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Acorns Disappear Across the Country
Hugh Pickens writes "Botanist Rod Simmons thought he was going crazy when couldn't find any acorns near his home in Arlington County, Virginia. 'I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe,' said Simmons. Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill. Simmons and Naturalist Greg Zell began to do some research and found Internet discussion groups, including one on Topix called 'No acorns this year,' reporting the same thing from as far away as the Midwest up through New England and Nova Scotia. 'We live in Glenwood Landing, N.Y., and don't have any acorns this year. Really weird,' wrote one. 'None in Kansas either! Curiouser and curiouser.' The absence of acorns could have something to do with the weather and Simmons has a theory about the wet and dry cycles. But many skeptics say oaks in other regions are producing plenty of acorns, and the acorn bust is nothing more than the extreme of a natural boom-and-bust cycle. But the bottom line is that no one really knows. 'It's sort of a mystery,' Zell said."
I remember one year growing up the Oaks in my backyard didn't produce any acorns, instead they produced these strange green globes that were soft almost like a grape except more spherical and speckled. When I split one open there was something akin to what cotton wood trees put out or dandylions, a soft fluffy thing. I wonder if the Oaks have a secondary seed production mechanism? Is that what I saw? that was probably 20 years or more ago so the memory is a little hazy. I wonder if the oaks are producing those things? or nothing at all.
I have noticed this cycle in the Boston area over the last 20 years. The squirrel population will follow the acorn yield. Some years there are very few squirrels about, and the chipmunk population seems to boom. Then the squirrels will have a great year and have too many little ones. Some of the babies will end up on the ground, pushed out by the others.
Don't let your kids adopt them or talk you into taking them to a wildlife shelter. Believe me. All you have to do is put them back into a tree in a basket. The mommy squirrel will come find them and take them home by the scruff like a kitten.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
For the record, there was an acorn boom a couple of years ago that was responsible for an increase of Lyme disease. Apparently, when you get more acorn, you get more ticks the next season.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Every Autumn, my brothers and I get into a nice acorn fight at Grandma's house in North Jersey. There was no shortage of ammunition this year.
Although I tend to side with the thesis of anthropogenic climate change I agree that there are too many alarmists who will draw an instant connection between occurances such as this and "global warming".
That said, I would have hoped that you could dig up some better references to support your post; Miranda Divine is an ignoarmus and Kieth Windshuttle has only slightly more credibility than David Irving.
...to what the majority of comments to this article will be related, given the delicious quotes like this in the article:'
Of course, these will be ignored on page two of the story:
I know it's not a popular sentiment here, but Beware the church of climate alarm.
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
There are really two groups of oaks: the red and the white oaks.
The white oaks are generally preferred by most small animals (and deer!), as their acorns are lower in tannins and produced much more regularly (a good crop approximately every other year, and less difference between a good year and a bad year).
Red oaks have a less palatable acorn and can go up to 7 years between heavy mast years (with up to a 135x difference between a bad and a good year).
Oddly, with all the research done on the topic, there's little that can be done to predict a future crop, as cyclic production varies so widely and seems dependant on such a myriad of factors. In areas heavily dominated by oaks, we still even have to "wait and see" for a harvest... otherwise it's a game of roulette, and you might have such poor production you don't get a forest of oak back at all (but red maple is a whole other can of worms).
Sam
Every so many years the Oak Trees cut off production of acorns. It has been documented and studied somewhat. I remember reading a scientific article about it in my bio class. The thinking is that there is a codependent relationship between Oak trees and squirrels. The oak trees depend on squirrels for new oak trees (squirrels disperse and plant seeds and forget where some of them are) and the squirrels depend largely on the acorns for food. the Acorn production increases year to year, creating a population increase for the squirrels. (stable food = more babies, more babies that survive) This goes on until there is a population boom of squirrels. At about this time the oak trees halt acorn production, producing a mass die off of squirrels. From the human point of view this seems highly ungrateful of the oak tree. After all the squirrels are busy helping the trees reproduce and now the trees repay the squirrels by making them starve. But the thinking is that if the oak trees didn't do this the squirrel population would reach an equilibrium with the oak tree population's acorn production. Each and every (or nearly every) acorn would get eaten, and next to none of the acorns would result in new oak trees. This local population of oak trees would die out. So it is only the oak trees that are "underhanded" that survive and make new trees. It shouldn't be hard to find more information on this; probably under ecology literature.
