| depressed lol. That's such a silly idea.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Bug population in general is down massively. I worry about a
| silent spring.
| 40four wrote:
| I've gone on one too many angry rants about inaccurate &
| deceptive 'bees are dying' articles at this point so I will try
| to be nice :) Also, I'll give National Geographic credit here for
| presenting a more 'balanced' depiction of the situation than most
| news outlets offer.
|
| I still have some nitpicks, but this article is a bit more
| balanced & honest than most, for a couple of reasons.
|
| Firstly, because they admit up front, that the majority of
| pollination in farms comes from 'managed' bee hives, offered up
| as a service by commercial bee keepers. Many articles never
| mention this, and present the subject as if all crops are
| pollinated by wild bees.
|
| Secondly, despite the title, the article clearly states that the
| science and observations on the subject are not well understood.
| Obviously wild pollinators supplement the managed honey bee
| hives, but I've never heard of any study that tries to measure
| the impact of wild pollinators have, compared to managed hives.
|
| I think it's safe to say the large majority of pollination comes
| from commercial honey bee keepers. For a point of reference, in
| the US according to the 'National Honey Board', _"The USDA has
| estimated that 80 percent of insect crop pollination is
| accomplished by honey bees"_.
|
| https://honey.com/newsroom/presskit/honey-industry-facts
|
| Also, it is important to remember many crops do not need
| pollinators. When this article states right off the bat that bees
| _"pollinate 85 percent of food crops and fruits around the
| world"_ , this is slightly misleading.
|
| They really mean bees pollinate 85% of crops and fruits _that
| require pollination_. The statement that 85% of _all_ crops
| require pollination to grow would be incorrect.
|
| With all that said, let me be clear. I'm not trying to be an
| apologist, or say any of this news is 'okay', it's not. We see
| these articles all the time now for good reason, because it is
| super important to protect bees and other pollinators.
|
| But commercial honey bee keepers need to be given credit for the
| invaluable and important work that they do by providing their
| hives to increase production in agriculture. They are the true
| champions. It's not the best system, but it is the reality of
| large scale agriculture these days.
|
| As the article mentions, depending too much on a single species
| can be risky. If there is a disease or pest outbreak in the
| hives, or in the fields, or problems from chemical application,
| that could have dramatic impacts of yearly yields.
|
| The article also rightly says _"There's no long-term, very
| accurate, precise sampling of bees all over the world,"_ , and _"
| Nevertheless, he cautions, the records that underpin the study
| don't give us enough information to determine if certain species
| have gone extinct."_
|
| Even with my nitpicks, I applaud National Geographic here. This
| is one of the more balanced articles I've seen on the topic of
| bee populations. Many of them are either purposely or ignorantly
| disingenuous.
| rbrbr wrote:
| "Enter your email address to continue reading"
| bcatanzaro wrote:
| I have always found it astonishing that the number of bee species
| and the number of bird species are roughly comparable.
| 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.
| brianberns wrote:
| When I was a kid in the 1970's and early 80's, my grandparents
| would drive 100's of miles along I-95 to visit us from Florida
| and arrive with the grille and windshield of their car
| absolutely splattered with bug corpses. You can make that same
| drive today without killing a fly.
|
| Side note: We also used to see long caravans of migrating birds
| flying south in the fall. Thousands of them at least, traveling
| overhead in a steady stream for 15 minutes or more.
| 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.
| eggsmediumrare wrote:
| We had a massive gypsy moth outbreak this year. They destroy
| oak trees and no birds will eat them. It's absolutely a good
| idea to destroy their nests. Obviously this entails knowing
| what they look like...
| 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.
| harryh wrote:
| Total land devoted to forrest in the US has been basically
| stable since the early 1900s and has actually increased a bit
| in the last 20 years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#United_States
| 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
| 40four wrote:
| I agree with you all's sentiment. But, I wish it was a simple
| as letting things get 'back to nature' but it's not
| unfortunately. I live in a rental, halfway through our second
| year lease.
|
| We have a really large, fantastic yard. It is landscaped
| nicely with mostly 'native' plants. Rhododendron, azaleas,
| among others. Also full of large, old growth trees. Many
| probably 150-200 years old according to the arborist who came
| out and surveyed recently.
|
| Due to the large tree canopies in the neighborhood, we have
| an unbelievable bird population. Numerous small birds
| special, huge seasonal flocking birds passing through, hawks,
| even a couple resident owls. Huge amounts of squirrels and
| small mammals.
