FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem, they were imported from europe. They are likely important if not critical to the pollination of several cash crops, but they're not an ecosystem concern in and of themselves.
However giant asian hornets are rather indiscriminate in their hunting, in fact their main prey in japan are large insects like mantises (as well as other hornets). GAH taking root in the US would be an unmitigated disaster all around, not just for beekeeping.
For instance, if you were trying to reestablish some some native pollinator, reducing honey bee pressure might be part of that plan. Even possible a critical one. But just killing them and walking away? That probably won’t end well. It would be irresponsible to do so.
Even removing invasive species of plants involves a succession plan, so the same thing doesn’t happen again, or something worse moves into the vacuum. I know a couple people who could fill a whole workshop on what people often get wrong here (and I’ve encouraged one of them to do so, but no luck), but they would both agree that what gets done, flawed as it can be (especially in walking away too soon) is better than the status quo, or removal and neglect.
Odds are, insect populations would also adapt to their disappearance.
I’d imagine from what I’ve read that a significant chunk of bees are already artificially produced and distributed for crops.
That plus of course combined with a general ongoing attempt at eradication of the hornets. Or at least significant population control.
Or is agriculture simply too widespread and complicated (or ‘naturally’ dependent) for such a thing?
We could make lasers driven by ML to identify the hornets and shoot them down as they approach a hive, but that would be really expensive :)
It would be an excellent grad CSS project. Identifying the Giant Wasps with 99.9% or whatever accuracy and deploying some defensive mechanism.
The problem like you said would be(e) infinitely expensive to deploy to all of the many thousands of randomly placed hives. But maybe useful for the industrial pollinator companies, which is a big thriving industry.
Anyway, I just like these sort of clever tech solutions.
There has to be plenty of solutions to this (major) problem we haven't thought of yet.
I don't think the bees really have any input.
Well, neither are most of the crops the Europeans started growing in America. They brought everything from apple species to wheat.
Not all of these are self-pollinating, so they had to bring bees too.
The main advantage of honeybees is that they are domesticated, and we can take them where we want. If your orchard has a healthy population of orchard bees, great, and there are ways to promote orchard bees, but the honeybees can actually be brought in on demand.
The flip side is that European honeybees can not pollinate native crops very well. For that, the native pollinators are very efficient. Native pollinators are threatened by the feral colonies of European honeybees and their introduced diseases like nosema, varroa, mites, and foulbrood. It's like smallpox blankets all over again as infected honeybee colonies are trucked all over the country to spread pollen and disease on various introduced European cops.
That being said there are lots of animals that can't be domesticated. Zebras are the classic example, being very similar to domesticated horses but are much more aggressive and unpredictable.
Honeybees also work well with mono-cropping because you can easily pick up and move the entire hive from massive field to massive field just in time for pollination. If you are relying on a wild bee population they'll do better when they have lots of plants in bloom across a wide spectrum of time so they have a chance to build up their population before the major blooms eg the orchard you want pollinated. Otherwise you run the risk of only have a small bee population that can't fully take advantage of (and pollinate) the suddenly massive resource glut of several square miles of orchards suddenly in bloom at once.
Interestingly, we have records of contemporary impressions of tarpans and aurochs, back when they weren't extinct. They tended to be described in terms like "absolutely untamable".
But of course they weren't.
https://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/plants/ornamentals/p...
We are loosing biodiversity at a rate comparable to the last mass extinctions, we are loosing our "life support systems" as climate/biodiv. experts say, yet no one is concerned.
This is beyond the worst i ever expected in my worst nightmares. And this is happening now.
And no one says a world. No one even dare spending 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.
If we go extinct (with 95% of the other species first) it will be well deserved.
By the way, the science says that the dynamics are NOT in our favour: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...
> And no one says a world. No one even dare spending
> 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.
Well, no one I know, and no one they know, has been hurt by the coronavirus. And the list of people I know includes two people from Wuhan. If we went out a third degree, we would likely start to pick up victims.
On the other hand, I do personally know someone who was injured by the response; this person responded so badly to the lockdown that they had to be committed.
It's possible that the existence of a pandemic isn't what people are denying...
