Xavier Rosseel at Environmental Professionals:
“Signs of 'Insect Apocalypse' Could Be Linked to Particular Human-Made Structures”
“Insects are the most numerous group of animals on the planet. There are an estimated 5.5 million species, 80 percent of which remain to be discovered. Yet insects are experiencing steep, widespread declines across the world: a "death by a thousand cuts" because of human activity.”
“Insects perform almost every role imaginable in an ecosystem, including pollinating crops, keeping pests under control, and acting as food for other animals. The potential consequences of their decline are so dire that it has been dubbed the "insect apocalypse".
Following the flurry of attention this impending environmental catastrophe generated, a more complex picture has emerged – with one gap in our understanding glaringly clear. Despite tropical and subtropical regions housing an estimated 85 percent of Earth's insects, what is happening in those regions is critically understudied.
Silvery Checkerspot (Chlosyne nycteis)
Driftless Area South Central Wisconsin, Dane County USA
2021 6/13 _F2A4951aaa
Dams and declines
Understanding insect decline requires long-term datasets, which are rare, especially from the global south. In our new study, we present one of the most comprehensive known datasets of subtropical freshwater insects, spanning 20 years. What we found were pervasive declines in insect numbers across all examined aquatic insect groups, including midges, mayflies and dragonflies.
Declines occurred in channels, lakes, rivers and backwaters across one of South America's largest freshwater systems, the Paraná River floodplain. In parallel, we found that numbers of invasive fish increased and water chemistry became more imbalanced – environmental changes all linked to the construction of dams.
There are over 130 dams along the Paraná and its tributaries. The most significant is Itaipu, the second largest hydroelectric plant in the world. Situated in Brazil and Paraguay, its reservoir is so large that it submerged one of Earth's largest waterfalls, Guaíra Falls, as it filled. The removal of such a natural geographic barrier between the Lower and Upper Paraná River has led to mass invasions of fish: many of them predators of insects.
At the same time, dams block the flow of sediment and nutrients, disrupting the water chemistry and making the water more transparent. Most aquatic insects are dark or mottled for camouflage in murky water. The increased water transparency weakened their ability to hide, making them even more vulnerable to being eaten by the invading fish.
Around 70 percent of Brazil's electricity comes from hydropower, and hydroelectric dams will be essential in the transition away from fossil fuels. Nevertheless, damming can have severe environmental and social impacts.
Our study shows that the negative consequences of dams can occur long after the forests have been flooded and local communities dislocated.
Tropical data shortfall
While the tropics and subtropics are the most biodiverse regions on the planet, they are also among the most threatened. Their bountiful natural resources are under immense pressure to provide food, water and energy for some of the planet's fastest growing human populations and developing economies.
Despite this, the logistical challenges of studying insects in such a biodiverse region, combined with continued historical inequality around where monitoring is conducted, means that the tropics remain underrepresented in studies on insect decline.
The lack of long-term datasets from the tropics and subtropics can skew the already complicated picture of how insect declines are occurring across the planet. One of the most comprehensive studies to date on global insect decline compared 166 surveys of over ten years across five continents.
It found land-based insects were indeed declining, but water-based insects were on the increase. However, of the 68 freshwater insect datasets in their analysis, only 7 percent came from the tropics. This apparent success is skewed by an overabundance of studies from Europe and North America, where increasing water quality and effective policies have boosted aquatic insect numbers.
Our results contradict the conclusions of this research. Aquatic insects are on the decline in the Paraná River system, which drains a significant proportion of southern South America – highlighting the importance of better tropical data.
Tropical and subtropical aquatic insects may be more at risk from human activity than their counterparts in more northern regions. Freshwater regions are among the most threatened ecosystems in the world, and must be a target for global conservation efforts.
Successes for aquatic insect conservation in some parts of the world should be celebrated – but without obscuring the challenges elsewhere. Tropical insects are understudied, not unimportant.”
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“Keep Animals Safe With These Natural, Harmless Alternatives to Pesticides”
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“June 24, 2021, OCA and our allies are formally launching a global campaign to ban dangerous “Gain-of-Function” experiments.
Read about:
* Why the engineering of viruses to make them deadlier and more easily transmissible must be stopped.
* The crisis of organic standards being degraded at the behest of corporate agribusiness.
* Why, by investigating itself, the US can answer many of the key COVID19 origin questions.
* How the Gates Foundation is driving the food system.
