As suggested by others the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods), who are actually working on collecting and identify species has most certainly declined. In many groups of insects there is at most a handful of experts worldwide who can take specimens to a species-level identification.
This is not to say that species richness is not declining, its to say that in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important, and why they require fixed, institutionally-based funding to actually be able to provide the services that would allow us to confidently state that data like these are because of environmental change (again, they very likely are) rather than a lack of experts in the field actually doing basic research.
In other words, it is extremely rare that universities (in the US) actually hire what was once known as "alpha-taxonomists", in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved) in part it is a reflection of the (I would argue "immense") short-sightedness of institutions. "We want answers to complex questions! We've neglected to give scientists time to think deeply, and research over decades to answer those questions. Oh, we see."
in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important
Without disputing your claim, why is this taxonomists' job? Imagine spending 10-15 years of academic work to get a PhD and become the world expert on something important but obscure, and then being told you need to market yourself to the general public and devote a significant portion of your time to answering stupid questions (as in 'who cares about this boring stuff' as opposed to 'what is the airspeed of a pigeon').
If I understand your 3rd paragraph correctly, maybe the real problem here is university administrators ending up actually in charge of things rather than as mere functionaries whose job is to facilitate the academics' goals, mysterious as those may be.Every single academic person I know loathes the administrators of their institutions (as a class rather than at the individual level, though I can think of exceptions) but seem helpless to displace them.
This is a reflection of a crazy society that sees everything as a "product" that needs to be "advertised". If there is a scientific branch that needs no explanation of its importance is taxonomy. If a nation is stupid enough not to understand the importance of this, then it should not even label itself a modern, civilized society.
That's seems a bit unfair. It's not about "products" or "advertising", or society being stupid, there has to be communication from researchers to wider society, research has to be allied to education.
To act in a stupid manner means to ignore obvious reality.
Society is the collective sum of its individuals.
Our collective sum of individuals is acting in a way which ignores the very obvious reality that it's quickly destroying the biome on which we are dependent.
Therefore, I would say that our society is being stupid.
Right, I fully agree with that, but that's not what the comment I was replying to said: the parent said that society (in a nation) was stupid for not recognising [what is to parent] the self-evident importance of the scientific specialisation of taxonomy. And sure, that is important, but equally so are thousands of other academic specialisations. The point is that a specialisation has to communicate their importance to wider society, has to educate. That isn't a new thing, or capitalism, or a creeping anti-elitism, or productisation of universities, or whatever. It's just something that has to be done. Calling people idiots because they don't pay attention to a specific specialisation among thousands -- what is gained from that? It feels good to do that, but it doesn't help, it doesn't change people's bearing. It may be that people are just really, really thick! We'll just say that instead of communicating the importance of something!
And I get that ignorance may be societally self destructive. That there are cultural/economic/societal systems that actively suppress communication
Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they should be asking for. If the world doesn’t see taxonomists’ worth on their own, it is up to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs.
We don’t have unlimited research funds and they need to play the game just like everyone else. Taxonomy has a tougher time of illustrating value compared to cancer research (as one example), but they still need to convince people that they should be funded.
Hopefully the field will figure this out before there is a crisis. As a recent example, the field of public health usually struggles to get funding compared to individual medicine. Before the COVID-19 pandemic very few people saw the value in having robust public health policy, agencies, and research, especially when they considered that they could add a new wing to a hospital or buy ambulances with the same money. Public health as a field did a poor job of convincing people that the field had something valuable to offer. Hopefully taxonomy can figure out how to convince the world that they offer something valuable before they go extinct (pun intended).
The whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from this sort of thing and give them room to work, instead of retroactively justifying their existence and life choices to pundits or politicians in search of a soft target.
It seems like we're already having a crisis (ie the collapse of ecosystems) and in any case it shouldn't take a crisis to get supposedly-responsible people to think ahead and do risk mitigation etc. I mean, I have no scientific qualifications or special training other than curiosity and a willingness to plough through papers and follow citations, and it disturbs the hell out of me that I seem to have a much better grasp of environmental and fiscal systems than most policymakers. This idea that we should sacrifice all our institutions built up over centuries on the altar of economic competition (knowing the existence of perverse incentives and short-termism) is clearly Not Working.
> whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from this sort of thing
This might be how it was before, but in a lot of fields, your success going forward is directly proportional to the valuation of the impact of your work so far. This as you note invites perverse incentives.
But we still need to somehow allocate funds to that insulating academy. We can't just give them blank checks to spend on whatever they want.(In current economy maybe we could, but that is beside the point)
So it is also part of that process that someone there provides the politicians good reasons to spend money. Now how to do this sanely is complex question, but it is step of process that needs to exist. Or we might end up funding astrology and likes...
Their jobs are to instruct. As part of that these other roles developed and became expected.
However, like healthcare, privatization got to a point where the money made a difference more than the research and other roles. This is not a failure of capitalism, business, or anything of that sort; it was just a problem of taking things that were considered important out of the equation, because they were not understood or justified; and we’re allowed to scratch our heads over this and wonder why, but it’s simply that it happened; things sometimes fail.
Academy is not the same as higher education. The other part is people doing research and no teaching. These are people who then publishes their findings in journals for others to see.
And if we’re talking about public universities, these researchers are already crowd sourced.
Right, I was reading it as academia, so, sure strictly speaking, there's academy which is just a school, and academia which connotes fundamental researcher, literature scholars etc who may never teach.
The comment I replied to read as if they meant academia, not academy.
This is an argument against specialization. You can’t do extremely difficult things while spending 20-30 hours a week on business management, public outreach, and fundraising. Since that’s the world were living in, might it explain how our tech progress has gotten less impressive in the last 2 decades?
