by Matthew Cobb
It’s gloomsville chez Professor Cobb today, I’m afraid. There’s a new report out on the use of the latest insecticides we’ve been bombarding our planet with, neonicotinoids. These compounds are typically sprayed on seeds, which means they are taken up by the growing plant and end up getting literally everywhere in the environment.
Just like the DDT that Rachel Carson warned about in Silent Spring, these compounds appear to be having devastating effects on our wildlife because, you know, ecology is complicated.
The Guardian has an alarming article about the report, which surveys over 20 years’ worth of studies on neonicotinoids. It includes this graphic which explains the problem:
The most horrifying bit of the article is that the authors – 29 scientists from around the world – report that there is no conclusive evidence that this widescale pollution has led to significant increases in crop yields. Worse, they are endangering the health of the very basis of food production: the soil. The Guardian quotes Professor Dave Goulson, of the University of Sussex:
“It is astonishing we have learned so little. After Silent Spring revealed the unfortunate side-effects of those chemicals, there was a big backlash. But we seem to have gone back to exactly what we were doing in the 1950s. It is just history repeating itself. The pervasive nature of these chemicals mean they are found everywhere now. If all our soils are toxic, that should really worry us, as soil is crucial to food production.”
The report will be published as a special issue of the Open Access journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research (I can’t find the report online yet).
Here’s my summary tw**t of the whole sorry mess:
The only optimistic thing I can think about the mass extinction we're creating is that it will lead to a new, beautiful normal, sans humans.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) June 24, 2014
I then tried to inject a bit of philosophical levity:
But will it be beautiful if there are no humans there to see it? #BishopBerkeley
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) June 24, 2014
To give you an idea of some of what we’ll end up losing, here’s the post I was intending to write. Another tw**t, by @abhijitkadle (Jerry really needs to get with the programme – I get an important part of my inspiration/information from Tw*tter), led me to this beautiful picture of long-legged flies, taken by Ripin Biswas, in Cooch Behar, India.
These are members of the large Dolichopodidae family (> 7000 species world wide) (I have no idea of the species – apparently the taxonomists have been reorganising the family, which makes it even more complicated than usual). You will be struck not only by their beauty (including the typically metallic sheen), but also be their incredibly long antennae. The male (the one on the right) has substantially longer antennae than the female, which might suggest that he uses them to detect female pheromones, or, given that these are very long and thin (ie not hairy) that he might use them to detect sounds. The base of the antenna contains Johnston’s organ, the insect sound-detector, which is the only anatomicl feature that all insects possess (a ‘synapomorphy’), and which is activated by the movement of the arista (the long bit).
Notice also that the male is holding onto the female’s wings. This seems to be typical of their courtship behaviour, as shown in this photo by Vipin Baliga:
Vipin also took this photo of a pair mating, which might be the same species as in the first photo:
Dolichopodids are generally predators as adults, and will even eat maggots (sacrilege). This stunning photo by Nitin Prabhudesai and taken from here shows one nomming what could be an aphid:
Finally, here’s a lovely green Dolichopodid by Anirudda Dhamorikar:
Bizarrely, looking at these lovely flies has cheered me up a bit. But I am still resolutely pessimistic about the world we are creating (or rather, destroying). What will come after, when we’re gone, will be different. We’re not going to destroy life: the end-Permian extinction didn’t manage to do that, so I reckon our puny efforts will fail, too. But we are doing irreperable damage that will, in the end, come back to bite us.
Oh well, in 20 million years or so the planet will be beautiful again (that’s about the time it takes for the ecosystem to recover from a mass extinction). There may even be Dolichopodids around.
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I am with you on this & equally as depressed.
In the UK this is National Insect Week in the UK to raise awareness about our six-legged friends, & I note they have a photo competition – Matthew you should submit your damsal fly!
http://nationalinsectweek.co.uk/competitions/insect_photography.htm
Our neighbors had some kind of device (fly in house with sticky paper) that was meant to kill wasps but it ended up with hundreds of dead bees. I wanted to throw up. Fortunately he stopped putting that device out every summer.
Depressing. All the bees at our house are different than they used to be. There were once thousands, then almost none, now, at least, they are rebounding to hundreds, but they are bigger, not the cute little fellas.
That is really dismal news. But, take heart. There is still beauty of every kind everywhere you look. And we may yet get our shit together. We should know, one way or the other, within the next couple / few generations. There are certainly plenty of reasons for pessimism, but there are also some reasons for optimism.
I don’t see any reason for optimism. There are too many humans and we are too slow to react. Essentially, our rate of impact is far greater than our rate of responses to our impacts. We have been lucky so far but our luck is not going to last.
Agreed, alas.
I get pessimism and agree it is warranted. The outlook is grim. But not any reasons for optimism? I can only think that the problem there is not looking.
