conservation Archives - Page 4 of 4

01/05/201301/05/2013

The popularity of bees

Because my research often uses bees as the study subject, friends and family are always forwarding links to news and culture that concerns these fascinating creatures. Let me list for you some of my favourites: I found this article about the debate surrounding the ban on neonicotinoids within the EU on twitter. On a lighter note, a performance group teamed up with a group of monks at Glenstal Abbey to compose a “Song of the bees” based on scientific recordings and data from honeybees. A friend on facebook sent me this comic, which describes the seeming absurdity of honeybee workers sacrificing themselves for their hives. Another facebook find was this spoof article which points out that we could probably solve the problem of bee decline if bees privatised. Finally, friends and family in Philadelphia informed me that Drexel University recently named its new department the BEES department! That last one is a little deceiving because BEES stands for Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science, so they don’t actually focus on the study of bees. I think it’s still significant that the department’s acronym features our little buzzing friends though. In addition to these references, the birthday and Christmas gifts I’ve received over the past three years include bee embroidered hand towels, wine glasses with bees painted on them, a bracelet with a bee charm, and a stuffed bee .

What is apparent from all of these links and articles (and the availability of the plethora of bee paraphernalia my lovely friends and family continue to buy for me), is that bees are incredibly popular right now. And I can’t help but ask myself, what is the attraction?

My first question was am I just noticing these references more because I started studying bees in the last few years? Honestly if you asked me to point out the difference between a honeybee and a bumblebee before I went to college, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to do it. But it turns out it’s not personal bias, not according to the scientific literature anyway. The graph below is the result of a search in Web of Science for papers that contain the word “bee” or “bees” in the topic. Clearly there has been increased interest in bees since the 1940’s. In the last few years the publications on bees have been especially numerous, for example there were 1796 records in 2012.

Okay, so bees are being studied more. But why does the public seem to be so intrigued by these organisms? Why do people love bees?

I have a few thoughts- I’ll start with the obvious:

1.) Bees make honey.

Or so many think. In reality, not all bees make honey. The honey-like substance that bumblebees produce would not be fit for consumption- they don’t keep their colonies nice and neat like honeybees do, so you’d be likely to get a mouth full of bacteria or bee larvae in your honey if it came from a bumblebee. But everyone thinks all bees make honey, and after all, honey is delicious.

2.) The social nature of bees.

The average person may not know much about solitary bees or the differences in the life cycles of bee species, but usually they can tell you that honeybees have a queen. People also commonly know that the queen bee is responsible for producing all the rest of the bees, and that the rest of the bees in the colony will fight to the death to protect her. I’m not trying to dive too deeply into psychology here, but I think that the apparent altruism of bees attracts people to them and makes them a more sympathetic organism than we would normally consider something with a sting. People also like the concept of a “superorganism.”

3.) The “busy bee”

If you’ve ever watched a bee in the springtime foraging on a flower it’s clear that they are working hard. The work ethic of bees is impressive! I think people like that bees put in a hard day’s work, collecting food for themselves and their brood. It makes us think kindly of them, the working class insect.

4.) The ecosystem service

Maybe my first three reasons seem a bit silly and have left you unconvinced, so I will end with a more scientific explanation. We’ve known for some time that bees make excellent pollinators, and pollination is an important ecosystem service. In 2006 Science published two studies describing declines in pollinators in Europe and North America. These findings were compounded by the emergence of colony collapse disorder just a year or so later, leading to intense fear that our helpful honeybees were experiencing declines in population that they simply wouldn’t be able to recover from. The next question was what will be the impact of declining bee populations on food security? Turns out it’s rather significant. Studies have shown that the global economic value of pollination is over €153 billion. Furthermore, a study in March demonstrated that honeybees cannot replace the value of pollination services from wild pollinators; we can’t just worry about the honeybees, wild bees are important to increasing yields as well. Food security is not something we tend to take lightly, so our pollinators have intrinsic value. This helps explain the incredible media coverage bees have been receiving lately, especially regarding the European ban of neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides that have been shown to be harmful to bees.