|
| Unfortunately, we still have a horrible mosquito problem in
| the summertime. It's really almost unbearable. I strongly
| considered having the yard sprayed last year, but resisted
| the temptation.
| 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.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Where I live (Bavaria), in the last two years public lawns didn't
| get mowed any more and now grow a beautiful variety of wild
| flowers and are a great place for bees and other insects. Also,
| some part of the farmed ground around the village has been
| dedicated to growing flowers. Sometimes it is very easy to at
| least compensate a bit the damage done.
| 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.
| i_love_music wrote:
| I grapple with this every day. It is painful to look around and
| see that no one is paying attention or cares. There is all this
| talk of being Woke nowadays but I believe these people are only
| woke in the one particular way - around race, sex, etc. To be
| truly Woke you need to be cognizant of how everything you do
| impacts the world around you. People go to great lengths to
| understand racial injustice but won't spend even a minute
| talking about the ecological issues. Crazy thing is that no
| matter your race, sexual orientation, pronoun, or whatever else
| basically have nothing in comparison to climate change and
| ecological collapse. These things affect all, not just some
| groups. I don't mean to diminish racial justice, but this is so
| much bigger than that. I'm scared.
| esarbe wrote:
| The ship has hit the iceberg a while ago and we trifle about
| the variance of the dance we should all perform.
|
| Isn't it?
|
| I'm scared too.
| brandon272 wrote:
| I don't think it's too late from a "technical perspective". We
| could absolutely change our behaviour and priorities and fix
| the problems that will ultimately end us as a species in the
| near future if we do nothing. We have that capability.
|
| But since witnessing the pandemic and how the human race has
| responded to it, rapid vaccine development notwithstanding, I
| have pretty much zero confidence that will happen. At this
| point when I look at climate change and other impacts from our
| insistence on exploiting and trashing our planet and its
| ecosystems, I would be shocked to learn that humans were around
| and thriving a couple hundred years from now.
|
| The difficult reality for me is not that there's nothing we can
| do, it's that there are things we can do, but a sufficient
| portion of the human population will simply not be convinced to
| do those things before it's too late, even as the impacts of
| the very problems they are being asked to acknowledge and
| accept are destroying their own lives.
| esarbe wrote:
| I agree with your assessment.
|
| I'm afraid we are - as I mentioned further up in the thread -
| are just not mentally equipped to be able to process the
| situation we - as a species - find ourselves in.
| 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.
| pjerem wrote:
| Don't think about doing the << right >> thing. Thinking like
| this is extremism.
|
| What is important is acquiring the knowledge of your impacts.
|
| Once you decide to acquire this knowledge, there is no more
| << right >> or << wrong >> way to act. There is only <<
| reasonable >>, << unreasonable >>, << exceptional >>, << I
| don't know let's check this I'm curious >>. You have the
| right to make the wrong choices as long as you are able to
| accept you were wrong.
|
| What I like with this approach, is that it's not self-
| flagellation anymore, it's the joy of understanding the
| beautiful and complex world we live in.
|
| You are not thinking about what the others do, you are just
| working towards being a better human. And this is easily
| transmissible around you without proselytism.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| This is the Fermi paradox as it is happening - civilizations
| invariably destroy themselves after short periods in
| astronomical time scale, otherwise we should see more evidence
| of extraterrestrial life if Drake equation is a remotely
| accurate model.
| esarbe wrote:
| I've come to the same conclusion.
| 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.
| esarbe wrote:
| I don't understand why you think that I would write off
| anyone as 'stuck in the dark ages'.
|
| So I guess that might be misunderstanding my argument. I'm
| not demanding any actions, my point is not that everyone but
| me is doing to little and that we should do more to save the
| environment and our planet. That's a good argument (well,
| except for the 'everyone but me' part) but not the one I'm
| making.
|
| My argument - or rather; the conclusion - that I've come to -
| is that we are mentally unable to accept the dire
| consequences of our current situation. It's not even that we
| don't /want/ to fix things, it's that most of the people
| cannot accept the fact of the situation we're in, because the
| of the absolutely devastating consequences we are facing,
| namely extinction.
|
| We are unable to accept that. It's too big. It's too
| grandiose, too preposterous. We cannot imagine this
| happening. And so we deny it, continue with the lives we've
| grown accustomed to, with the pleasures we enjoy and the
| dangers we know. And because everyone around us continues the
| charade and we feel comforted in our not-quite-conscious
| decision to ignore the situation and continue as before.