It will be interesting to see if the authors have finally managed to generate a positive result demonstrating neonic effects on bees in a genuine field study.
I didn’t support the EU neonic legislation that was introduced last year, primarily because it seemed to me that the science it was based on was too preliminary. For all the press attention, I can’t see that the evidence base has improved much in the intervening year.
They are correct to highlight particular risks associated with the use of systemic insecticides, but that assessment has to be done alongside the alternatives. All crop production methods (including organic) use pesticides, and all of them will have environmental costs.
In any case, it is good to see this generating so much attention, and hopefully research funding too.
*In the interests of transparency: I work in crop protection, but from the crop genetics side, so hopefully I can remain reasonably objective about the debate about the chemistry.
I agree with your strongly objective approach on this issue. Experiments must be done testing the effects of non-lethal doses of these insecticides on invertebrate populations. Besides possibly giving us a clear cause for population declines, it will, if necessary, help to counter the lobbying efforts of the pesticide industry.
Trying to be objective here, but dammit it does look like an obvious thing that needs study. Sub-lethal doses of persistent insecticides everywhere? In flower nectar and pollen, soil, water…?? One must admit that that could effect bees, earthworms, soil nematodes, assorted small arthropods….
I agree with both Marks. 🙂 Profligate use of systemic pesticides, including neonicotinoids, is definitely a cause for concern that requires solid independent investigation. Unfortunately, my impression (which certainly could be wrong) is that there isn’t a whole lot of good, unbiased research out there. Industry-funded studies showing a company’s cash-cow harmless are obviously suspect. Unfortunately, a lot of the non-industry-funded research doesn’t seem much better. There seem to be a lot of fishing expeditions, using whatever unrealistic exposures of the evil industry product du jour is necessary to harm to the day’s favorite cute organism. Of course, just about any substance has an LD50 for any particular organism. It isn’t remotely surprising that, e.g., Bt corn pollen -can- kill monarch butterflies and neonicotinoids -can- kill honeybees. What we ought to figure out is what harm is caused at realistic dosages and how that level of harm compares with the likely alternatives. Given biased research from both sides, it’s hard to get that kind of useful analysis.
Basically, we need more Tyrone Hayeses in the world.
Also, this bit: “Neonicotinoids are applied routinely rather than in response to pest attacks but the scientists highlight the “striking” lack of evidence that this leads to increased crop yields.”
This is also mentioned on the post here, but it isn’t really clear what is being asked. Are they looking for studies that identify associations between global or regional crop yield and use of systemic insecticides? I presume that they are, because the effectiveness of neonics in protecting yield in controlled experiments is well demonstrated in the literature.
If so, then generating that result is probably even more of a big ask than the experiment that they still need to run (i.e. demonstrating an adverse effect on bee colonies under natural exposure to neonics).
It also ignores how farmers make decisions about crop protection (which is far more about risk management than mean effect). In any case , it is well established that neonics are effective at protecting yield under certain conditions and for certain crops.
I heard this news on my drive to work. Sad indeed. The report I listened to talked about how the effects were seen in earthworms as well and warned they would also affect humans. If more people understood evolution, they’d recognize we are all made of the same stuff and what we use to kill one animal can also kill us. People never really care until it affects them directly and by then it is too late.
We have layers of bad news. This possible major problem on top of global warming and continuous war. Everyone should be feeling crisis fatigue by now. Longing for the good old days of the 1st Iraq war, ha ha.
I am a gardner and every year I have seen fewer and fewer insects in my garden. This year, along with a friend, I became a back yard beekeeper and we each have one hive. I post all the time on Facebook about my hive. Many of my friends have changed their behaviors regarding pesticide use because of this. People can change, though I have little confidence in chemical companies changing.
To make that change you need evidence, not anecdotes. There doesn’t seem to be any connection between bee population levels and these pesticides specifically.
As I understand it, there are 4-5 globally spread bee diseases, which are affected by stresses like pesticides. But also how bees are cultivated at a guess, or they wouldn’t be global problems. I read yesterday that such diseases are amenable to antibiotics, so the problem should be short term manageable.
Maybe agriculture need to be changed. But if these are global diseases isn’t the current way of sending bees the world over [which WEIT had an article about some time ago, IIRC) something that needs to change first?
Oh, and according to the swedish research institute SLU where I got the disease info, those disease _are_ tied to some decreased bee populations.
But again, it can’t be all of them, see the bumblebee evidence. (That bumblebees aren’t kept is btw what would be expected if those diseases are correlated with modern bee keeping practices.)
and solitary native bees too –very important pollinators.
I’m with Mark L here, though maybe not as neutral re crop production methods (see below). That is, I don’t see any facts supporting worry.
The report is lambasted for cherry picking. They haven’t shown an effect, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.