I wonder though, how many people know the facts about how important bees are to the ecosystem service of pollination and therefore food security? How many people really like them because they are fuzzy, make sweet honey, and are hard workers? I suppose you could argue that it doesn’t matter why people are attracted to bees, it’s positive regardless because it encourages money to be spent on research into why they are declining and how we can conserve their populations. I think it’s helpful to try to understand why bees have become a sort of flagship species. That way we can better understand what traits cause humans to assign intrinsic value to organisms for future conservation work.

Author

Erin Jo Tiedeken: tiedekee[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

08/03/2013

Fly Away Home

The University of Exeter team visited Ireland this week as part of their ongoing investigation into the biology of the Brent Goose. This species has a remarkable migration, spanning from Northern Canada to Western Europe. The team collects DNA samples, blood for stable isotope analysis and various morphometric and behavioural data. We joined them on Wednesday to help out.

Author

Adam Kane: kanead[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

Adam Kane

04/03/2013

Could the ‘drone’ be a new technology to survey African wildlife?

Nazinga Game Ranch is a protected area in southern Burkina Faso, dominated by clear shrub and woody savannah and home to one of the most important elephant populations of the Western Africa.

Researchers from the University of Gembloux Agrobiotech in Belgium tested one of the first unmanned aerial surveys to study the wildlife of Nazinga. They achieved this study using ‘drone’ technology i.e. a small Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) (pictured). This technology was shown to have the potential to be a valuable alternative to current walk and light aircraft survey techniques.

The Belgian researchers tested different aspects of this new technology on the wildlife and more particularly on elephants. Firstly they wanted to know if the animals reacted when the UAS passed over and found no animal flight or warning reactions were recorded when the plane passed over at a height of 100 meters. Secondly they flew the UAS at different heights (from 100 meters to 700 meters) and showed that only elephants are visible at these heights (while the medium and small sized mammals are not). The pictures taken at a height of 100 meters do however allow easy observation of the elephants.

In the light of this information one elephant survey has been completed in Nazinga Game Ranch so far. This UAS aerial survey has revealed several advantages in comparison to the traditional plane based surveying: (1) an easier flight implementation as a very short airfield is needed, (2) low safety risks as there is no pilot on board, (3) higher reliability in rough weather conditions, and (4) a lower global cost. However, to be able to cover hundred kilometres at a time it is important to improve the flight time of the small UAS as for the moment it is quite low.

Technological improvement of some aspects of the drone will make it more efficient and in the future could compete the light aircraft to monitor the wildlife in Africa.

Author

Florence Hecq: fhecq[at]tcd.ie

Photo Credit

Vermeulen C, Lejeune P, Lisein J, Sawadogo P, Bouché P (2013) Unmanned Aerial Survey of Elephants. PLoS ONE 8(2): e54700. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0054700

22/02/201318/02/2019

The buzz on neonicotinoids

On the 31st January, stimulated by a European Food Safety Authority report, the EU proposed banning three neonicotinoid insecticides which have been implicated in causing honeybee decline. These insecticides are widely-used, systemic (i.e. soluble enough in water to move around the plant’s vascular system to nearly all plant tissues), and, like nicotine, affect the insects’ central nervous system. They are highly effective at reducing insect pests that feed on crops and reduce yields and value, and many farmers are concerned about the effect the proposed ban will have on crop production. But these insecticides can also end up in the nectar and pollen of crops (as well as in the soil and in non-crop plants), and thus can have unintended side-effects on beneficial, nectar-feeding insects, who act as pollinators. Especially bees.

Bee decline has become a hot topic with scientists, the media, the public and even some politicians, but until recently the threat of neonicotinoids to bees has not been seriously implicated in their decline. Concern about pollinator decline is a result of the important role that pollinators play in food production: 75% of crop species depend on animal pollinators, which translates into 35% of global production; and the total annual economic value of pollination has been estimated at €153 billion globally. In addition, pollinators are fundamental to most terrestrial ecosystems, and indirectly affect the availability of food for other organisms (e.g. fruits and berries for frugivorous birds), as well as the structure and functioning of ecosystems.