Don't worry, considering how things are going, that will change this winter.
Unless you are in New Zealand.
At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.
As George Carlin said, we need to stop framing these issues as “saving the Earth.” The Earth will be fine. This is about saving ourselves.
Same goes for climate change. The Earth has been very warm in the past, even ice free. The Earth will be fine. The question is whether the >10 billion humans that may be on it as climate change starts to really manifest will be fine.
I like Elon’s way of putting climate change: sure we may be wrong at least a bit, but is it wise to take our best habitable planet and dump a shitload of CO2 into the atmosphere and then just see what happens because YOLO?
He certainly can't personally stop climate change, but maybe in theory he can get a step closer to building an ark.
Hope/push for the former, prepare for the latter.
Have you seen how Mars looks like? What the conditions are like? Temperature? Atmosphere? Radiation? Ecosystems (none)? Water (none)? Breathable air (none)? How could that ever be more inviting than earth?
As we have seen in this pandemic, even selling it like that isn't a recipe for success.
>> It'll still be running some code...
until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction
Yet, while I lack any deep understanding why they would re-emerge, paleontology seems to show a long history of mass extinctions down to very low levels, then re-emergence of more complex forms.
One theory that I read of a few years back posited that life, and higher forms in particular, are more efficient at increasing entropy, i.e., diffusing heat, and so are systemically favored (seen nothing on it in a few years, so no idea of its current state; if anyone recognizes it and can provide a link, thanks in advance!).
This a surprisingly and pleasingly apt analogy given that DNA/RNA are indeed code being 'run' by life.
Technical audiences usually go with the "technology, right or wrong" angle (as nationalists go with "my country, right or wrong").
It's more about identity validation and peer group thinking than critical and systems thinking. Plus they're into technology because they disproportionally like, glorify, and are attracted by tech in the first place.
A year ago, there was a fascinating episode of "Nature" on PBS about keystone species. It's available for free online streaming here [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species
[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/2...
A lot of people seem to think that if you "destroy" an ecosystem it is a step toward a lifeless environment.
Here's some comments: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6049/1547.6
We have honey bees in Japan. While I agree it will have huge implications, it’ll hardly be the last of them.
That said, I’d rather murder hornets go away everywhere.
I love having hornets on my property if their nest isn't located in a path I have to cross. They also eat wasps and you won't have any problems with them throughout the summer. They don't try to eat your cake or drink you lemonade and you can peacefully chill in your garden.
They always leave their nest after a season and it can make quite a mess. But nothing is better than having them in a remote location in your garden. It is better than any insect spray.
But you still might seriously want to get rid of them because they could indeed do a lot of damage in another ecosystem that needs to sacrifice several species until it adapts.
> "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."
I don't think that's the case. I think you're giving humanity too much credit. If humanity kills itself from overpopulation and overconsumption, the earth will do just fine without us. Even if we harm it as badly as we did with something like the Chernobyl disaster (look how it has bounced back there).
We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history and billions of years from now we may not be here, but the earth probably will be.
> We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history
That's exactly the problem. We're causing massive changes on a much shorter timescale than evolution operates on. I think it's likely the global ecosystem will struggle to adapt.
Mass extinctions in the past were over a timescale of thousands of years, so there was some time for evolutionary "computation" to adapt.
Human mass extinction is occurring on the timescale of decades.
What position do you mean? Your comment is not replying to anybody.
I don't see anybody in this thread who is arguing that we should do nothing.
Pretty cool to watch actually: https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1320152207212253185
https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...
For things like apples, it's actually affordable to pay humans to do it. Which is not to say that bee's aren't better than humans in most ways, just that it doesn't come down to 'no options'.
And like other people are saying, honeybees are livestock, they aren't 'nature'.
Hand pollination of apples is already sometimes done in China.
You seem to be speaking from an unquantifiably elevated position of privilege.
https://www.wired.com/2014/05/will-we-still-have-fruit-if-be...
Wonder how the economics are now!
Ya. Cognitive dissonance. Humankind has full agency (dominion) with an utter refusal to even acknowledge consequences, much less accept responsibility.
"Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections."
Yup.
In the Anthropocene, we are the gardeners. Laissez faire is a terrible gardening strategy.
There is no safe harbor. We will always need nature to sustain ourselves.
We are nature, full stop. But if you include our digestive tracts, that fact is inescapable. We are a sentient bioreactors. I’m thinking we can destroy nature and keep going is suicide.
Mars, apparently.
This sentiment is too simplifying. Yes, the planet, as in a spinning celestial object with a molten core, solid surface with water, and an atmosphere will be fine, so to speak, but the vast amounts of flora and fauna will not and haven’t been. Some will make it, but I don’t define that as “fine”.
Many animal species, if they haven’t already gone extinct have been suffering deeply. Take a look at the southern resident orca population. We captured, killing many in the process, and enslaved them, all of which served to torture those enslaved and break up the matriarchal hierarchies that existed. This left new, untrained leaders in the population. Before then and since then, we have poisoned them and have completely decimated their food source. These are direct consequences of unneeded, self serving actions of humans. We also harass them sonically. This is a population that is already and has been having a “bad time”, and it’s likely the population will go extinct. The cause of all this is 100% humans. Now take this example and multiply it by the thousands if not millions of species also going extinct and having bad times. Humans and our technological development combined literally form an extinction event.
I see this line a lot but everyday humans are doing irreparable damage to ecosystems. Taking millions of years to heal from events is not ‘fine’.
His point was that we're killing ourself. An ecosystem and a planet will continue existing, the question is whether humans will exist on it.
I think it’s similar to how we view viruses.
And the almost uncountable plants and animals that are already extinct. At least when we go the others will be able to stay.
There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee
Sorry, what?
https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/native-bees-often-bette...
I haven't got it out for honey bees, but as your comment makes clear, native species are underappreciated.
> So why the global obsession with the one species that makes honey? For one, honey bees have hives, which makes them easy to keep and transfer en masse. For another, some native bees are picky about which flowers they prefer and where they live. As a result, commercial pollination is almost wholly dependant on honey bees.
> ...The goal of all this work is not to replace honey bees, but to pinpoint which native bees are effective, what they can offer and how to lure them into visiting and pollinating.
From what the article describes, the honey bee is uniquely suited for the niche we need it for, and there is no other species even remotely as well adapted -- though they're trying to figure out if any other species could be made to work in some lesser capacity.
So it doesn't seem that native species are underappreciated -- just that there are very good reasons we use the honeybee instead.
In some places I know similar species are actually grown for commercial pollination, so it'll vary from place to place for sure.
It's not about socialism or capitalism here, scarce resources and humans need regulation
healthcare being ran by a union of worker coops, that all pay taxes into the union of unions to manage healthcare for all members (workers and consumers who are members of the union)... Don't want to be part of the union then don't and if your employer still has their own health ins. use that, or maybe they use ours anyways cause it'd be better... Either way options still exist with the best ones rising to the top like normal capitalism, just CEOs and execs wouldn't be paid as well, because their value is a lot less than they think it is.
A balanced society as you say, can only come from something that's not capitalism or communism both of which are authoritarian or oligarchical at the very least.
Ancom, I think is the best solution with the least amount of friction. I mean all it requires to get started is for people to form a union, start some union-owned businesses, put the profits back into healthcare for all members of the union. Anyone can become a member who wants to (might have a dues though), then they'd be encourage to buy from union businesses, who will in turn use that $$ to pay medical bills for all union members. If there's surplus everyone gets dividends, and workers get big bonuses.
Free market propaganda often sets up a black/white dichotomy between capitalism and communism/central planning, then uses the failures of regimes like the Soviet Union to attempt to train readers to think that any deviation from capitalism will lead to similar disasters.
No, they're absolutely capitalist. Workers own the means of production in no "healthy" "functioning" government in the world.
This whole idea is very batshit insane too.
What do you propose instead?
This is solely due to the industrialization of agriculture.
Leaving fallow portions of the field and growing native crops winds up with an assortment of pollinators--including a lot of native bees.
The problem is that they are less efficient. So, a farmer who does this will lose to a farmer who uses industrialized honeybees.