“However, the Crop Protection Association, which represents pesticide manufacturers, criticised the report. Nick von Westenholz, chief executive of the CPA, said: “It is a selective review of existing studies which highlighted worst-case scenarios, largely produced under laboratory conditions. As such, the publication does not represent a robust assessment of the safety of systemic pesticides under realistic conditions of use.”” [Guardian]
“Representatives of manufacturers say that there is nothing new in the task force study.
“There is very little credible evidence that these things are causing untoward damage because we would have seen them over 20 years of use,” said Dr Julian Little from Bayer, one of the manufacturers of neonicotinoids.” [ http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27980344 ]
Especially there seem to be counter-evidence from 20 years of non-effects:
“”If you look at the tree bumblebee, it is eating the same food as the other bees, and is being exposed to the same pesticide load and weather conditions and yet it is flourishing, whereas some other bees are not.” [Ibid]
That is arguable too. “Von Westenholz added: “Importantly, they have failed or neglected to look at the broad benefits provided by this technology and the fact that by maximising yields from land already under cultivation, more wild spaces are preserved for biodiversity.”
That formulation makes me think it is the old ‘ecological [organic]’ agriculture vs modern agriculture divide, where scam artists are “diversifying” into non-efficient land use by producing less while being paid more. Already the Rome meeting -60 rejected organic agriculture as too inefficient for supporting our global population (~ 50 % production compared to best of breed methods) and there was a -13 meta-analysis that showed that still holds.
That seems arguable too. A recent paper has claimed < 1 million year IIRC. I have a semi-track on this due to my astrobiology interest, but of course I have no broad understanding of the issues.
On the other hand it seems there is no absolute recovery. After re-diversification the level is randomly lower of higher. So things like AGW, or environmentally poisonous pesticides, are gambles in that sense.
Agribusiness cannot be trusted with insecticides and herbicides because it is driven by profit (short-term or long-term, who cares anymore?), not by any concern for any kind of “sustainable” system. The average person can be trusted even less: I doubt that one in a hundred people who buy a spray bottle of insecticide or herbicide even bother to read the label before they start hosing everything down with it; the empty bottles (which usually aren’t completely empty) go into those “magic boxes” (dumpsters) that make things disappear- I found a full bottle of malathion in one the other evening.
The evidence is now more and more strongly implicating the neonicotinoids in “colony collapse disorder” in honeybees- I’ve seen a truly alarming decline in them in the past few years. Last year, I stood next to a cherry tree in full bloom and didn’t see a single one. They’ve been getting into my apartment because the disorder makes the workers fly at night and they seek light, like moths. I saw a video several years ago from China, from a persimmon-growing region where the profligate use of insecticides had completely wiped out the local pollinating insects- the farmers had to hand-pollinate the thousands of blooms on each tree with feathers tied to long poles! Of course, the CEOs of Monsanto and the other big chemical companies know that THEY won’t have to do this…..
A bit different take on this subject:
http://www.science20.com/science_20/blog/killer_regulators_are_more_dangerous_to_bees_than_neonics_are-138043
A complete waste of time reading anything by the author at the above link. Anyone who writes “As we now know, DDT is actually pretty terrific” can be summarily dismissed as someone who doesn’t understand the science. From his bio, I’m sure he’s popular with libertarian-type denialists.
I got as far as his opening statement:
“At a time when the EPA is rushing to place new regulations on the one thing that is still cheap and increasingly environmentally effective in America, energy, it may seem strange to laud the EPA.”
This article sound disturbingly like aspects of Frank Herbert’s “The Green Brain” (1966), in which China, in the supposed defense of its crop yield, exterminates all insect life in the country — ironically causing the total collapse of its agriculture.
A big part of the problem is that we don’t take a, “first do no harm” approach to agriculture. That is, before any pesticide or fertilizer or even mechanical technique is permitted, it must first be empirically demonstrated safe to surrounding ecosystems.
We have similar protocols with respect to pharmaceuticals. Why on Earth don’t we apply the same standards to the only world we can possibly call, “Home”?
Maybe neonicotinoids aren’t causing widespread harm; maybe they are. But why the fuck is their use permitted without the controversy already having been conclusively settled?
b&
That question cover a number of different issues. Obviously, there already is a fairly stringent registration and approval procedure for new agrichemicals that requires robust empirical data on efficacy and safety, much like pharmaceuticals.
The issue with neonicotoids is not that the original research and subsequent approval was wrong, but that new and unanticipated routes of environmental exposure were subsequently identified, whilst other experiments identified behavioural effects on bees at exposures far below toxic levels. It is very hard to legislate a regulatory framework that requires experimental answers to unknown questions.
Agriculture is not an optional activity and any form of agriculture carries massive environmental costs. As such, there are also risks associated with being overly cautious, given that you run the risk of holding up new technologies with real environmental benefits.