So here’s the paradox: flower-visiting insects including bees are really important for agricultural production. But so is the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. Which is more important and is the ban justified on scientific grounds?

In the last year, the evidence that neonicotinoids have negative impacts on bees has been mounting. Bees and other flower-visiting insects are exposed to neonicotinoid pesticides in multiple ways: during planting of seeds which have been coated with pesticides as a pre-planting treatment, by collecting pollen and nectar from the crop, and by foraging on non-crop plants which take the pesticide up through the soil. Traditionally, toxicological tests of agrochemicals are carried out on the managed honeybee Apis mellifera, and pesticides are rated according to their lethal effects (by calculating the LD50 – the dose required to kill half the organisms tested after a specified duration). But the biology of Apis and all the other bee species (20,000 of them worldwide) is different. Can we generalise about effects on Apis, to effects on other bee species, and other pollinating insects including hoverflies and butterflies? And what about sub-lethal effects, i.e. those that don’t kill the insects, but affect their physiolology, behaviour and fitness?

Neonicotinoids are highly toxic to insects – that’s the whole point of them. Bees are insects. So it shouldn’t be too much of a shock that they kill bees. Last year it was shown that neonicotinoids can also have sub-lethal effects in honeybees, by decreasing foraging success and navigation by individuals back to the hive. At the same time, the neonicotinoid pesticide, imidacloprid, can reduce bumblebee colony growth and fitness by affecting their feeding behaviour. Some dissenters have cast doubt on the field-relevance of laboratory tests, claiming that field-realistic dosages have not been used, but this is not the case – the concentration of imidacloprid in oilseed rape flowers for example has been found to be 4.4-7.6 mg/kg in pollen and 0.6-0.8 mg/kg in nectar, which was within the range tested on bumblebees. This is pretty convincing evidence that neonicotinoids can cause very adverse effects on populations of these social bees.

Although neonicotinoids are not the only cause of widespread bee decline, they are more than likely contributing to it. Some of the agrochemical companies are claiming that bee decline has nothing to do with their chemicals and instead blame decline on Varroa destructor, the parasitic mite which infects honeybee colonies. Whilst Varroa probably plays its part in honeybee decline, the most probable cause of decline in other bee species is multiple pressures, including habitat loss and loss of forage plants, AND the use of neonicotinoid pesticides.

So should these insecticides be banned? YES, if we want to address pollinator decline. They should not be used for insect-pollinated crops, and wind-pollinated crops that insects forage on (including maize). But what’s the alternative for the farmer? How can crop production be maintained in the absence of these chemicals? Use something worse? If we’ve learned anything since Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” published 50 years ago last year, it’s that an alternative will be found, and we can’t be sure that this won’t be worse for the bees and other pollinating insects.

Author

Jane Stout: stoutj@tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

15/02/2013

Coursing conundrum

At first glance, many scientific ideas can appear counterintuitive. A press release from a leading Irish wildlife charity in support of the proposed coursing ban prompted me to attempt to balance the discussion of coursing impacts on the Irish hare population. The bill to ban coursing is due to come before the Dáil in the coming months. However, the above press release immediately struck me as biased, and so I felt a discussion of coursing impacts was required before the public were asked to sign any petitions in support of this ban. For those unsure of just what coursing is, it is a popular field sport which consists of a hare being chased by a pair of greyhounds over a short distance. Unlike fox and deer hunting, the aim of coursing is not to kill the hare. It is instead a speed and agility competition between two dogs, where each is awarded points depending on its ability to “turn” the hare from a direct route along the field. Irish hares (Lepus timidus hibernicus Bell 1837) are caught and held in captivity prior to an event during which the hare is coursed within an enclosed park. A running hare is given a 75m head start before the release of two dogs, whose performance is assessed by a judge, and surviving hares escape into an area from which the dogs are excluded. The duration of the pursuit is relatively brief, usually lasting less than a minute, and surviving hares are returned to the wild after the event.