So now you propose that scientific researchers fight each other using advertisement and PR campaigns, and spend more of their already small grants, just to do what they were trained to do? Who would benefit from this other than PR companies?
Maybe they should do it, yes, and I'm being 100% serious.
That would solve a lot of newspapers abuse, always delighted to sell a history about crazy eccentric being chased by bees in some jungle, fourty years after falling in a pond at 8Yo.
Journals seen politics or sports(wo)man as clients (they pay), but scientists... are products. They don't pay. Is a never-ending caricature.
Isn't your hypothesis dependent on the fact that there is a way to convince the public at all? The alternative tends to be more enticing.
Humour me; how would you have convinced the public that a pandemic was a real risk before it happened; such that they would need to fork out more money for taxes?
How would you have convinced someone before 2008 that regulating part of the finance industry might be somewhat a good idea; such that they would have to reduce profit on their pension funds?
And how do you convince someone, /today/ that climate-change might have quite far-reaching consequences; such that they'll need to pay more for consumer goods?
Words cannot describe how much I disagree with this point of view. If we’ve let capitalism devalue non-profitable knowledge and rot society to the point that what you say is the general consensus we have truly started our decline as a civilisation and the only way from here is down.
> * Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they should be asking for. If the world doesn’t see taxonomists’ worth on their own, it is up to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs.*
No, no. The excuse for ignorance is not to blame the only people that have actually worked toward solutions to the current, ongoing extinction event. People that devote their lives to entomology, biology, ecology, and related fields have already done their part.
Endless propaganda and reality distortion has made everyone not care about plants and animals. This along with similar corporate and governmental mindfucking initiatives has made everyone go crazy.
Your observation is bang on. I have expressed and argued this point of view to our community as well. I'm not sure there is an easy answer. I advocate strongly for a system that rewards doing something well, as an expert, and not being asked to do more. I don't want to be asked to design Mars landers, gourmet food (well, that might be fun), flight control systems, car brakes, etc. I do want to have pride and recognition for my hard work.
Tangentially I expressed the frustrations of being asked to do more at a recent meeting. Talk slides for the curious [0]
I like your TaxonWorks platform. It feels like an important step towards a general empirical research infrastructure, eg the basic framework seems like it might be applicable in numerous non-bio fields, from (say) geology to sociology.
Thanks, that's nice to hear. There are certainly generalizations that have arrisen, we're not building this out of thin air but with reference to a lot of work done over decades (semantics, standards, pre-existing tools). It's open source, there is significant infrastructure there that could be grabbed and re-factored or extended to meet other needs. Of course the whole project is also a test of the oft stated, rarely proven "open-source it and people will join/contribute" too ;).
But the stupid people asking stupid questions are also the poor dudes with barely a future for their children giving a bit of what they earn so you can focus.
I mean, people hate rich banking elites so far removed from society providing obscure services to each others. What do you think they think of intellectual elites complaining of stupid questions by the people who paid them ?
You want funding you explain why. You don't want to explain why, accept nobody cares. It's because there's no absolute good in nature, nothing an expert can do to increase global knowledge is as necessary as the same guy growing lemons if society desires lemons more than knowledge. Make them desire knowledge more than lemon, THAT is part of the job.
I'm not sure that comparing the derivative products of very rich people to a fundemantal understanding of the Earth we live on is a fair comparison.
Suggesting we must sell everything feels short-sighted. Knowledge of the Earth benefits everyone in the long run. We should collectively have the intellectual capacity to acknowledge this.
For example [0] there are cases where a semingly-obscure wasp, describe by a seemingly obscure person, for an audience of seemingly a handful of people, turns out to be critical to the lives and livelihoods of many, many people. The knowledge that lead to this discovery came from the passion of the taxonomists who dedicate their lives to this gathering of foundational knowledge, not from those who best knew how to sell themselves as useful.
This is one of the reasons I support basic income. It will be an unshackling for the intellectually curious. They may be small in numbers but they’re the ones who move everyone forward.
You just sold it to me, though. Before, I thought only lemons mattered.
See my point ? You have to tell your taxpayers why you spend their taxes, they can't guess it. And if they know nothing abt what you do with it, they'll just vote for the next magical unicorn telling them they're actually stolen by a conspiracy of elitist universities.
Expecting people to be clever just because they exist is optimistic at best :)
I don't expect the average person to be fully appreciative of every Science! thing that I find interesting. But I do think that an important goal of education and of a polity is to communicate and inculcate the value of intellectual inquiry for the common good.
That gets lost when we treat private gain as the only valid goal. It's not just a matter of getting people interested in something they might otherwise not care much about, but of overcoming the BS and outright lies put out by people who set out to attack institutional infrastructure and deliberately mislead the public.
We just had an example with the big freeze in Texas where various news commentators and political figures chose to lie to the public about why the electricity had catastrophically failed. And we've been seeing for the last year in less obvious form with people deliberately downplaying and misrepresenting the risk factors around coronavirus. Fraudsters and propagandists are literally willing to kill other people for political and fiscal gain by creating negative information externalities.
We need a better response to this than just shrugging and saying 'oh well, that's just how things are.'The Way Things Are is serving us poorly as a society.
Maybe we should have people collectively decide on who they want to represent them and then those representatives could allocate funding depending on what societies broader strategic goals are.
The reason for the mocking tone of the above is that we have always solved this problem centuries ago yet somehow now everyone has decided they want to live in a crypto-neo-feudalist society that cares only for profit and stock price and screw everything else. Government will never work if we do everything we can to sabotage it at every corner. Enough is enough. We either fix this now or we resign ourselves to a dark future.
