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Do Honeybees Defy Dinosaur Extinction Theories?
neutron_p writes "The humble tropical honeybee may challenge the idea that a post-asteroid impact "nuclear winter" was a big player in the decimation of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Somehow the tropical honeybee, Cretotrigona prisca, survived the end-Cretaceous extinction event, despite what many researchers believe was a years-long period of darkness and frigid temperatures caused by sunlight-blocking dust and smoke from the asteroid impact at Chicxulub."
This new finding is based on the optimal temperature range for honeybees and their food source - nectar-rich flowering plants (which share the same optimal temperature range), to survive.
However if your living environment has just been destroyed by a meteor, wouldn't these creatures just "make-do" with less-ideal conditions, maybe in a smaller population?
Honeybees are so much smaller than dinosaurs, I don't think we can really compare their adapting speed, ability and mobility.
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I thought it was pretty well-established that the dinosaurs were already in decline by the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago.
/. is there's no shortage of people who'll try to explain this...)
It's known that many species were already extinct by then, and there was a large asteroid impact around that time, causing some sort of a climate change that finished them off.
Based on the fact that many many smaller animals (rodents, birds, reptiles, amphibians) survived the event, I don't understand why it's confusing that insects (even tropical insects) survived as well. Can someone explain this, please?
(One of the great things about
Why do bees always sting me? I mean I know people who have never been stung that live in the same area I do, yet I've been stung like 20 times, it pisses me off. Anyway, thought I would share that, now back to your regularly scheduled comment...
Many species of bees hibernate during the winter. All you'd need is a few queens to survive in hibernation, and they could easily repopulate the bee world afterwards.
Last I checked you could pop a bee into the freezer for a few days and it will recover after you thaw it. Could this not explain how insects and other simple life forms survived the climet change caused by such an impact?
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Bees Have one Queen per hive who is always well fed even if the other drones get killed off. But the Queen always gets priority so she can have more offspring. Dinos If they are like modern reptiles and mammals tend to live for themeless And they will try to allocate the recourses for them to survive even if it means not mating or letting a pregnant female starve, so the male could live an other day. These different methods have different advantages and flaws it is can be that the Bees lifestyle seems to have given them an advantage in times of food scarcity where the queen was still reproducing while the Reptiles were off fending for themselves.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Of course, that doesn't mean much in context- so what if basaltic shield volcanoes produce a lot of iridium? The reasoning is fairly straightforward- the Deccan Traps could have opened up, spouted out magma and iridium (and possibly the "sacred" shocked quartz, based on some papers in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta a few years back), and smothered damn near everything on the face of the planet as well. It has also been hypothesized that the Deccan Traps opened up after the planet was smacked with a huge meteor, too.
The point is that while dramatic, there is no clear evidence that the dinos were wiped out by one asteroid. The dinos were in decline before the K/T boundary, and dino teeth have been found *above* the K/T boundary- although they may have been from re-worked sediments, as teeth are very tough and likely to survive that sort of thing. More importantly, while the quandary presented by the survival of bees may seem strange, even harder to explain is the survival of amphibians, particularly frogs and some other species that are very sensitive to environmental changes.
The bees just ate the Grendels (and everything else that wasn't blue) when the environment changed.
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No, the dance theory has to do with how a forager bee tells the rest of the workers precicely where the food is that he found. The legend goes that he first spins one way X times to denote the direction, then the other way X times to denote the distance.
Plenty of people are sceptical of this, and alternate theories include the one that the other bees just follow the forager by his scent - like a line of ants in the sky.
I have seen bees spin around and do this dance while they flap their wings. Every time I'd smoke them they'd all start doing it (to fan the smoke from the hive). That's how smoke "pacifies" bees, they go into "holy shit forget that guy whos tryin to take our honey, this place is on fire!" mode.
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I'd think a bigger mystery is why crocodiles and sharks have survived virtually unchanged. What's a croc got that T-Rex didnt?
A T-Rex is functionally warm-blooded. It may not be able to regulate its temperature, but between its mass and activity level, the core body temperature of a T-Rex will remain fairly constant. It's quite likely that the dinosaurs evolved to take advantage of this. Reduce the environmental temperature by a few degrees, though, and a T-Rex will need to increase its activity level to maintain body temperature. If there isn't enough food for the increased activity, it'll either starve to death or freeze to death.
A croc is functionally cold-blooded. Global cooling just means it'll slow down for a while.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
... paleontology graduate student Jacqueline M. Kozisek ...
Did it occur to her to ask an entomologist? From Wikipedia In the autumn, young queens mate with male drone bees and hibernate over the winter in a warm area. Oftentimes, a queen will burrow into the ground to keep herself from freezing. In the spring, a queen awakens and finds a suitable place to create her hive, and then builds wax pots in which to lay her fertilized eggs from the previous winter. The eggs that hatch are female workers, and in time they populate the hive.
I am not an entomologist, but even I can postulate a) they are triggered out of hibernation by temperature, so they just stayed until the earth heated up. Winters around here (Western Penn) can spend quite some time around and below freezing, but the ground stays near freezing. All it would have taken would have been a relative hardy handful to survive; if they haven't changed much since then it's not like they were cross breeding like crazy. Heck, for all we know there were thousands of bee types beforehand and these are the only ones that could survive being frozen as queens.
It's almost as if this paleontologist didn't know queen bees hibernate, even for tropical bees. (See here. I will give her credit for an original approach, but even if I'm way off base (which I'll admit) it took me 2 minutes to find 'hibernate in winter' in reference to bumblebees. It may just be the article left out her accounting for this fact, but if she found out about it hopefully she can address whether or not they could have hibernated long enough.
Ok, I know I'm rambling so I'll make my point: while the temperatures were shown to kill off flying bees, I'm curious whether she was aware of the hibernation possibility and accounted for whether the temperatures were low enough, long enough to kill them as well.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
No, the dance theory has to do with how a forager bee tells the rest of the workers precicely where the food is that he found. The legend goes that he first spins one way X times to denote the direction, then the other way X times to denote the distance.
The descriptions of the "waggle dance" I've seen don't match the one you give. They're more like this:
The dancing forager bee does a figure-8 path around a slashed-circle - like the capital leter theta. The straight run is what's significant.
The angle of the striaght run with the vertical is the same as the angle between the sun and the path to the food. The bee waggles its butt while on the straight path, and the number of waggles is proportional to the flight effort to get to the food under prevailing wind conditions.
The surrounding bees observe the dance, pick up the scent of the food source off the dancing bee, then take off BEFORE it goes out for another load.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Writers imply. Readers infer.
...'coz in case it's escaped your attention, the grubs which hatch require outside care and feeding until they encyst for metamorphosis.
The conditions TFA says that the bees die under is "much to cold to live, much to hot to suspend animation". If the eggs didn't die before hatching, the larvae which hatched would be dead within a day, probably much sooner.
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What's worse is, if I recall correctly, temperature changes are now understood to affect the poles more than the equator (ie, the tropics).
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