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US Puts Bumblebee On the Endangered Species List For First Time (npr.org)
For the first time for a bumblebee and a bee species in the U.S., the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated the bumblebee an endangered species. The protected status goes into effect on February 10, and includes requirements for federal protections and the development of a recovery plan. NPR reports: "Today's Endangered Species listing is the best -- and probably last -- hope for the recovery of the rusty patched bumble bee," NRDC Senior Attorney Rebecca Riley said in a statement from the Xerces Society, which advocates for invertebrates. "Bumble bees are dying off, vanishing from our farms, gardens, and parks, where they were once found in great numbers." Large parts of the Eastern and Midwestern United States were once crawling with these bees, Bombus affinis, but the bees have suffered a dramatic decline in the last two decades due to habitat loss and degradation, along with pathogens and pesticides. Indeed, the bee was found in 31 states and Canadian provinces before the mid- to late-1990s, according to the final rule published in the Federal Register. But since 2000, it has been reported in only 13 states and Ontario, Canada. It has seen an 88 percent decline in the number of populations and an 87 percent loss in the amount of territory it inhabits. This means the species is vulnerable to extinction, the rule says, even without further habitat loss or insecticide exposure. Canada designated the species as endangered in 2012.
Meanwhile my Dad is outside with his roundup backpack, spraying a big circle around the house...Chemical warfare against nature just isn't working out how we thought it might!
If you want information including things that you might be able to do take a look at Bumble Bee Watch (http://www.bumblebeewatch.org/) or the Xerces Society page on bumblebees (http://www.xerces.org/bumblebees/). The University of Maine in Farmington has also been tracking the decline of several of the species native to Maine (http://mainebumblebeeatlas.umf.maine.edu/), and other state universities may have similar programs going on.
fencepost
just a little off
This sounds more like a means to aggregate the incoming administration.
thanks Monsanto !
Any bets on whether the endangeredness of species is just a lie invented by the chinese to ruin the US economy?
...errr pollen.
Trump will take them off.
that my deck isn't full of holes they dug into the wood.
Wouldn't it work more like when Will E. Coyote runs off a cliff and doesn't fall till he looks down?
.So the solution to the problem would be to put neonics on the endangered-species list, and hope they fade out of the environment before the bees do.
Then the pesticide industry will lobby the Republicans saying how it'll hurt business and jobs and profits. Eventually, there will be some sort of phase out agreed to that will take ten years for the pesticides to be stopped.
In the meantime, there will be this PR blitz stating that the science isn't in and that the scientists who study it are saying the pesticides are killing bees because that's the only way they can get grants.
Eventually, as our bees get destroyed and the skyrocketing of food prices, the EPA will be blamed for all the unnecessary regulations that caused the problem in the first place.
Cigarette smoking, Air conditioning refrigerant, lead in gasoline are just a couple of instances off of the top of my head where business has put profits above human health. What a warped society we have where it's considered a valid argument to put corporate profits above human health.
Trump will shut down the EPA, then no animals will be endangered. So simple.
So if I swat a bumblebee I could go to jail, and lose my right to a gun and to vote?
I think Maritz was doing Trump sarcasm.... not actually claiming some big conspiracy to fund their research.
My guess is Trump'll blame the bumblee deaths on a conspiracy of his enemies in league with NASA and NOAA in league with other bumblebees.
If you didn't get todays Trump big conspiracy, he just said that Democrats and Republicans had conspired to make up the Russian spy claims, and its all the work of political sleazebag operatives. He promises a new report within 90 days that will totally exonerate Russia. (Which is odd, because the dossier reported Kremlin was grooming non entity called Michael Flynn in August, and Trump didn't choose Flynn till November, which means Putin knew Trump's appointees before Trump announced them, which confirms Trump's is a traitor to his country.
Bees should be at the top of the list of potential imports from Cuba.
They do not use the insecticides we and Europe does. So, they have plenty of healthy bees.
We should be careful about invasive species. But fresh blood into existing stocks could be helpful.
Now when a landowner (farmer) sees any natural beehive they will destroy it quietly and remove all evidence it was there. There is enough history to know that once an endangered species appears on your land it effectively is not your land any more. Nobody is going to take the chance that they now have to grow bee food.
Nobody admits to this of course but SSS applies here in full.