> Imagine spending 10-15 years of academic work to get a PhD and become the world expert on something important but obscure, and then being told you need to market yourself to the general public and devote a significant portion of your time to answering stupid questions (as in 'who cares about this boring stuff' as opposed to 'what is the airspeed of a pigeon').
I think it's moving in the right direction in countries with national parks. I certainly can see that in France we still have working taxonomists, and that they even band to create FOSS for managing their work (TaxHub, Geonature 2, Geonature Citizen, etc).
Knowledge for knowledges sake is noble, but someone always pays for it out of their pocket meaning that even super educated researchers have to justify why they are worth someone’s dime.
This isn’t a capitalist thing, or even a modern idea by any stretch. Science, as far as I can tell, has always been a matter of pragmatism, and science for science’s sake seems like a recent idea stemming from Cold War fears of falling behind stoking heavy investment and public messaging romanticizing science. For all of human history, science has almost always been public ally funded and often for military or otherwise strategic gain.
So yes, even the most educated among us have to prove their value, because science isn’t some religious function or human right - it’s a discipline with pragmatic purposes to society.
I have a controversial theory that society would be better off if we made sure no one technically had to work to survive. Working would provide income to improve your conditions (serving as motivation), but food and shelter would be made available to everyone no matter what.
Under these conditions, anyone could study what they wanted and volunteer to do things like this, and institutions could provide support to them at little cost.
I imagine we accomplish this by making the necessities of life as cheap as possible, not by heavy state subsidy.
Our need to squeeze profitable labor out of every person seems actually counter productive. Anyway total aside...
Most studies I've seen about basic income show that the people on it go out and do shit. "Watch TV and become depressed" is what you do when you can't go out (say, because there's a pandemic going on) and also what you do when you come home exhausted from working long hours at a shitty job you hate.
People have said this but I really don’t think that’s true. That doesn’t seem to be what happens to wealthy people who have all of their material needs met. People love to do things. I think most people would “work” even if it was volunteer work. But if they got injured or had a life change, they wouldn’t be screwed.
People will find meaning. It’s part of the human condition.
It’s only when you take someone who has been working day in and day out for years and you give them a week off, and they’ll collapse on the couch and watch TV and feel bad. Because they are exhausted and haven’t developed any healthy hobbies. But if it was their whole life, they wouldn’t stay on the couch forever. Also when you give a worker a bit of time off, their friends are still working. If everyone can take time off, people would meet with each other. And that’s the oldest human pastime. The company of others. And it’s free!
> That doesn’t seem to be what happens to wealthy people who have all of their material needs met.
Exactly! Do people not realise that the whole reason we have any science in the first place is because of these people? Before there was any kind of middle class, these were the only guys with the freedom to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge, thanks to living comfortably in other respects, and they did it.
Agreed. I actually found a less than full time engineering job so I could spend more time working on personal educational work. I’m building a self driving off road vehicle from scratch in my spare time and learning all kind of stuff about machine learning in the process. I work so hard on it (for free, with no intention of commercializing it) that I’m constantly reminding myself to slow down and try to “do nothing”. I work 20-30 hours a week at my paid job and then spend another 10-20 hours a week working on what I call research (intensive educational hobby) by my own free will. I would never just sit around on the couch and get depressed lol. That’s such a silly idea.
There are plenty of people who are born into means such that they realistically don't need to worry about being hungry or homeless, and they still get up and go to work each day.
Nobody needs the threat of hunger or homelessness to motivate them to live normal lives.
I don’t think that applies here. Furlough happens in a world where everyone must work, and then they are prevented from working at their chosen job.
In a world where food is free, no one would be prevented from working. They would choose whatever job they liked, only they would have the freedom to say no if they wanted. But that would be their choice. Furlough is forced upon them, and there’s no free food down the street they can pick up for lunch or dinner.
Have you managed to isolate the mental impact of furlough from the mental impact of the pandemic and possibly killing granny if you go out to meet people?
I think I've mostly stuck to the rules and was never furloughed. Problem with he granny argument is that they are their worse enemies for carrying on as usual in spite of risks
Care to provide a reference to this declining number of taxonomists? Because you've made a long reasonable-sounding argument, but there are a lot of reasonable-sounding arguments that don't have any empirical evidence.
Sure [0], [1], [2], [3] can give you a hint at the keywords to search for. "Taxonomic impediment" is often used, it will let you dig deeper (though I don't like the term for various reasons). The topic has been raised for decades. I was part of the NSF program PEET [4], my peers and I got the best training in the world. Some of us are fortunate enough to good or great jobs in taxonomy. I can think of none that are strictly alpha-taxonomists (their primary research output being species descriptions). For example, if you did a PhD that was an epic 500 page monograph of the description of 100+ new species and covered 400 species total referencing science and specimens dating back up to 250 years, you wouldn't be a prof now. If you did a diverse, but necessarily less comprehensive PhD on a bunch of topics, maybe a couple new species, maybe a little molecular phylogeny, perhaps a database, a little of this, a little of that, and some of it was very buzzy- you'd have a fighting chance. This isn't really surprising, and I'm not making a real value-judgement on either approach. BTW- the problem is not that we've run out of species to descr
> This is not to say that species richness is not declining,
I continue to be baffled by how many take serious this rather arbitrary concept as though it actually mean something.
Apparently Clostridium botulinum as a species is purely defined by the ability to produce botulinum; many members of this species have acquired this trait by way of horizontal gene transfer and are otherwise vertically not specially related and vertically related strains that lost it recently are considered different species.
The species of the neanderthal man has recently gone extinct, or not, depending on a sheer matter of semantics of whether it and the cro-magnon man are of the same species, or not.