This is a standard case of privatize the profit and socialize the risk.
Working towards reducing that reliance sounds like a better investment than hoping that a fragile system keeps stable if we undo the changes we noticed we cause (a system that had multiple extinction events in the past)
We don't need to "reduce our reliance on nature". We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Whether it be on planet-scale or otherwise. We don't exist in a vacuum.
That's a matter of perspective. I would say they happen all the time.
Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes, advanced construction makes us resilient to earthquakes, etc. etc.
There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
I’m not sure why you think that plant pollination needs a new solution in the first place. We’ve been working with bees for centuries and we’ve used them as a tool. Bees are themselves an optimal method for pollination created though thousands of years of natural progress.
Colonizing Mars continues to be a pipe dream and even if/when people start living there it’s going to be full of compromises and discomfort. And we’ll still have billions of people stuck on earth.
Technology isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems.
Technological optimists have had a poor record over the past 50+ years. Infotech is the exception rather than the rule, and even it has encountered progressively formidable headwinds.
Heating and cooling necessarily heat the exterior of the heated or cooled environment more than they do heat or cool the interior. As the temperature warms, you need to cool your interior space even more, pumping yet more heat into the surrounds. For one, all that energy has to come from somewhere. For two, hopefully you don’t drive the system beyond a point where your heating and cooling can keep up.
> There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
There is a huge, vast, expansive, unimaginably large, ridiculously wide chasm between “working on plans to colonize Mars” and “actually colonizing Mars.” In the meantime, we’ve got ~10 billion people dependent on the existing ecosystem we’ve got here. Keeping that global ecosystem healthy enough to support those people without massive die-offs or total chaos, without the benefit of any globally organized effort to speak of, is deeply and profoundly not trivial, probably much less trivial than supporting a very small population on another planet.
Plus, even if we do manage to colonize another world without first learning how to maintain the one we have, what exactly is the end game? Hop from planet to planet, destroying any life we find or create along the way?
If we were to think long-term, we could stop this invasive species. Crop duster planes spray everything within at least several generations or years of insect migration. That might mean 10,000 square miles gets completely soaked in a mix of Sevin, Malathion, and neonicotinoids.
Compared to the roughly 16,300,000 square miles at risk of being irrevocably harmed by an invasive species, that local and temporary ecosystem damage would be practically nothing.
We'll argue a bit and do nothing. The wasps are here to stay. Say goodbye to bees.
Consider climate change. Let's take it as given that climate change is an existental threat to humanity, and that it is caused by carbon dumped into the atmosphere by mankind. If this is true, then we need to leverage the full arsenal of technology available to us to solve the problem.
Nuclear power is a solution we have in-hand, today, to atmospheric carbon.
Of course, it comes with trade-offs. Nuclear waste is a big downside, but nuclear waste is a tiny annoyance compared to a runaway greenhouse effect.
And yet, environmentalists have, for sixty years, fought tooth-and-nail against nuclear power.
This brings me to the point: the track record of environmentalists, and the of green movement, shows that they do not care about the environment, nor do they care about solving real problems with real solutions for real people.
What they do seem to care about is money. Especially taxpayer money, because once you're in, the gravy never stops. Actually solving problems doesn't matter, as long as you look busy and get interviewed on MSNBC and NPR a lot.
The image of the envrionmentalist is of someone who will chain themselves to trees to protest their university building a new parking lot, with lots of pictures for Instagram and the news, but only until the semester break. Instead of organizing transportation and/or walkable housing for other students, thereby eliminating the demand for additional parking.
The opposition by-and-large cares very deeply about the environment. You'd be hard-pressed to find more environmentally-conscious folks than in the hunting and homesteading communities.
But they also believe, from observed behavior, that environmentalists are mostly interested in prolonging the problem while making themselves rich.
Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey ( duh ). But they are more useful than just that: people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them. If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops.
There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications.
What are you proposing exactly? We stand back and lose all of our biodiversity because we have to pay a few conservationists 1/5 of a mediocre SAAS CEO's salary? Give me a break.
Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves. "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money."
And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?