I chose trees as my area of natural science geekdom, because I couldn't stand those snotty birders who take a glance at a streak through the trees that an ordinary mortal couldn't narrow down to "bird" then say something like, "Ah, a Stimpson's downy breasted tit." Trees stand still long enough to put an identification to an objective test.
Oak species often display yearly variations in acorn production. This may be helpful in that you want surplus acorns from the point of view of squirrels; producing lots of acorns every year means you get lots of squirrels. Producing a bumper crop every three or four years and a small crop otherwise maximizes the number of surplus acorns you make.
I've heard some say that White Oaks (with smoothly rounded leaf lobes) have three to four year cycles and Red Oaks (with pointy veins that stick out past the end of the leaf lobes) are acyclic. I've also heard the opposite, that White Oaks produce acorns every year and Red Oaks have longer cycles of five or even six years. My own experience is that the White Oaks I know produce bumper crops ever several years, and the Red Oaks seem to produce reliably every year. However, individual trees often vary considerably from the normal habit of their species. In my experience the yearly variations in the Red Oaks I know are small, and the acorns produced are always extremely bitter, however some Red Oaks seem to produce acorns like White Oaks: sweet, and in bumper crops.
That said, the Red Oaks in my yard have for the last fourteen years produced healthy crops of extremely bitter acorns every year. I've lived in this house fifteen years and every year, like clockwork, there has been a night in early November where I've woken up to a continual refrain of "pok-pok-pok-tumble", as the oaks shed the bulk of their acorns in one day.
It didn't happen this year. This article made me go out an look, and the tree is completely bare and there is very little acorn debris around the tree or the gutters.
Weird.
Still, the Northern Red Oak species is reported by some as having long annual crop cycles, and nobody really knows what might trigger a good or bad year. It stands to reason that trees in an area ought to have some kind of climatic trigger for coordinating their production variations. Otherwise, the winner would be a tree that produces lots of acorns every year.
This could be a situation where a meme gains steam because somebody reports a mysterious lack of acorns, and then others (like me) run out and look at their tree and say, "good lord, there aren't any acorns." Chance are if we'd been paying attention, we'd have noticed that there is occasionally a year in which the trees don't produce many acorns.
It's still a weird feeling, though, to read this story and realize that my trees produced hardly any acorns this year.
If this is real, it may be trees responding to a common climatic cue, a cue which is not necessarily a sign of a widespread disaster (unless you are a squirrel). I'd hypothesize that they ought to have some kind of cue that helps keep the squirrel population in check.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's no mystery.
There's a bumper crop of acorns on my property this year and last year there were almost none.
Why? Last year we had a late freeze followed by a drought.
The volume of mast crop always varies, but during bad years there's very little production. The people screaming and hollering about it need to go outside more.
So this educated fool has a "theory" about wet and dry cycles, does he? Any rube farmer or hunter out there can tell you that the mast crop is directly related to wet and dry cycles. Any botanist who doesn't know that already shouldn't be able to call himself one.
I guess it's much less fun to understand the workings of nature than it is to lay the blame on a favorite political cause.
If you think climate scientists don't relish debate, you obviously haven't been to a scientific conference.
What they relish, however, is honest debate by an informed opponent. As opposed to 95% of the so-called "skeptics" out there — like Plimer — who do little but repeat long-discredited misleading or wrong arguments. It's pretty much the same as the evolution-creation "debate". Evolutionary biologists argue all the time about evolutionary theory — witness the whole gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium debate. But that doesn't mean they relish correcting creationist wackaloons, again and again, every time they drag out the same bad arguments. Bypassing the whole scientific debate in the first place by going straight to the media. The reason why creationists don't engage in real scientific debate is because their arguments are so poor they can't get published. Of course, they then cry that the orthodox gatekeepers are "silencing" them. Pretty much like most of the climate skeptics. There is legitimate scientific debate about, say, whether the equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2 is closer to the lower or the upper end of the IPCC range. But you hardly ever see any of the real debate. Instead, you see the ridiculously wrong claims like "the geologic record proves that temperature is unrelated to CO2" or "all the global warming is an artifact of urban heat island contamination". It's a shame.