Similar arguments can of course be made for languages. A dialect with an army-and-a-navy being lost is a tragœdy; a dialect that lacks such being lost is inconsequential, — for the former is a separate language, and the latter merely a variant of another.
Do you feel confident that you can apply an individual measure of meaning as to whether each of the 2 million + estimated species on Earth is "valuable"? If not, perhaps blanked statements might be of use. For example all species that produce food, perhaps useful. All species that are part of an ecosystem that decomposes dead things so that we are covered in filth - also useful. Species that cause viral death- extremely useful to know about. Species that produce oxygen for us to breath, I'm for them. Species that fix nitrogen so we can eat, count me. You get my drift, suggesting nothing matters/has meaning is a dead-end/non-starter argument.
You assume that these traits necessarily lie on the arbitrary lines men have drawn between so-called “species”.
My point is that they do not, and that the line between different species indeed can be quite arbitrary, and can very often differ from one specialist to the other.
Most of the earth's oxygen is produced by plankton, which is especially a place where some members of the same species produce said oxygen, and some do not.
Of course species are hypotheses, nobody is arguing that. Are you suggesting anything that is a hypothesis has no worth?
It's trivial to show traits delimit useful species concepts, and indeed ample envidence can be used to show that species can be very robustly defined according to well defined species concepts (of which there are various).
So I'm unclear as to what your point is. Are you suggesting that species concepts allow us to do no useful work?
> Of course species are hypotheses, nobody is arguing that. Are you suggesting anything that is a hypothesis has no worth?
I'm but merely arguing that your supposition of the value of a “species" is nonsensical.
Value does not run across species lines is what I am saying.
> It's trivial to show traits delimit useful species concepts, and indeed ample envidence can be used to show that species can be very robustly defined according to well defined species concepts (of which there are various).
Yes, one can come with multiple arbitrary proposals of line in the sand, and there is no argument to be made that any of these arbitrary places to draw lines is more sound than the other.
> So I'm unclear as to what your point is. Are you suggesting that species concepts allow us to do no useful work?
I'm suggesting that decisions are made based on arbitrary semantics issues.
I'm suggesting that a rose by any other name, still smelling as sweet, would be treated differently.
> I'm but merely arguing that your supposition of the value of a “species" is nonsensical.
But of course it's not. This is straightforward to demonstrate.
If you are to converve a set of traits, as you would like to think, (to me = proxy for species), so they will not disappear (= go extinct) how will you define this set?
You will gather the sets of traits (= species concepts), and figure out which set to preserve. The cutting edge way of doing this is to look at the evolutionary distance between species and weight those species (sorry, sets of traits), that contain unique evolutionary tradjectories higher. You'll look at what is actually possible, consider geographic and geopolitical constraints, and make a decision. Now, you can't preserve just one trait, because, and here's the problem with your "only traits matter" arguement ... they come bundled with others. Now you have an optimization problem, that can only really be tackled by understanding the sets, i.e. species concepts.
Use whatever words you want, semantics are that species concepts are extremely useful, because they are conceptual boundaries/limits that must be understood if we are to act in `some` useful ways. Note I do not say in `all` ways (you would coutner-point glowing fish with jellyfish genes), I only have to prove the `some` case.
At the end of the day definitions matter if they can be used to do meaningful work with them, regardless of wether other definitions can refute them, or point us in other directions towards other conceptual playgrounds. I hope you see that species definitions fall into the category of enabling meaningful work.
> If you are to converve a set of traits, as you would like to think, (to me = proxy for species), so they will not disappear (= go extinct) how will you define this set?
To you, perhaps, but my point is that this is not how species are defined in practice.
There is no consistent way to define species, whatever specialist working with it will define it however he sees fit at the moment with little consistency, and different specialists will come to different conclusions as to A) how many species there are among any population of organisms and B) what organisms should be placed under what species.
> The cutting edge way of doing this is to look at the evolutionary distance between species and weight those species (sorry, sets of traits), that contain unique evolutionary tradjectories higher.
Given the extremely common occurrence of horizontal gene transfer in actual reality, the concept of “evolutionary distance” itself is a nonsensical one.
Well, I'm 99% sure you're trolling at this point. So that this ad-hominen is allowed on this website I'll clarify to others why so that they might not fall into the same trap.
Your argument comes down to "one counter example proves I'm right". For those of you who want to see a quintesential source of this type of argument go look at the evolution of the newsgroup talk.origins. There you can see a plethora of examples just like this.
> Your argument comes down to "one counter example proves I'm right".
Not only would that be a valid reasoning, but the number of counter examples is far from one.
Horizontal gene transfer is not something that happens only rarely, it is extremely common among bacteria and your model is based upon the assumption that it not happen.
> the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods), [...] has most certainly declined.
That sentence is close to falsifying itself. If species can be identified by molecular methods, then anyone trained in basic molecular bio techniques can do it.
Now, I don't know how many insect sequences that would enable identification are actually available in databases (might be a few, might be a lot...), but "molecular methods" make this easier, not harder.
This is a great example of how our biases can lead us to make mistakes like this. If they had looked at this and the numbers pointed the other way, they would certainly have looked at the denominator in hopes that the number of people identifying the specimens had gone up by more than the amount of observations. Just a great lesson to everyone when trying to do science.
It's the unfortunate truth that in the hyper capitalistic system we live in, everything that does not in the most direct way result in value added is demeaned, discounted and cut.
And we've also seen what happened to climate scientists warning against the dangers of climate change for the past fifty years; they were - from a large part of the media, politicians and the public - at best ignored and more often belittled.
So, I don't think it is the taxonomists or entomologists are are fault for not screaming loud enough "WE ARE KILLING OUR OWN LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM" from the top of their lungs. It is us that is to blame. We capitalistic producers and consumers that have put the profit motive over any cautionary principle when it comes to health, safety and liberty. Just see how long it took the general public to accept that a substance like lead in gas is detrimental to health. It's ridiculous.
