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Electronic smog 'is disrupting nature on a massive scale' - Nature,
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Electronic smog 'is disrupting nature on a massive scale'
New study blames mobile phone masts and power lines for collapse of bee
colonies and decline in sparrows
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
*Sunday, 7 September 2008*
[image: Bees are able to change the polarity of their antennae at will. It
is believed that that it is this that enables them to navigate using the
Earth's magnetic forces]
*AP*
Bees are able to change the polarity of their antennae at will. It is
believed that that it is this that enables them to navigate using the
Earth's magnetic forces
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Mobile phones, Wi-Fi systems, electric power lines and similar sources of
"electrosmog" are disrupting nature on a massive scale, causing birds and
bees to lose their bearings, fail to reproduce and die, a conference will be
told this week.
Dr Ulrich Warnke – who has been researching the effects of man-made
electrical fields on wildlife for more than 30 years – will tell the
conference, organised by the Radiation Research Trust at the Royal Society
in London, that "an unprecedented dense mesh of artificial magnetic,
electrical and electromagnetic fields" has been generated, overwhelming the
"natural system of information" on which the species rely.
He believes this could be responsible for the disappearance of bees in
Europe and the US in what is known as colony collapse disorder, for the
decline of the house sparrow, whose numbers have fallen by half in Britain
over the past 30 years, and that it could also interfere with bird
migration.
Dr Warnke, a lecturer at the University of Saarland, in Germany, adds that
the world's natural electrical and magnetic fields have had a "decisive hand
in the evolution of species". Over millions of years they learned to use
them to work out where they were, the time of day, and the approach of bad
weather.
Now, he says, "man-made technology has created transmitters which have
fundamentally changed the natural electromagnetic energies and forces on the
earth's surface. Animals that depend on natural electrical, magnetic and
electromagnetic fields for their orientation and navigation are confused by
the much stronger and constantly changing artificial fields."
His research has shown that bees exposed to the kinds of electrical fields
generated by power lines killed each other and their young, while ones
exposed to signals in the same range as mobile phones lost much of their
homing ability. Studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau, reported in The
Independent on Sunday last year, have found bees failed to return to their
hives when digital cordless phones were placed in them, while an Austrian
survey noted that two-thirds of beekeepers with mobile phone masts within
300 metres had suffered unexplained colony collapse.
Dr Warnke also cites Spanish and Belgian studies showing that the number of
sparrows near mobile phone masts fell as radiation increased. And he says
that migrating birds, flying in formation, had been seen to split up when
approaching the masts.
But the Mobile Operators Association, representing the UK's five mobile
phone companies, says a US research group has found collapsing bee colonies
in areas with no mobile phone service, and Denis Summers-Smith, a leading
expert on sparrows, has described the link as "nonsense".
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