|
| I expect that this is to a large part the fate of any species
| "finding the ultimate exploits" in the game of life. That
| also answers the questions of; why isn't there anybody out
| there: any species evolved in the context of competition for
| resources is unable to handle the transition to a steady-
| state and after a brief and glorious period of unchecked
| growth collapses into itself.
|
| We are - after all - reproduction machines.
| i_love_music wrote:
| So this is how you justify it to yourself? Honest question.
| It seems you acknowledge the legitimacy and urgency of the
| problem but are unwilling to make changes due to it being
| social suicide?
|
| This is kind of where I feel I am, so I'm curious for you to
| expand. Do you have kids? Will you be able to tell them you
| did something positive about this problem? Or greedily stayed
| complicit due to the inconvenience? Are you prepared to tell
| your daughter you were the part of the people killing all the
| wildlife on earth? I know that sounds super aggressive but
| I'm legitimately asking. This stuff goes through my head for
| myself, so I'm curious how you address it?
| pokeymcsnatch wrote:
| I stay at a level of selfishness that I'm comfortable with.
| I do what I can to make the little things I can control
| better, I lead by example when I get the chance, and I
| understand that I'm not going to change society so it's
| (selfishly) not worth it for me to be a zealot.
|
| I don't have kids, but I'd like to. I know even that's the
| "selfish" answer, but I can attempt to justify it by
| teaching them to be good stewards and thereby doing
| something positive about the problem. Calling it passing
| the problem on, but they'll have better tools than me to
| cope with it because we're building those tools right now.
| At the very least, I'd hope my daughter would be smart
| enough to understand that being "part of the people killing
| all the wildlife on earth" is a gross simplification of an
| incredibly complex social and scientific environment.
| grep_name wrote:
| Not the OP, but I'll take your questionnaire
|
| > So this is how you justify it to yourself?
|
| I don't justify anything. In my opinion, a first world life
| as it exists today is unjustifiable. But that doesn't mean
| it's my fault, or that I can do anything about it.
|
| > It seems you acknowledge the legitimacy and urgency of
| the problem but are unwilling to make changes due to it
| being social suicide?
|
| It would be impossible for me personally to make meaningful
| changes. I live in a city with no infrastructure. The USA
| has so much inefficiency baked into its supply chain due to
| globalism it's ridiculous. Everyone is anti-nuclear, no
| politician represents me or these interests. I recycle, I
| carry my own bag to the store, etc. I drive more than an
| hour every day even though I would like to not own a car. I
| can't ever not be employed because losing the insurance
| would literally kill me due to a medical condition.
|
| > Do you have kids?
|
| I will probably never have children because I don't really
| believe in the future.
|
| > Will you be able to tell them you did something positive
| about this problem? Or greedily stayed complicit due to the
| inconvenience? Are you prepared to tell your daughter you
| were the part of the people killing all the wildlife on
| earth?
|
| Here's the deal. All of our carbon footprints here probably
| suck, but you're playing into the hands of the real evil by
| framing things this way. Counterintuitively, pushing for
| individual responsibility for pollution and environmental
| degradation is exactly what big corporations want because
| it enables their destruction more than any other single
| thing. If I had a child, I would educate them not to make
| this argument but to push for structural reform and
| deprogramming of this mindset.
|
| Have you ever heard of the Keep America Beautiful [1]
| campaign? It's where a lot of this sentiment comes from,
| and it was funded by Coca-Cola in response to a rise in
| sentiment supporting legislation to reign in environmental
| destruction on the part of big corporations. Greenwashing
| campaigns have been very effective at shifting public
| attention away from corporate responsibility and towards
| the individual. I'll 'do my part' to consume less, but I
| refuse to put responsibility for these corporate /
| government structures on myself. Especially after they've
| gone to such lengths to gaslight us all.
|
| > This stuff goes through my head for myself, so I'm
| curious how you address it?
|
| One thing I've brainstormed with a similarly-concerned
| friend would be to create a series of localized handout
| materials tying politicians that people in the area can
| vote for to specific environmental atrocities directly in
| an easy-to-understand fashion. That would be a pretty non-
| trivial effort though, would require cooperation from a lot
| of other people, and could get us in a lot of trouble.
| Maybe one day.
|
| [1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful)
| unishark wrote:
| > So this is how you justify it to yourself? Honest
| question.
|
| Sounds more like a loaded question.
| terse_malvolio wrote:
| Is there any downside to humans feeding bees?
|
| If not, why isn't it more common?
| pjerem wrote:
| Because it's time consuming so you have to be paid for this. So
| you have to sell honey that will suffer the competition of
| cheap industrial honey.