Then again; who could have thought that two centuries of ever-increasing predatory ecosystem exploitation could have any negative consequences?
> everything that does not in the most direct way result in value added is demeaned, discounted and cut
Yeah, back when I was working in pure research every time I met someone at a party and explained what I was trying to solve the follow up question invariably was "what is the application?". In general, in my experience, people don't value the pursuit of knowledge or understanding the universe, they value product.
> everything that does not in the most direct way result in value added is demeaned, discounted and cut.
Correction: everything that is not _perceived_ to add value. The amount of bullshit and inefficiencies that are rewarded with exorbitant salaries is simply astonishing.
Agreed. It's all about perception, not about actual value added. Just see e.g. the costs of environmental pollution that are not even considered when 'calculating' the added value.
I think if you look from a point in time of where the term 'capitalim' was initially heh coined, you will find that it very much is a hyper-capitalistic society we live in.
During the time when capitalism was first named an overwhelming majority of the populaces' exchanges of services and goods was not based on any capitalistic exchanges. And with capitalistic exchange I mean the exchange of good that were produced under a capitalistic agreement where the means of production are not in the hands of anyone with immediate social relations to the person controlling the means of labor. Most of the people were living and working in small villages, self-sufficient to a large degree and wholly preoccupied with agriculture. Goods and services were mostly produced in a feudal mode of production, not in a capitalistic mode.
Nowadays however, for a vast majority of the population of most industrialized and developing economies of the world this means of exchange is the primary - if not the exclusive - means of procuring goods and services.
So, I very much dispute that calling our society 'hyper capitalistic' is hyperbole, despite of the two sharing a prefix.
Means of production and money existed since the dawn of civilization. The law of Hammurabi discusses contracts, prices, private property, etc.
Also, for example, Rome during the times of Roman Empire had to rely on imports of food from Africa because Appenine agriculture wasn’t self-sufficient. And throughout history in Europe and Middle East trade was a big part of every complex society.
These stories about feudal mode of production is just bad outdated 19th century scholarship.
It also seems completely ridiculous to call modern states hyper capitalistic when in most countries 35-65% of GDP is controlled by the government (yes, even in the US). 100 years ago it was more like 5% of GDP and income taxes didn’t even exist!
I am not conflating trade with capitalism. I am explaining that the “feudal mode of production” was at best localized and relatively short period in the history of mankind. So contrasting capitalism with it is disingenuous because many periods in human history were more similar to what we have today than feudalism but there is often an implication that feudalism is the closest in time and place to the rise of capitalism and therefore it is the most similar one which is simply not true. If you look at the history of Rome it is much closer to what we have now in terms of its legal system, government expenditure, private relations, etc than feudalism. And they even had a similar sort of “capital” like private ships they used for trade that were very expensive, even though they didn’t have a modern idea of a corporation.
Indeed, exchange is not always capitalistic exchange. Capitalism can be analyzed as a system defined by 3 core properties: (1) private ownership of the means of production (2) labor market (3) commodity market. This is what Adam Smith called “the system of natural liberty” and what Marx called “capitalism” (I am not sure he coined it, but he certainly popularized it). Hence, when the government uses spends money on big infrastructure projects or hires people to work on a mine, it has little to do with capitalism, thinks like that existed in Ancient Rome and even Ancient Greece!
Compare our modern world to what we had 100-300 years ago when companies had personal armies. I don’t see how we are live in anything close to “hyper capitalism”.
First; thanks for the thoughtful reply. This is why I really enjoy NH.
Why do you think that the "feudal mode" of production was only localized and over a short period time? I would argue that since the agricultural revolution some 12'000 years ago, most people that ever lived, lived in some kind of feudal system. Chinese feudalism is well documented back to about 1000 BCE. It is not unreasonable to assume that this is true for most of the cultures at the time; there are countless examples of how tribal societies change with the introduction of agriculture and how this in term leads to stratification and thus to some form of feudalism or another.
But really; the point I'm trying to make is that the capitalistic mode and thus capitalistic exchanges are really something new in the history of mankind. Before the agricultural feudalism people weren't living in capitalism for sure.
Rome is an interesting exception. And it really is just that; an exception. Yes, there were vast trading networks, bringing goods from all exotic places to the center of the universe, hundreds of ships transporting tons and tons of loot and slaves and culture. But only a very, very small percentage of the Roman populace was ever involved in such trades. Even in Rome (the republic/empire, not the city), most of the population was living in farmsteads, producing most of what they consumed themselves, trading surplus for additional calories or goods.
Very few would have had any capitalistic exchanges, most of them would have had none at all. Yes, much of the Roman land was owned by the elite of Rome itself and even today's oligarchs would pale if they knew how rich Marcus Licinius Crassus was. But that ownership was very different from anything that we could honestly classify as capitalism. If there was capitalism in Rome, it probably was in the manufacturies and in the mines. (E.g. Terra sigillata was manufactured on a ginormous scale - but only for a fraction of a percent of the population)
And again; Rome in this shape existed for less than four hundred years. And for most of the world, Rome wasn't terribly important after that.
So, if we go back to your (very apt) definition of capitalism, we can see that the three core properties really only arise around the year 1600 and 1700, at least in Europe. There we have the faint beginnings of a capitalistic system, akin to what imperial Rom might have had (for some time); wealthy merchants trading goods that - produced in a manufactory (1) by hired labor (2), are shipped and sold in a foreign market (3). Again; it is only a small fraction of the population that takes place in this value-adding. Most of the population is still not taking part in any capitalistic exchanges. Most of the population is still living a nasty brutish and short live in agricultural settlements; still producing most of what they consumed themselves, trading surplus for additional calories or goods.