* And more, in this week's edition of our newsletter, #OrganicBytes”
“Ban Reckless “GOF” Engineering”
“GOF Gain of function research is medical research that alters an organism or disease in a way that increases pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range (the types of hosts that a microorganism can infect)
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“Florida’s Manatees Are Dying at an Alarming Rate
Experts say starvation appears to be the main cause of death. Polluted waters are likely smothering the manatees’ favorite food: seagrass”
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Forced to playing god with what remains:
“Conservation is an expensive endeavour. To reverse the current rate of species loss, it has been estimated that we need to spend up to $900b a year. The current reality? We are only spending a fraction of that: $80-90b per year. This severe deficit has made it challenging for conservationists across the world to protect endangered species from extinction. To make matters worse, threatened species tend to be concentrated in the poorest countries, with the 40 most underfunded countries containing 32% of all threatened animal diversity.
This severe lack of funding has led some conservationists to support the idea of conservation triage. Just as medical triage prioritises patients with the most serious injuries for treatment, conservation triage aims to prioritise the most valuable species with a high risk of extinction and a good chance of being saved. Existing conservation funding is disproportionately allocated: in the US, the bull trout receives 10 times as much funding as it needs, while most listed species receive much less. As such, from a utilitarian point of view, conservation triage makes sense. Spending more money than is necessary to conserve a species does not significantly affect conservation outcomes. That surplus might be better spent on species that need it more. Some species might also never recover no matter how much money is invested – the $2 million invested in the Canadian woodland caribou, for example, hasn’t done much to better its prospects. Should we continue to allocate more money to such species when there are others with a better chance of conservation?
Triage supporters also believe that such budget planning could better convince policymakers to increase funding in conservation by clearly setting out the benefits and costs of saving particular species. In New Zealand, conservation scientists were able to create a priority list of endangered species based on cost and chance of success. This has helped hundreds more species get the funding they need, as well as improved their management.
Moreover, triage could help with the conservation of less charismatic species. Ever heard of Attenborough’s Long-beaked Echidna? Despite carrying the name of a world-famous naturalist, this marsupial has such a low profile that there isn’t even an official distribution map for the species. Unlike more popular species like tigers and pandas that have captured the public’s imagination, many species like the Long-beaked echidna receive little to no conservation attention. Such unpopular species tend to be “EDGE” species: evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered. In other words, they are the last members of unique evolutionary lineages. Losing them would mean losing entire evolutionary branches from the tree of life. Instead of allocating funds based on public popularity, triage systems could direct money to species with genuine need.
But not everyone is on board with the idea of prioritising certain species for saving. In particular, the economic rhetoric behind many triage plans has given some conservationists pause. The inherent value of biodiversity is not something that can be quantified easily in dollars and cents, and any such valuation is necessarily human-centric. The focus on “dollar efficiency” is overly clinical and ignores our moral obligation to protect our fellow species. Such resistance to applying the language of economics is not new in conservation, with the recently published Dasgupta Review having received similar criticism.
There are also concerns that conservation triage is vulnerable to corruption, providing politicians with a way to justify any underfunding with seemingly objective arguments. Politicians are not obliged to follow the rankings set by their environmental agencies, so triage is limited as a tool for conservation in that it fails to tackle the root issue of underfunding. For example, despite the US Federal Wildlife Service having ranked endangered species since 1983, the Government Accountability Office found in 2005 that other factors such as “office workload, Congressional earmarks, and the potential for attracting extra money” were considered more heavily than the actual ranks of the species. The severe lack of funds in some countries might mean that even triage won’t significantly help conservation efforts, with some scientists describing it as “rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship”.
Should we see triage as simply being smarter with funding, or does it signify resignation towards the biodiversity crisis that we face? Either way, the idea of triage has clearly been unpleasant for conservationists. But with funding unlikely to increase drastically in the coming years, decision makers may have to face up to deciding which species should live and which will die.”
“Which species should we save?
Izavel Lee explains how inadequate funding is forcing conservationists to make tough choices about which species to save – and which to leave behind”
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“What tree rings reveal about America's megadrought
How we know the American west is experiencing a once-in-a-millennium drought” - by Alvin Chang”
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Here we go again,…
“Democrats control the House right now and are blocking Medicare for All.” This is what they have to say about it,…
“If we lose our House majority in 2022, the GOP will block everything we care about. We must keep our majority.”
““2022 will be the most important election in our lifetime!!!!”
Do you see this? Your Democrat vote has gotten you nothing and will get you nowhere. But, and I admit, you are getting a stellar performance by these politicians.”
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