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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."
Or maybe the squirrels had banked them in citi?
Big Acorn needs a bailout.
this guy's got em all
http://www.old-computers.com/club/collectors/ordis.asp?c=3664
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
...the comments on this article can actually include speculation on what may be occurring beyond climate change alarmism?
That's the thing that kind of bugs me is that Global Climate change gets all of the attention at the expense, it seems, over other issues. For example, coal fired power plants. The argument usually boils down to green house gases and maybe air quality. But the issue of coal burning releasing mercury into the environment (why do you think predator fish are contaminated with the stuff?) is hardly ever brought up and if it is, it's just ignored.
Unfortunately, global climate change has become a very politically polarizing issue and it drowns out any sort of rational discourse. Which means, regardless of what needs to be done, it won't get done because folks will spend all their time digging their heals in to be "right".
Those were probably marble galls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_marble_gall); I find them a lot, too. They are produced in addition to acorns, though.
Panic when the dolphins decide its time to leave.
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
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.
The squirrels are merely saving them. They know the apocalypse is coming. That, or they are planning an all out takeover of the earth. Are you ready?
Look! You've been warned! The hungry squirrel of the apocalypse rides!!!
blah blah blah
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.
It's a simple supply and demand thing. OAPT (Organization of the Acorn Producing Trees) decided that supply was too high and cut production. This has significantly increased the price per cheek full.
If the earth's temperature is being increased by the sun, then it's more important we do something about global warming, and quick.
All the bad stuff that's going to happen thanks to global warming doesn't magically vanish because it's being done by the sun.
If it's caused by humans, we just need to back off. As long as we don't hit the point where the ocean currents flip or the antarctic ice melts, we're okay.
If it's caused by the sun, we need to back way the hell off, back to the stone age, and even farther, perhaps with some sort of technology to shade the earth, and attempt to weather it out without hitting the tipping point in several of the systems that would push us past no recovery.
I.e., the car we're in just got a flat tire. Most people are arguing that it's because we're driving over a rocky road with bad tires, whereas you're arguing there's a sniper shooting at us. That doesn't make the situation better and somehow mean we can ignore it, that makes it a good deal worse and means we need to start panicking now.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I emailed my mom who lives in Pennsylvania (which was mentioned in the article), and who owns 5 acres of oak trees (terrible for raking in the fall - these leaves decay very slowly and lay very flat - each missed leaf is a dead bit of grass come the spring). She also lives on the edge of ~100 acres of forest composed largely of oak.
She's a zoologist and not a botanist, though botany is a bit of a hobby of hers. This explanation sounds as plausible as any other, and more plausible than most.
So I think that alarmism about this is overboard until there's more information. That said though, environmental concern under the guise of global warming is overall a good thing - it's causing people to pay attention to the impact of their actions on the world.
Just like most main stream causes, the only way to maintain the public attention the cause requires is to either federally mandate the attention, or to engage in a lot of alarmism. The only way to get the federal mandate is to convince politicians that doing so is in their political career's best interest, so you need to engage the public with... alarmism.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!