That's the time when the term 'capitalism' is termed. And I think it is quite different from what we have today; nowadays; most of all exchanges are capitalistic ones, for much of the population all the exchanges are exclusively capitalistic. This exclusivity is something that is new (since about ~70 years). And it is this exclusivity that I think is something that was neither obvious not expected when 'capitalism' was first being used to refer to systems that satisfy our three core properties.
So, there you have my reasoning. I understand that you might not agree with my assessment, but I hope I was able to explain my reasoning for using such an inflammatory term as "hyper capitalism" to refer to the manifestation of capitalism we have today.
Thanks for having this exchange and thanks for making me work for it. ;)
>Chinese feudalism is well documented back to about 1000 BCE. It is not unreasonable to assume that this is true for most of the cultures at the time;
Well, depends on your definition of feudalism I guess. If you ignore all political differences, I am not sure what core economic difference would cause to group the system in the Middle Ages Europe with Fengjian putting aside the Roman Empire.
>But really; the point I'm trying to make is that the capitalistic mode and thus capitalistic exchanges are really something new in the history of mankind. Before the agricultural feudalism people weren't living in capitalism for sure.
For sure, it is quite different, but it is also more similar to the past that people usually imagine. Money, global trade, private property, even public-private partnerships in some sense (in Ancient Rome there were publicans, private subcontractors for public projects). You don't need capitalsim for any of that even though these things mostly didn't really exist in feudal realms.
>Rome is an interesting exception. And it really is just that; an exception. Yes, there were vast trading networks, bringing goods from all exotic places to the center of the universe, hundreds of ships transporting tons and tons of loot and slaves and culture. But only a very, very small percentage of the Roman populace was ever involved in such trades. Even in Rome (the republic/empire, not the city), most of the population was living in farmsteads, producing most of what they consumed themselves, trading surplus for additional calories or goods.
But it is not really an exception. Every centralized government did something similar, the difference is that the Rome was the most succesfful one, it produced lots of written artifacts and it is the closest one to the European mind. If you look at the Bronze Age states, they are also very "modern", but the problem is that we don't have much info about them. They had complex regionals supply chains, trade, even infrastructure like sanitation systems.
Of course people bought less stuff in Ancient times simply because there were less stuff that wasn't crops. I am not saying that there was capitalism in the past or that nothing have changed. My point is that many things people attribute as properties of hypercapitalism are not really that special. If food production technologies wouldn't be so advanced and we still had to rely to 80% of people working in semi-substistence farming (SSF) would this really make our world less "hypercapitalistic" by any measure people use for this label? (many people actually still do SSF, in Europe there are still over 5 million such farmers.) Doesn't this make hypercapitalism simply a measure of advancement of farming technologies? It wouldn't really change the everyday life dynamics of people who aren't engaged in such activities.
Society is heterogenous and by such weird measure everyone who didn't engage in subsistence lived in hypercapitalism for thousands of years, while people in Europe who rely on semi-subsistence farming are not even in capitalism; of course from the point of their lived experience. But to me it seems absurd, it is the totality of human relations that defines the social structure, the network of relations. Many people in the past relied on subsitence farming, but they lived alongside people that didn't and this certainly affected them and vice versa. And I don't see how I can say that modern society is hypercapitalistic when not only governments tax the corporations but the whole international community creates regulation and controls these companies in a way that would benefit the states.
>And again; Rome in this shape existed for less than four hundred years. And for most of the world, Rome wasn't terribly important after that.
Right, but after Early Middle Ages many states had many similar things. There were many so-called "Medieval renessainces" in Europe.
>That's the time when the term 'capitalism' is termed. And I think it is quite different from what we have today; nowadays; most of all exchanges are capitalistic ones, for much of the population all the exchanges are exclusively capitalistic. This exclusivity is something that is new (since about ~70 years). And it is this exclusivity that I think is something that was neither obvious not expected when 'capitalism' was first being used to refer to systems that satisfy our three core properties.
But that's not really true. Many services you receive are not capitalistic on surface: the roads, the healthcare in most countries, education. In a country like Norway the government commands over 50% of GDP, i.e. it tells people what to do, what services to provide, to whom to redistribute money. There is little capitalistic about that. Again, compare it to company towns and governments with less than 10% of GDP spending in 18th century.
I'm answering several paragraphs at once, because here the point of contention really comes down to - to paraphrase - "But really, didn't we have capitalism before that?"
> They had complex regionals supply chains, trade, even infrastructure like sanitation systems. [...] Society is heterogenous and by such weird measure everyone who didn't engage in subsistence lived in hypercapitalism for thousands of years [...] Many people in the past relied on subsitence farming, but they lived alongside people that didn't and this certainly affected them and vice versa. [...] My point is that many things people attribute as properties of hypercapitalism are not really that special. If food production technologies wouldn't be so advanced and we still had to rely to 80% of people working in semi-substistence farming (SSF) would this really make our world less "hypercapitalistic" by any measure people use for this label? (
Not quite, because - as we already defined, you need three things for capitalism: (1) private ownership of the means of production (2) labor market (3) commodity market. For most of time time until back to the dawn of apes, we didn't really have a labor market. This is only something that arose out of the fatalities of the black death that ravaged Europe and killed almost a third of the population. [0] This was the beginning of the end for feudalism in much of Europe, since for the first time, people had a reason to travel for better work, since suddenly - due to to lack of people - wages were rising and landlords were competing for sharecroppers to crop their fields.
