Birds and Bees

[Political Waves]

... and even butterflies at risk from the mundane evils of human greed, arrogance and apathy.

Wish I had some happier news to share, but we have allowed ourselves a stunning disconnect from what is natural and normal and we need to take a good look before it's too late. When the bees and birds disappear, the butterflies can't be found, bats and insects, frogs and turtles begin to die from obscure maladies that disrupt the natural order our ancestors understood and revered, we've gone too far. You know we have. There's no time to waste if we are to recover.

Easter is always a time of renewal, of redemption and hope. This Easter, take time to visit the great outdoors, seek out nature, bask in it. What we always thought was "forever" may not be. The natural world awaits our respect, appreciation and intention to protect it ... and ourselves ... from harm.

Blessed Equinox, Easter and Spring to you all -- blessed restoration to the Earth, her systems and her creatures!

Jude



Not Just the Bees: Bayer's Pesticide May Harm Birds, Too
Tom Philpott, Mother Jones
Wed Mar. 27, 2013
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/03/not-just-bees-bayers-pesticide-may-harm-birds-too

Once again this spring, farmers will begin planting at least 140 million acres—a land mass roughly equal to the combined footprints of California and Washington state—with seeds (mainly corn and soy) treated with a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. Commercial landscapers and home gardeners will get into the act, too—neonics are common in lawn and garden products. If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know all of that is probably bad news for honeybees and other pollinators, as a growing body of research shows—including three studies released just ahead of last year's planting season.

But bees aren't the only iconic springtime creature threatened by the ubiquitous pesticide, whose biggest makers are the European giants Bayer and Syngenta. It turns out that birds are too, according to an alarming analysis co-authored by Pierre Mineau, a retired senior research scientist at Environment Canada (Canada's EPA), published by the American Bird Conservancy. And not just birds themselves, but also the water-borne insect species that serve as a major food source for birds, fish, and amphibians.

The article isn't peer-reviewed, but Mineau is a formidable scientist. In February, he published a peer-reviewed paper in PLoS One concluding that pesticides, and not habitat loss, have likely been driving bird-population declines in the United States.

That paper didn't delve into specific pesticides. For his American Bird Conservancy paper, Mineau and his co-author, Cynthia Palmer, looked at a range of research on the effects of neonics on birds and water-borne insects, from papers by independent researchers to industry-funded studies used in the EPA's deregulation process and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

For the most vulnerable bird species, they found, consuming even two corn seeds coated with Bayer's blockbuster neonic clothianidin can have lethal effects. [emphasis added]

Their conclusion: Neonics are highly mobile and persistent once they're unleashed into ecosystems, and they pose a serious threat to birds and the insects they feed on. The EPA, they continue, has in some cases severely underestimated the danger and in other cases simply ignored it. The underestimation, they argue, mainly stems from the widespread use of two bird species to judge toxicity, mallards and bobwhites. But many other bird species are more vulnerable to neonics than those two, and Mineau's paper concludes the EPA, in its risk assessment used to register a raft of neonic products over the past two decades, "underestimates toxicity by 1.5 to 10 fold if the intent of the exercise is to protect most species, not merely mallards and bobwhites."

For the most vulnerable bird species, they found, consuming even two corn seeds coated with Bayer's blockbuster neonic clothianidin can have lethal effects.

The authors point to several instances of EPA scientists raising serious concerns about the ecological impacts of these pesticides, only to see them registered anyway. Back in 2003, when the EPA was first considering registering Bayer's clothianidin, an agency risk assessment concluded that "exposure to treated seed through ingestion might result in chronic risk to birds and mammals, especially mammals where consumption of 1-2 seeds only could push them to an exposure level at which reproductive effects are expected," the authors report. The assessment also described the chemical as persistent and mobile, with "potential to leach to groundwater as well as runoff to surface waters." So what happened to clothianidin? A "plethora of registered uses for clothianidin followed in quick succession," they report. The pesticide is now used on corn, soybeans, cotton, pears, potatoes, tree nuts, mustard greens, and more.