If the EPA is worried about this species of bees not surviving, seed them on every piece of public land in their natural habitat. Don't implement a policy that is going to turn the public against all bees.
the Decepticons. They're bringing the Age of Extinction!
A Buzzworthy story.
Sure you'll go to jail and probably lose your right to vote if you swat at a bee now, but the big thing is you better hope it's not at your house. If an endangered species decides to visit your property, your house becomes property of the bee. You lose all rights to use your property as you need to, because rust bubble bees are far more important than people. Of course that doesn't excuse you from paying the mortgage - you still owe the bank. The EPA isn't going to pay off your mortgage for you, theyv just tell you you can't use your property anymore. It belongs to the bee, in case he decides to come back.
As someone else said, if you've got a half million dollar mortgage on a farm and you spot a bee or other endangered species visiting your farm, you have two choices:
A) Stop farming and producing income to pay your mortgage, ceding control of your property to the visiting bug. You'll go bankrupt, of course, with no farm income to pay the mortgage.
B) Quickly and very quietly destroy any evidence that the bug ever flew across your property. You can then continue to earn a living.
Note that (b) is illegal. Legally, you must do (a) because democrats don't understand that reality isn't governed by liberal ideals. The actual laws of physics and the way things really work aren't a folk song, unfortunately.
Arguing over bullshit while screaming, "NO TRUE ENVIRONMENTALIST!" while ignoring the problem:
Fucktards have been fucking with our environment because they know best, and we're paying for it.
Fucking Decepticons
... if one gets splatted on your windshield while driving?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Why can't the mosquito or Lyme disease tick be endangered?
Oh, no ! First 'Optimus Prime' dies, and now this ?
Bumble bees disappearing is alarming, and it could have a number of causes but no one is quite yet sure exactly what is the main cause or if several causes are combining (likely). I've been to several research presentations lately from scientists researching bee health and bee loss. They know that neonics kill bees (they kill lots of insects). But the thing you have to realize is that very few farmers apply neonics as a spray where it kills indiscriminately. Almost all neonic use is in seed treatments that go underground and make the plants toxic to insects that would eat them. Also, bees (but not bumblebees) are doing quite well in areas that have high use of neonic seed treatments, like Alberta.
In other areas the situation is not nearly as good for many bee species. And neonics are suspected to play a role, though neonics are usually not sprayed. What it could be is vacuum planters planting corn and beans are blowing neonic-laced dust into the air which is causing the damage. In Alberta, planting is largely done with air seeders which blow dust into the soil, not the air, where bees are not exposed nearly as much to it.
So things aren't as simple as the comments so far want to make it. Banning of neonic spray does make some sense. But if they were banned outright, to save the food crops farmers will have to spray more insecticides on the plants during the early growth stages, which is ultimately more harmful to everyone. Not only does that kill problem insects, it kills bumble bees and beneficials indiscriminately.
One final comment on habitat loss. This indeed could be contributing. As far as farmland goes, though, very little land is being converted from wild to farming in North America these days. Nearly all habitat loss comes from urban development. So don't go blaming farmers for habitat loss in that regard. As well, the US and Canada has quite large wilderness areas that have never been touched by agriculture, and bumble bees seem to be in decline everywhere. And it could be that climate change is playing as big a role as neonics ever did in this decline.
It's a complicated story. Likely humans play a major role, but how to fix this no on really knows.
Don't worry, this is just the start of the coming unstoppable cascade of ecosystem collapses that will lead to worse and worse effects, including overall destruction of the food supply.
The interlocking domino-effect of multiple large-scale environmental system failures will quickly kill off most plant and animal species, including those in the ocean habitats. It'll happen faster than you think.
Once the tipping point is reached the entire ecosystem will crash- interdependent flora and fauna will die off, most of them before they have a chance to understand something is wrong.
By the way, just in case it hasn't sunk in, you are one of the animal species that's gonna die off. Apex predators are always among the first to go when something disruptive happens. And if wholesale environmental collapse isn't "disruptive", I don't know what is.
Oh sure, the rich people can hide in their doomsday bunkers for a while but no one has stocked 50 years of MREs for each bunker-dweller, and even if they did, so what? The human population will have dwindled well below the minimum biological diversity limit to be able to sustain itself.
Complex systems (like our ecosystem) are fragile and often ridiculously susceptible to small events. Toss a bolt into a running jet engine and you'll see what I mean.