This is the new phenomenon. The mobile labor market. This is why we never had capitalism before that time. As I said; I'm willing to make an exception for the Roman manufacturies, since there you had some kind of labor market-ish. A teensy-tiny one.
But other than that, a labor market really never existed. People were born in their villages, they grew old and they died that. If you were a weaver, you wove your weaving and then sold it. There was no labor market, you owned your loom and did your own thing and starved trying to do it.
After the upheavals of the Black Death, many feudal realms introduced (or reinstated or reinforced) laws forbidding the movement of people without special permission. In Germany, England and France this only started to change after the 1750. For Russia it took over a hundred years longer to get there.
So, before that time, there really was no labor market. And without labor market, no capitalism.
> Right, but after Early Middle Ages many states had many similar things. There were many so-called "Medieval renessainces" in Europe.
I'm not sure how these would fit in here. The Medieval Renaissances were cultural and artistic in nature. Nowhere during Carolingian time can you find a Manufactury like you would have seen during the Roman times, with hundreds of workers living on or nearby the Manufactury grounds in Insulae operated by the manufactory owner or with branded corporations setting up manufacturing subsidies. No kidding, they did that. [1]
> But that's not really true. Many services you receive are not capitalistic on surface: the roads, the healthcare in most countries, education. [...] And I don't see how I can say that modern society is hypercapitalistic when not only governments tax the corporations but the whole international community creates regulation and controls these companies in a way that would benefit the states.
This is not about how powerful one single corporation or one single government is. It is about the system that they both operate in. Because as it is, both governments and corporations are participants in a game of Hypercapitalism.
I don't know where you live, but I would call US hyper capitalist. Overly privatized into the hands of the 1%. No health care. Everyday people mostly powerless and government pandering to companies for political support.
> Everyday people mostly powerless and government pandering to companies for political support.
I lived in a post-socialist country, and trust me, just because it's post-socialist doesn't mean that the systems change to other things next day. It wasn't much different.
There is a ruling class. Capitalism had nothing to do with it.
> in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved)
What tools did they fail to learn? If we went from a state of identifying species to not identifying them, and the major change is removing the taxonomists, isn't it arguable that they were doing fine if not better than without them?
Not sure if a troll given I address this in the OP. You can't just upload images. Internal dissections, DNA sequences, imaging at SEM scale, all of these are not rare requirements, they are the norm. Specimens have to be meticulously collected, preserved, and vouchered in Natural History collections as part of this process (Science should be replicable to some degree).
It's a wonderful aspiration to live in a society where anyone will have the free time to "level-up" to a taxonomists level of experience by making, literally, millions of observations, then "power-up" with their free access to SEMs, sequencers, high-powered microscopes and lighting, digital imaging systems (etc.) then "farm for $" to get access to travel and gear then gain "clan-clout" to navigate collecting policies and permitting, etc. etc. Something to strive for, but sadly not a reality anytime soon.
Good question, increasingly we can judge for ourselves. Go to BOLD (COI barcoding) [0]. Search for "Apidae". That's just one family of bees, in this case the one that includes 27+ (IIRC, probably way off) subspecies of what we know as the honeybee. The important bit is the count in "BINS", e.g. hypothesis of speciation typically based on a single gene, COI.
That's only the specimens that have been sequenced and archived at BOLD. That doesn't include the various other bee families, notably Halictidae, Colletidae, Melittidae, and others roughly all the "sister groups" in the Apoidea [1].
An example of why is this important? The Africanized honeybee, known perhaps from bad horror movies, is characterized (identified) as a hybrid of two species. It can be more or less aggressive (to the point of killing you if you don't GTFO) depending on then nature of its DNA. Hybridization has blurred the limits of the species in many areas, including in the US. Sequencing specimens is the only way to confidently determine which of the species you have, A (friendly bee honey), AB (grumpy bee honey), or B (deadly bee honey) (gross simplification here, not Mendelian).
> The Africanized honeybee, known perhaps from bad horror movies
You're talking about The Swarm (1978), which is absolutely so-bad-it's-good. Fans of Michael Caine will I think in particular find it rewarding, and I was especially impressed with its frankly prescient treatment of the drawbacks inherent in mass insecticide application given that the ongoing research increasingly points to exactly that as the culprit for pollinators disappearing.
Well, you're considerably more likely to run into a wild colony of "Africanized" hybrids than you are a great white shark, for one thing. For another, while I wasn't around at the time, I understand the movie was more made in response to sensationalistic reporting than a cause of it - I might be wrong about that part, though.
That said, my understanding is that A. m. scutellata x A. mellifera hybrids aren't unusually aggressive in nest defense by the standards of social hymenopterans generally, but only by the standard of the European honeybee (A. mellifera). I can't claim close familiarity with the relevant literature on bee hybrids, but from what I have seen, their nest defense behavior seems roughly comparable in aggressiveness to that of many yellowjacket (Vespula, Dolichovespula) species. On the other hand, a wild bee colony is likely to be one or two orders of magnitude greater in size than a wild yellowjacket colony, which means that a comparable level of aggression in nest defense could pose a significantly greater hazard.
Using the figures from the Wikipedia article [1] and its relevant source [2], it looks like A. m. scutellata x A. mellifera are responsible for an average of around 15 human deaths per year since the introduction of A. m. scutellata into Brazil in 1956. So I don't really see that there's very much to worry over here, in any case.
> Well, you're considerably more likely to run into a wild colony of "Africanized" hybrids than you are a great white shark
Are you? They attack rarely (although are thought to have done so fatally a few weeks ago here in NZ) and aren’t even seen usually, but they are close to popular beaches.
Well, according to UFL's International Shark Attack File [1] and the CDC [2] respectively, on average 4.3 humans die worldwide per year of shark attacks, vs. an average 62 humans in the US per year of stings from hymenopterans excluding ants.