|
| However, you can have a hive in your land just for the sake of
| feeding bees (and eat your own honey).
|
| I don't know how it works in your country, in France, you can
| legally do it as long as your terrain is large enough to place
| the hive 20m away any habitation (100m away if it's a public
| building). You are also required to follow a 3 day training.
| It's not that much but it requires some self-investment.
|
| So I would say that it's not common but it is totally possible.
| kawsper wrote:
| Isn't having bees part of the problem? Your honey-bees will
| compete with local pollinators.
| klingaman wrote:
| Check out this TensorFlow project that Google is working on to
| analyze bee pollination behavior in order to try to save them:
| https://about.google/intl/en-GB/stories/save-the-bees/
| anon0010022 wrote:
| oh that is awesome
| [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?
| Cd00d wrote:
| I agree with another poster that it's likely aerodynamics.
|
| But, it reminded me of an incident when I was a kid. In a
| minivan, all windows open, highway speeds. Driver hit a _swarm_
| of bees. I 've never seen a density of bees like it. Made the
| windshield opaque for many seconds of wipers and spray, and the
| number of bees that came through the side windows to be smashed
| against the back windows and luggage was shocking.
|
| I don't know anything about swarming behavior, and it's been
| years since I thought about that incident. Thanks for the
| memory!
| terse_malvolio wrote:
| Just because you don't see them, it doesn't mean you didn't ran
| them over
| 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.
| eucryphia wrote:
| I was told that at a nursery when I went buy a discontinued
| systemic fruit fly spray (spray twice a year), he had no answer
| when I told him the local council had banned keeping bee hives in
| the city. We do have bees, just nowhere near as many as I
| remember as a kid.
| 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.
| kiliantics wrote:
| That is fantastic. We really have no hope unless there is some
| initiative that encourages literally everyone to do this kind
| of thing. I just came across this yesterday and it really
| inspired me:
|
| http://beararainforest.com/
|
| It is so much work though and only a few people would really
| have such commitment to do it on their own. We need new
| legislation that requires e.g. every new land development to
| rewild some fraction of that land, or some great benefits for
| people that otherwise perform ecological stewardship. It's the
| only way we can turn this around.
| 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.
| jazzabeanie wrote:
| >it's not about what we can do to minimize our negative impact,
| but rather what we can do to have a positive impact
|
| I think it's about both.
| 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.
| ciconia wrote:
| Here in France basically all hives are infected, and male
| bees are the main propagation vector, since they go and visit
| other hives.
|
| For me he choice is between an intrusive apiculture -
| introducing poisonous chemicals into the hive, frequent
| interventions, essentially having a dependent, weak bee
| population - and a more gentle one where I keep intervention
| to a minimum, and instead focus on giving the bees a healthy,
| thriving habitat, a garden without pesticides, access to
| water, and lots of flowers.
| highstep wrote:
| or just quit beekeeping, like i did, once i realized how
| horrible the mites and their treatments are.
| 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
| probable changes in population size or density. Consistent 2%
| growth should be relatively easy for politicians to
| anticipate and manage.
| [deleted]
| yboris wrote:
| I worded this poorly. I meant to point out the
| counterintuitive nature of 2% growth, not that growth of a
| city is bad. Mayors who don't realize what 2% means are
| doing a bad job governing.
| dmix wrote:
| That viewpoint might be pre 1970s. We've been hammered with
| environmental news for quiet some time.
|
| Especially with the popularity of Boy Scouts and Camp Fire
| starting way back in American history.
|
| At least the common person.
|
| Most people know what's going on, forests destroyed and
| changing habitats. They just don't care or have higher priority
| issues like having a job to eat or electricity/productive
| resources.
| 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)
| thewarrior wrote:
| Why do we have wasteful lawns instead of growing food on them
| or something ?
|
| Seems like a social imitation of feudal lords who could flex
| by showing off how much land they could leave empty while
| still being rich.
| 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.
| mplanchard wrote:
| There is a large body of existing literature linking
| pesticide application to decreased biodiversity. I'm not
| saying this speculation about thiamine is unfounded, but if
| there's good supporting data for it, it's likely to be an
| additive rather than alternative factor contributing to the
| loss of biodiversity.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| Possibly they could be interrelated, if say thiamine
| deficiency made insects more susceptible to pesticides or
| pesticides also increased thiamine deficiency. The link
| between pesticides and decreased biodiversity would still
| exist, but the root cause or chain of causes might be
| something happening at a lower level than simple direct
| poisoning. This paper is interesting in that respect "A
| 2018 Horizon Scan of Emerging Issues for Global
| Conservation and Biological Diversity":
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S01695347
| 1...