The IWT states something which a few of us may agree with; that Ireland is lagging behind in terms of its attitude to welfare and conservation of native wildlife. However, the idea that a coursing ban would in some way improve this status is highly questionable. Welfare issues need to be taken into account, but these considerations must be viewed in parallel with the beneficial aspects of coursing, such as habitat conservation and the associated protection of both target and non-target species, before any final judgements regarding coursing acceptability can be made. It is perhaps unintuitive, but evidence indicates that coursing has an extremely large positive impact on hare numbers. Mortality of coursed hares stands at just 4.1% since the implementation of dog muzzling in 1993, and research has found coursing to have negligible impacts on hare populations due their large intrinsic rates of increase. People who participate in coursing maximise hare populations in coursing preserves through predator control and set aside to conserve habitat suited to the Irish hare. In fact, it is agricultural intensification (an issue completely ignored in the IWT article) which is more likely to blame for population declines. Habitat management to encourage target species for hunting can protect against the detrimental effects of modern agricultural policy on biodiversity. Irish Coursing Club preserves host a hare density 3 times greater than that supported by the wider countryside. What is more probable is that coursing is actually stemming the tide of anthropogenic destruction of many species our native wildlife (including corncrakes and many other farmland bird species) through habitat conservation aimed at artificially increasing hare populations for coursing. If coursing were to be banned in this country, this practice would be completely abandoned due to waning interest in encouraging hare numbers, and could potentially have serious ramifications for other wildlife which benefit from associated habitat management and predator control. Incentives to promote hare conservation would be required, but it’s questionable whether these would produce the same results as coursing-associated management due to a lack of personal interest for farmers and other landowners who practice coursing. Hare conservation in the absence of coursing, similar to that of other species benefiting from game management, would be a costly endeavour and would be unlikely to be awarded the necessary funding in the Republic of Ireland with the current economic climate.

We have the opportunity to be forward-thinking, innovative and inclusive in the way in which we achieve sustainable conservation of our native wildlife, something which appears all the more important in light of the EU agricultural policy reforms which were leaked in recent days. We can only hope that a review of the research will stop the Dáil bowing to ill-informed political pressure and perhaps, the future of farmland birds and our only endemic mammal, the Irish hare, will be ensured.

Author

Emma Murphy: butlere1[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons

06/02/201306/02/2013

The Flora of the Future

It’s the year 2050. Several billion more humans occupy the world, and species translocations are by now the norm to mitigate against increased urban sprawl, climatic instability and a sea level now a third of a metre higher. In spite of unprecedented demands on the natural environment, governments have slowly developed capacity for conservation of wilderness and semi-natural habitat. Beyond this even, with the vast majority of the human race by now living in cities and the continued trend of rural land abandonment; restoration ecology has come to the fore at entire landscape and regional scales. The concept of ‘rewilding’ is debated openly amongst politicians and the public – no longer the mere theoretical exercise of academics. The monetary value of ecosystem services is also by now a very real and tangible concept within economic circles, embedded within highly developed metrics such as green-GDP. Despite such positive developments, however, problematic legacies of the past remain. Intensification of agriculture has been unrelenting globally, notwithstanding inroads into adoption of agroecosystem approaches. A transition to truly renewable energy sources is still incomplete and of utmost urgency. One of the most critical questions of all most likely still looms – have we yet done enough to put a cap in the peak of this, the sixth great mass-extinction of life on the planet?

And so, it is within this future and none-the-less challenging world we find the modern ecologist and biodiversity practitioner at work.

What kind of new and useful technologies may exist to help tackle such problems and challenges of the not so distant future? It is interesting to deliberate on one low-tech tool in particular (the so-called bread and butter of biodiversity), which has been with us already for centuries – and that is the humble species checklist. Specifically we take a look at the Flora – and although coverage here is rather phyto-centric, it should be easy to draw equivalents to all forms of taxa, without (too) much stretch of the imagination.