Again, in the realm of medicine, when serious questions are raised about the safety or efficacy of drugs, so long as the manufacturers don’t overwhelm the process with legalized bribery in the form of lobbying, the drugs are pulled from market or otherwise restricted, at least until those questions are resolved.
Sadly, you’re correct, and it points to a much more fundamental problem: we just simply can’t feed several billion humans for an extended period of time. As you likely know, the agrichemical business would not exist were it not for fossil fuels, and we’ve already used up roughly half of the stuff that ever existed and most of the “good” stuff we normally use for feedstocks. Never mind topsoil and aquifer depletion and habitat loss; as petroleum production continues to drop, so too will crop yields, like it or not. And we can expect production to decline at roughly the inverse of the ~2% historical growth rate we’ve enjoyed, with prices continuing to rise at a disproportionately exponential rate.
Not a pretty picture….
b&
It is based on a 20 year study (heard that driving home – all my news is online or on air while driving). The response: oh those scientists just took the worst case scenarios.
We are living brought the worst case scenarios!!!!
“That is, before any pesticide or fertilizer or even mechanical technique is permitted, it must first be empirically demonstrated safe to surrounding ecosystems.”
By that standard, we should simply ban agriculture.
“First do no harm” is, unfortunately, not one of the available options.
It’s not an all-or-nothing prospect. There are areas that have been continuously farmed for millennia; it’s hard to get more sustainable than that.
The real problem is that you can’t sustain a ~2% annual population growth, regardless of the means used to feed those people. And, at several billion people combined with modern techniques to extract short-term gains in production at the cost of long-term sustainability, we’re now starting to see real signs of the bubble collapsing.
b&
This is so incredibly depressing… I won’t live to see much if any of it, but my children and grand-children (and their children if humanity survives that long, what with all the other massive threats like global warming) likely will. 🙁
A small ray of hope:
http://www.nationofchange.org/obama-mandates-precedent-setting-task-force-protect-honey-bees-and-other-pollinators-1403614119
“Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence”
Was Yeats writing about dolichopodids?
“Greed proves itself an enemy of science by perverting it to such ends as the despoliation of the environment for profit, and the invention of ever more destructive weapons of war – thus bringing science into disrepute.” (A C Grayling, What is Good?).
Thank you Evolutionistrue for being a candle in the dark on this particularly urgent issue.
“A flea and a fly were caught in a flue;
What on Earth were they going to do?
Said the flea, “Let us fly!”
Said the fly, “Let us flee!”
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”
By I forget who.
Ogden Nash.
My favourite Ogden Nash poem is The Cow: the cow is of the bovine ilk. One end is moo, the other milk.
All y’all Nash fans should — nay, must — familiarize yourselves with Anthony Plog’s Animal Ditties. It’s a somewhat ongoing series of chamber works for various brass instruments and narrator.
Here’s the first suite, with Tony himself playing trumpet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTsVHtbXYO0
At least most of the other suites can be found with the obvious search terms, or on Summit Records.
Tony is one of my all-time favorite composers, and one of the better trumpet virtuosi of our time. I had the privilege of studying with him for a semester when he substituted for David Hickman when Hickman went on sabbatical. Tony is also a great guy and a most observant and insightful and helpful teacher; I still often hear both his examples and words when I’m trying to play with an even tone across all registers.
Cheers,
b&
Although I find the bulk of my fellow humans troubling, to say the least, I find visualizing a world without humans as somehow “more beautiful” as a category error (and bad PR as well). It is like thinking about how miserable you’d be if you’d never been born. Your second tw**t gets it right and I don’t think it is levity, it is a serious point. The bees won’t give a damn if flowers go extinct, nor will the flowers themselves. Nor will the birds. No tiger cares about the fate of tigers, only about mating, finding water, finding food. The beauty that is wrecked by the mass extinction we preside over is an experience that exists mostly, if not entirely, inside human brains. We work to preserve nature for ourselves: because it is our home, because we appreciate it’s beauty, because we appreciate it’s marvels and diversity, etc. Environmentalism really is all about us. I see little point in saving the polar bears *for* the polar bears. The last polar bear will feel no worse dying than the last hundred thousand did dying. But we will feel different about it. We care, and that is enough reason to do something about it.
I think a bit more research needs to be done. Here’s a quote from an article I read (link below):
“Australia presents the most striking dilemma for those isolating their attacks on neonics. On a per crop basis, it is one of the world’s heaviest users of the pesticide—and has among the healthiest bee colonies in the world. Government records indicate there has not been even one adverse experience report from either the public or beekeepers concerning the use of neonics. The other thing they don’t see in Australia—but we do see everywhere else in the world where CCD is claimed—is the Varroa mite, the culprit in the 2005/06 bee death march.” [Note: No problems in Canada either.]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2013/04/11/science-collapse-disorder-the-real-story-behind-neonics-and-mass-bee-deaths/