|
| Quoting:
|
| Thiamine Deficiency as a Possible Driver of Wildlife
| Population Declines
|
| Evidence is increasing that a range of taxonomic groups,
| including bivalve molluscs, ray-finned fish, and birds
| across the Northern Hemisphere, are deficient in thiamine
| (vitamin B1) 19, 20. Thiamine is required for basic
| cellular metabolism and functioning of neuronal membranes.
| Thiamine deficiency rarely is a direct cause of mortality,
| but impairs health and can cause immunosuppression or leads
| to behavioural and reproductive problems that ultimately
| could cause population decline or extirpation. Days of
| thiamine deficiency may present long-lasting sublethal
| effects, which makes recognition of the extent of thiamine
| deficiencies more complex. The deficiencies likely are
| caused by insufficient dietary intake, which may be related
| to shifts in thiamine-producing algal populations. A recent
| and extensive survey along the northwest coast of the US
| found evidence of thiamine depletion in the water column
| [21]. Additionally, exposure to environmental pollutants
| may interfere with thiamine uptake. The extent to which
| thiamine deficiency may pose a substantial long-term risk
| to a range of species remains unclear.
|
| End quote.
|
| So thiamine deficiency may also be partially induced by
| environmental pollutants which possibly includes
| insecticides (though the paper gives no citations for which
| pollutants). The scale of the known thiamine problems, at
| least in water systems, are scary, as is the fact that we
| don't really know what the extent of it is, especially on
| land. My experience in research, software, and life is that
| there are usually multiple simultaneous problems behind
| observable issues.
| 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.
| kirillzubovsky wrote:
| Could it bee they are just really good at hiding?
| 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 ;)
| toss1 wrote:
| Touche!
| radford-neal wrote:
| Yes, some change in pesticide use would fit better with the
| time scale.
|
| But supposing that's the source of the problem, I don't
| understand your focus on capitalism. In _any_ economic
| system, some people are going to be trying to increase the
| efficiency of food production (if not, they 'll all
| eventually starve to death). In doing so, they are going to
| be responding to incentives of making money, or of getting
| a promotion after fulfilling the goals of the five-year
| plan, or simply of having the inner feeling of having done
| a good job. I don't see why only the "making money"
| incentive is problematic. And indeed, the former Soviet
| block was notorious for terrible environmental problems.
| toss1 wrote:
| Good question, thx. It is the balance that I'm focusing
| on.
|
| Completely agree that over-regulation, e.g., soviet-
| style, is a recipe for many of the WORST environmental
| disasters.
|
| Corporate regulatory capture or elimination of regulation
| is just crashing the scale in the other direction.
|
| Since the current problem in most of the world is lack of
| constraints on production of, for example, things that
| serve some purpose but also break the food web, that's my
| focus.
|
| Basically, it seems that, whenever people get enough good
| information, and have good democratic (small-d) control
| of the system, they find a balance to encourage and
| regulate development. No one wants to live in a
| wasteland.
|
| But if too few control things, such as an authoritarian
| state, or corporatists doing regulatory capture, they
| have the illusion that they can destroy all they want,
| externalize the damage, and enjoy life in their palaces.
| For centurys, it was true. Now, we seem to be approaching
| the point where the whole food web may break.
| [deleted]
| anonytrary wrote:
| As a physics/chemistry person I have a lot of questions, I hope
| there are some biologists in the house. I am all for
| environmental preservation and conservation -- do we know the
| exact effects of certain bee species becoming extinct? Will it
| really throw off pollination and ecological equilibrium, or will
| it be a slight perturbation that nature will promptly rebound
| from? For example if all X pollinators go extinct, could it not
| potentially leave room for Y pollinators to grow and effectively
| "take over the job" or "fill the void".
|
| Somewhat dark, but I imagine there are hundreds, if not
| thousands, of species that could simply go extinct without
| permanent "damage" to the biochemical ecosystem. Humans are
| probably one of those species. For example, what if all red ants
| went extinct? Would the Earth just be completely screwed? I would
| guess probably not. My question is what separates a critical
| species from a non-critical one and how do biologists even
| determine this effectively?
|
| I know nature does not care about what species live and die;
| evolution has no "desire" to keep anything alive. But is there
| really a bottleneck species that, if wiped out, would cause an
| irreversible phase transition for life as we know it?
| 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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