Mineau's paper notes in passing that the EPA also identified potential threats from clothianidin to bees as early as 2003, adding, however, that the pollinator issue is "outside the scope of the current review." I told the sordid tale of clothianidin's march through EPA registration despite its own scientists' bee concerns in this 2010 post.

But the most pernicious effect of neonics on birds may be indirect: By leaching into water and accumulating in streams and ponds, neonics also attack a major component of birds' food supply: insects that hang out in water, what Mineau calls the "bottom of the aquatic food chain." The EPA has severely underestimated the risk to such insects, they charge. For the neonic imidacloprid, they argue, a "scientifically defensible reference level" to gauge when the pesticide causes harm to insects is 0.2 ug/l. "European regulators acknowledge that acute effects are likely at levels exceeding 0.5 ug/l," they write. "In contrast, the EPA’s regulatory and non-regulatory reference levels are set at 35 ug/l."

Based on Mineau's analysis, the American Bird Conservancy is calling for a ban on the practice of using neonics to treat seed, joining a similar plea from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Meanwhile the EPA has been conducting a "comprehensive re-evaluation of these pesticides," but has taken no action to stop their use, and isn't expected to complete its review until 2018 at the earliest. Mineau told me that he presented his case on neonics and birds to the EPA last week, urging them to "speed things up a bit" on the review. I asked him how his message went over. "I didn't get the answer, that, sure, we'll have it done next year," he said.
Instead, he added, the agency stressed it would stick to its current process. And that means heavy neonic exposure for the birds and the bees for at least another half-decade. ++


Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms
A Disastrous Year for Bees: For America’s beekeepers, who have struggled for nearly a decade with a mysterious malady called colony collapse disorder that kills honeybees en masse, the last year was particularly bad.
MICHAEL WINES, NYT
March 28, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-bee-deaths-in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady.html

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.

The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.

“They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”

[... open the link to read the entire article]


Disappearance of the Monarch
Michelle Werts, American Forests
March 15th, 2013
http://www.americanforests.org/blog/disappearance-of-the-monarch/

What’s black and white and orange all over? Probably many things, but I’m thinking specifically of the monarch butterfly. Why? Because earlier this week, Mexico’s National Commission of Natural Protected Areas announced that the wintering population of the monarch butterfly declined by 59 percent this winter. The monarch — which can’t be counted individually, but whose population is measured instead by the amount of canopy covered while they are huddled together in the winter for warmth — occupied more than seven acres last winter and less than three acres this year.

This year’s figure represents the lowest number of butterflies in Mexico in the last two decades, when record keeping began, and the third year of declines. Lincoln Brower, a leading entomologist at Virginia’s Sweet Briar College, tells the Associated Press (AP) that “the report of the dwindling monarch butterfly winter residence in Mexico is ominous. This is not just the lowest population recorded in the 20 years for which we have records. It is the continuation of a statistically significant decrease in the monarch population that began at least a decade ago.”

For years, the monarch’s winter home in Mexico has been threatened by deforestation. At a peak in 2005, logging consumed more than 1,100 acres of areas in Michoacán, Mexico, where the butterfly winters. A year later, American Forests began work to restore oyamel firs in Michoacán to benefit the monarch; we’ve helped plant a million trees for the monarchs since 2006. The AP reports, though, that aerial surveys in 2012 revealed little logging in the monarch’s home, which has left some researchers looking at another culprit for the monarch’s decline: U.S. herbicide use.

During the migration from its summer homes in the northern U.S. and southern Canada to Mexico and back again, the monarch relies on milkweed growing throughout America’s agricultural fields for sustenance. However, herbicide-resistant crops have meant more herbicide use, which means very little milkweed peeking up between rows of corn and soybeans. Add in drought, and there are a lot of missing food sources for the monarch.