So what is a Flora in the traditional sense, why is this changing, and how will the Flora of the Future look and function? To briefly tackle these first two questions, a Flora is primarily a list of plant biodiversity (either with or without diagnostic characters and keys) within a specified geographic range, be it local, national or at larger scales. Outside of this basic function there are the ‘added-extras’, which may include notes on distribution, ecology, synonymy, conservation status and even ethnobotanical use. Often the assemblage of national-level Floras has proven quite a mammoth task; logistically challenging, fraught with funding difficulties, and above all time-consuming – with efforts spanning over several decades for particularly biodiverse countries. This is all very well, and such traditional Floras have and will continue to serve as invaluable tools. In this modern age, however, change is called for to tackle some common short-comings of the Flora. A considerable amount of valuable information collected by taxonomists and other experts in the production process is typically lost, never making its way into the public realm – and when such publications can easily run to over 20 volumes, it is clear to see the major constraints involved. Another key drawback is the sheer speed at which redundancy can occur. Even before the final volume of a Flora is published, taxa (species/genera/families) covered within the first volumes may have long been ripe for new taxonomic treatment.

The revolution in how biological information is collected, stored and disseminated is already greatly influencing the Flora. One of the most recently initiated national-level projects is the Flora of Nepal project, for which advances in biodiversity informatics have permeated the entire process from preparation to publication. Although the Flora of Nepal will still be published in printed format, a (if not the) main focus will be an E-Flora freely accessible online, which will also greatly expand the availability of information assembled by experts. A simple yet very significant feature will be the ease of portability of numerous volumes to the field in digital format. Though perhaps most critically, the Flora of Nepal will be maintained and updated to reflect new findings – creating for the first time, in essence, an evolving Flora.

Before we really begin to speculate on the form and function of our Flora of the Future, we must first take a look to the current cutting edge of biodiversity informatics. In what must be one of the most significant advances in decades, the cooperative development of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) by many governments and organisations has promoted and facilitated the “mobilization, access, discovery and use of information about the occurrence of organisms”. This centralized repository of earth’s biodiversity is fast set to reach one billion indexed records within a few years from now, fed from diverse sources ranging from individuals to national biodiversity data centres. It is difficult to envisage how the Flora of the Future could in any plausible way side-step such a global network. Whereas floras have traditionally featured a top-down, expert driven synthesis – the Flora of the Future will also no doubt integrate the emergent trend of bottom-up assembly of knowledge – a good example of which is currently purveyed by the Encyclopaedia of Life.

Let’s get back now to our future ecologists and biodiversity practitioners, and take a little look in as they go about conducting their fieldwork. No matter what habitat or location they study in worldwide, they will each possess a small handheld device connected to the Flora of the Future. Automation of species identification by means of this device will have removed a large bottleneck in their work – leaving ecologists to focus on actual ecology. No longer will they be bound to a particular geographic territory due to limited floristic familiarity – we will witness a complete opening of boundaries, and greater migration of ‘western’ ecologists to the frontline of areas of global biodiversity importance.

But just how exactly could such a device work? A potential basis could feature a combination of machine-learning morphometrics and DNA barcoding – two presently very promising tools. For the former, development of algorithms for auto-identification of plant species is already well underway (see for example the Leafsnap mobile app). These function much like facial recognition technology, and through input of a digital scan/photo can pinpoint unique morphological characteristics required for successful classification. A key aspect of machine learning is removal of subjectivity by conversion of shapes into numerical descriptions – no need for argument any longer on just how ‘subglobose’ a feature is; the ball is already in motion towards a predictive and integrative taxonomy. Upon scanning a specimen in the field, an image will be broken down into key morphometric characteristics, and referenced against a large central database within the Flora of the Future. The Flora will prioritize this procedure by first referencing against species known to occur within a certain radius from where the user currently stands (a useful feature in itself!). The ecologist, on the spot, may learn that the specimen has a confirmed match, and proceed to download key local statistics of importance. On the other hand, this specimen may in fact represent an extension of the species known distributional range. The finding, however, of no known match in the database could spell discovery of a new species, whereas a positive match with notably low morphometric agreement may indicate new subspecific taxa or otherwise interesting findings (for which DNA barcoding could be employed for further verification in both cases).