Happy 2017!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
In the late 1980s computer power got good enough to model bee wings that flex and they were allowed to fly again.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
seems that whoever is responsible for whatever is killing bees could be considered a very real, very serious threat to the future of humanity
Someone finally clued in the bees they are violating the Law of Aerodynamics and they're just dropping out of the sky.
Urban myth, it is well known how they fly, they USE aerodynamics.
http://www.snopes.com/science/...
Well. Indirectly, it does. Roundup kills many "weed" that are actually useful wild plants that bumblebees feed on. The western "green grass patch" is an ecological desert. No flowers for insects to feed on, no insects for birds to feed on...
If you let your grass grow a little wild your garden will attract many small creatures, and shortly after many birds, and mammals such as hedgehogs who feed on insects... Then you can spend a lot of fun times with family observing nature without going far away from home.
Also Roundup fumes are probably giving your dad cancer right now. Maybe you could talk him out of using this shit, no?
You do a good job of trying to sound smart, enough to get upvoted a bunch even. The trouble is you obviously know absolutely nothing about using roundup or what it does. Round-up's most famous quality is that kills everything green, but leaves mostly anything walking or flying alone. That is, it kills ALL plant life with almost zero exceptions. As in, NOBODY with the bright green grass patch on the front lawn hit it with round up. If they did, it'd be the brown patch of dead vegetation. Which is incidentally why almost nobody in urban areas makes wide spread use of roundup as it's less common you want to kill all plant life indiscriminately in your yard or garden.
If you want to play again, agriculture does make heavy use of round up, largely because it is cheap and compared to almost every other pesticide available it's vastly safer for all non-plant living things. The reason round-up resistant crops are such a big deal is because it means you can very cheaply and safely plant a crop, spray it with round-up and have it growing virtually nothing but the plant you chose to put there. If you are looking at bees though, those plants farmers put in ALL have flowers, and lots of them, more than a wild grassland would in any given year.
Bumble bees disappearing is alarming, and it could have a number of causes but no one is quite yet sure exactly what is the main cause or if several causes are combining (likely). I've been to several research presentations lately from scientists researching bee health and bee loss. They know that neonics kill bees (they kill lots of insects). But the thing you have to realize is that very few farmers apply neonics as a spray where it kills indiscriminately. Almost all neonic use is in seed treatments that go underground and make the plants toxic to insects that would eat them. Also, bees (but not bumblebees) are doing quite well in areas that have high use of neonic seed treatments, like Alberta.
In other areas the situation is not nearly as good for many bee species. And neonics are suspected to play a role, though neonics are usually not sprayed. What it could be is vacuum planters planting corn and beans are blowing neonic-laced dust into the air which is causing the damage. In Alberta, planting is largely done with air seeders which blow dust into the soil, not the air, where bees are not exposed nearly as much to it.
So things aren't as simple as the comments so far want to make it. Banning of neonic spray does make some sense. But if they were banned outright, to save the food crops farmers will have to spray more insecticides on the plants during the early growth stages, which is ultimately more harmful to everyone. Not only does that kill problem insects, it kills bumble bees and beneficials indiscriminately.
One final comment on habitat loss. This indeed could be contributing. As far as farmland goes, though, very little land is being converted from wild to farming in North America these days. Nearly all habitat loss comes from urban development. So don't go blaming farmers for habitat loss in that regard. As well, the US and Canada has quite large wilderness areas that have never been touched by agriculture, and bumble bees seem to be in decline everywhere. And it could be that climate change is playing as big a role as neonics ever did in this decline.
It's a complicated story. Likely humans play a major role, but how to fix this no on really knows.
The other problem also seems to be an absence of investigation into the bigger picture, The only studies I find all look at a single potential factor and it's impact in a lab environment, and then noting a percentage increase or decrease to populations from that factor. Almost all those studies revolve around trying to find what it is that farmers are doing to kill bees. Not a single study I've seen has even considered the possibility of an impact from competition with bee farms. In spite of that, number show the bee populations that are hitting the most are the wild bees, while domestic bee populations hit a record high last year up here in Canada.
Good. I never liked their tuna anyway. In fact, I';ve never liked tuna, or any other kind of seafood. Good riddance.
Now those little fuzzy black-and-yellow guys that fly around, I'd miss them if they became extinct. To me, the earth seems simultaneously very fragile and very robust and resilient. I think it depends on the timescale and the subject matter.