Chip Taylor, director the University of Kansas’ Monarch Watch, tells The New York Times that the butterfly migration is at a tipping point. If numbers continue to decline, the butterfly may not be able to readily recover from a natural disaster, such as an extremely harsh winter in Mexico.

The magnificent migration of the monarch butterfly is a wondrous, natural marvel, and its current precarious state is a prime example of how interconnected our natural systems are. Animals, insects, plants and trees flow from one ecosystem and habitat to another more rapidly than we sometimes realize. That’s why we’re focused not only on trees, but on the forests overall. If we protect them, we protect so much more. ++


... and from last spring:

The Fox (Monsanto) Buys the Chicken Coop (Beeologics)
Richard Schiffman, HuffPo
05/ 3/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-schiffman/the-fox-monsanto-buys-the_b_1470878.html

Why would one of the largest purveyors of pesticides, genetically engineered seeds and agrochemicals want to buy a company which has been seeking solutions to the escalating threats to the world bee population?

Monsanto spokeswomen Kelly Powers says it is to give the fledgling company a helping hand. Beeologics has developed a product called Remembee, an anti-viral agent which its boosters claim will help stem the tide of Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious plague which has led to the disappearance of the bees in up to a third of the commercial colonies located in the U.S. during the last decade.

The root of the problem, however, may not be the virus targeted by Remembee, a chemical agent which utilizes RNA interference, a mechanism that blocks gene expression, but the herbicides and insecticides that agro-chemical giants like Monsanto, Dow and Bayer have themselves been hawking to farmers around the world.

This is the conclusion of three recent studies which implicate a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, or "neonics" for short, which coat a massive 142 million acres of corn, wheat, soy and cotton seeds in the U.S. alone. They are also a common ingredient in a wide variety of home gardening products. As I detail in an article which was published by Reuters last month, neonics are absorbed by the plants' vascular system and contaminate the pollen and nectar that bees encounter on their rounds. Neonics are a nerve poison that disorient their insect victims and appear to damage the homing ability of bees, which may help to account for their mysterious failure to make it back to the hive.

This was the conclusion of research which came out in the prestigious Journal Science during March. In another study conducted by entomologists at Purdue University the scientists found that neonic-containing dust released into the air at planting time had "lethal effects compatible with colony losses phenomena observed by beekeepers." A third study by the Harvard School of Public Health actually re-created colony collapse disorder in several honeybee hives simply by administering small doses of a popular neonic, imidacloprid.

While these studies strongly suggest that herbicides are a culprit, scientists caution that colony collapse disorder is a complex phenomenon with multiple causes, ranging from the loss of wild bee habitats to the weakening of bee immune systems as a result of poor diet (commercial bees are frequently fed pesticide-laced corn syrup instead of their own honey) and also the techniques of modern beekeeping, which include the artificial insemination of queens, and the resulting loss of genetic diversity in the bee population.

Some have also pointed the finger at the pollen from genetically modified Roundup Ready corn which bees ingest, and which contains a powerful insecticide within its genetic structure. Roundup seeds are manufactured by Monsanto, and are currently planted across wide swaths of the American Midwest and elsewhere.

So with Monsanto products themselves amongst the key suspects in Colony Collapse Disorder, one might ask: Why has the multinational bought a company which has been a key player in researching this disorder as well as Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, another scourge of bees?

"We're absolutely committed to Beeologics' existing work," said Monsanto spokesperson Kelly Powers. Yet one has to wonder if owning a firm dedicated to shedding light on the trouble with bees might not serve Monsanto's interest in allowing it to further cover up their own corporate complicity in the problem.

Let us hope that Monsanto is as good as its word and uses this newly acquired company to boldly get to the bottom of the mystery of the disappearing bees. But if history is any guide, there is little cause for optimism. The health watchdog group "Natural Society" rated Monsanto "the worst in 2011 for its ongoing work to threaten human health and the environment."

With its acquisition of Beeologic, the multinational has a chance to start improving its record -- right? My advice, however, is don't hold your breath! ++


“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverend Martin Luther King

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