Regardless of outcome, the above three scenarios will have allowed for a real-time and in situ solution to identification of species. The exact significance of this process will not only lie in the freeing up of both ecologists’ and taxonomists’ resources, but in the real-time flagging of new discoveries. As it stands, it is expected that discovery of remaining undescribed plant species will be an incredibly inefficient process (given that 50% of the world’s plant species have been discovered by only 2% of plant collectors), despite the vast number of these thought to exist. A recent study examining the exact inefficiency of the production chain from collection to publication uncovered that “on average, more than two decades pass between the first collection of samples of a new species and the publication of the species’ description in scientific literature”. In other words, a specimen of a new species has physically passed through the hands of many people before the simple ‘discovery’ (perhaps after many, many years in a herbarium) that it is something new to science. In this sense, an important function of the Flora of the Future will be instant recognition (perhaps even while standing in the field!) of a new discovery as just that – which can drastically reduce this presently overblown timeframe and waste of resources.

Getting back to the future for now, we see our biodiversity practitioners and ecologists as key players in the advancement of ecological as well as taxonomic discovery, with a highly efficient yet passive ability for discovery embedded within the commonplace tools they use, as they go about their work. With an entirely streamlined approach to field research, and identification no longer a daunting prospect in the study and documentation of biodiversity, we will eventually see the peak of mass extinction pass, looking back behind us. The challenges of tomorrow are no doubt great, and a renewed vigour for the taxonomic process will be critical for progress on these fronts. The Flora of the Future will for the first time sew a seamless line between ecologists and taxonomy; the essential currency of biodiversity.

Author

Paul Egan: eganp5[at]tcd.ie

Photo Credit

Paul Egan

14/12/201217/12/2012

Gorillas and/or potatoes?

If you were given a resource that could guarantee revenue of $30 million every year, with almost triple that amount additionally coming through ancillary spending, would you ignore it? If this resource then had the power to lift some of the most marginalised people on the planet out of poverty, you would even think twice? Gorilla tourism in Rwanda is this valuable and the people living around Volcanoes National Park (one of the few remaining islands for this species) are some of the poorest in Africa. My research into interactions between the national park and local farmers has revealed that control of land is one of the key factors in creating conflict between the ideals of national park management and those of subsistence farmers. When people have little control over what they grow in this highly fertile region, either through government land use consolidation initiatives or private agro-industry, the impact of buffalos raiding potato fields or gorillas decimating eucalyptus plantations is exacerbated. The catch is, cultural values and hierarchies in Rwanda mean that leadership will be followed, as changes are effected unquestioningly. One solution is to increase the proportion of tourism revenue shared with local communities, instilling a feeling of ownership, and responsibility for, their forest. But this can only come with livelihood autonomy.

Author

Shane McGuinness: mcguinsk[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

Shane McGuinness

15/11/201215/11/2012

Cod, correlation and causation

Stephen Leahy at the Guardian reports on a battle between science and politics which is worth highlighting. The Atlantic cod fisheries in the Atlantic collapsed during the 90s due to overfishing. They have yet to recover. The Atlantic cod is an apex predator and its decline effected a trophic cascade, which modified the original food web, perhaps irrevocably.

The Canadian government is holding the grey seal responsible for this. They argue that the seals, which are growing in number, are preventing the recovery of the stocks and are planning to kill 70,000 of them next year.

This has vexed a group of marine biologists at Dalhousie University so much that they wrote an open letter arguing that cod are rarely preyed upon by the seals. Instead, the cod’s main predators are other, larger fishes. And in actual fact, the seal preferentially feeds on these fishes. So any reduction in seal numbers will produce the opposite result to the one intended, seals will be killed, the predatory fish population will increase, and the cod population will decline even further.

Correlation does not imply causation. But perhaps, the view of the Canadian government is that of Winston Churchill who once remarked, scientists should be on tap, not on top. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Author

Adam Kane: kanead[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

wikimedia commons