Given that the shark attack stats cover a period 25 times as long as that for the bees, wasps, and hornets, I do feel like "considerably" is a fair choice of adjective here.
You’re measuring attacks, I’m talking of being in close proximity.
Probably people die of bee stings more than sharks attacks here in NZ, but those bees certainly aren’t africanised. I suspect most US deaths aren’t all from africanised bees either but that’s going to be hard to prove.
Look into mushroom identification - many little brown mushrooms (LBMs) are differentiated only by careful microscopic analysis of their spores or DNA sequencing. Mushrooms are especially difficult because many of the potentially useful identifying features are only present at certain (short - hours or a day or two) phases of the lifecycle of the fruiting body.
Finally, for those who think genomic/genetic studies are being used inappropriately, consider that while they may seem to me to be, in practice, just another sort of 'data processing' (which they are not - they are often just generalised (or even generalized), and their application to new contexts is not that different to simply applying similar analysis to previous contexts) it is possible, for example, that, for example, the study of the DNA sequences of fungi actually (if you want to make a broader and very broad claim about fungus genomics) might in the future yield, in this particular case, a much more detailed, more reliable (and possibly more objective) classification (if not entirely a direct one) of some of the fungi and their eukaryotes in our immediate neighbourhood.
I've also got to say that for the same reason, I don't have a lot of confidence in the 'fungal genomic analysis' thing in particular, because, on the whole, it seems to me to be so easily manipulated.
I occasionally use iNaturalist to help identify plants and fungus while out on hikes. The community there has a ton of specialists and it is extremely common to get messages like this on observations that are months old. Here is one I got this morning about a random mushroom I took a picture of in the woods of Indiana:
Russula sanguinea was described from a European mushroom and therefore probably isn't here in North America at all. The name has been applied to many red Russula in N. A. adding to the confusion. Out west where it may be sorted it is being called Russula rhodocephala which itself is a lookalike for Russula americana but under different trees according to Danny Miller here [1]. Mushroomexpert's Kuo and Mycoquebec say that a lookalike under oaks in the east is Russula tenuiceps or R. sanguinaria under conifers/pines, but it is probably a group of species, and also not the same as the European one in the case of R. sanguinaria. We are trying to downvote these identifications for this reason. Hopefully, any people interested in identifying mushrooms will pitch in and help to vote any Russula that is being called Russula sanguinea in the eastern US back to genus level anyway, but we are concerned with a few other species too. Read fungee's journal post here [2]. Check out the master list here [3]. Another thing that is daunting for Russula ID, there are well over a hundred known red Russula in the east, many are not named yet, and, if they are, the name is not in use.
I dabbled in mycology and identifying mushrooms is super hard, probably one of the hardest taxonomy things. I wouldn’t want to be the expert in that field getting asked all the time with a single iPhone photo.
/r/mycology had to say stop posting “please identify this mushroom” because it was so common. I’d imagine its easier with insects. And you don’t have as many people who care because they aren’t trying to eat them as often.
I still like to ID random bugs I find in my house and backyard and it’s always a probability exercise.
Those tree identification apps by taking a photo never work. I used it at a UofT garden where every tree was labelled and it got it wrong every time. So even the ML is way off.
I read genomic data collected for phylogenetic analysis of non-hymenopteran species the way I do, I don't expect to find a single specimen of that species that I haven't seen somewhere else, either within my own field of study or any other. It is possible that some new species of hymenopteran may be found from genomic data, and that this newly discovered species will then become a member of the Hymenoptera, but it would probably not be of that group we currently consider. That's the thing: the current state of the hymenopteran phylogeny is that although the species of hymenopteran I consider most closely related to each other has been found in multiple specimens from multiple populations, they are a diverse group, with many examples of them from multiple regions. That's the kind of thing we would expect to see from a modern, large-scale genome analysis, but that is not how I see it.
> I dabbled in mycology and identifying mushrooms is super hard, probably one of the hardest taxonomy things.
There are a lot of mushrooms that are very easy to identify, and learning edible mushrooms is imho a lot easier than learning edible plants. But if you pick up mushrooms at random then yeah, it's generally extremely difficult.
I mean out of the 2,000 mushrooms in North America, there are all of 20 or 30 that are seriously poisonous. So it doesn't take all that long to learn the most harmful ones. Especially since you don't even need to know whether or not a mushroom is harmful, only if it looks vaguely like one of the harmful ones.
Yes, and this even applies to vertebrates and can sometimes work in reverse. I was part of a team of research divers that did fish counts in California. This was in the early 00's so in several instances genetic research found that seemingly identical fish were different species depending on region. In one case groups of fish that looked quite different turned out to be the same species. Very frustrating when you are putting in so much work underwater!
That whole experience made me very skeptical of citizen-science projects once I knew how much training was required to do good work. While they are a great compliment to professional research they are no replacement (though often funders are treating citizen science as just that).
Yes. And to make it even more confusing, there are often plants/animals that have wildly varying appearance but are actually the same species: e.g. great danes/chihuahuas or cabbage/broccoli
> Not sure if a troll given I address this in the OP. You can't just upload images. Internal dissections, DNA sequences, imaging at SEM scale, all of these are not rare requirements, they are the norm. Specimens have to be meticulously collected, preserved, and vouchered in Natural History collections as part of this process (Science should be replicable to some degree).
Take the comment a little more gently. You didn't really address that by just saying "many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods". And even with this followup, it's not fully addressed. Dissection takes an expert, sure. But DNA extraction doesn't require deep knowledge about the species. And preservation requires skills but not taxonomy skills. Does SEM imaging for this purpose usually require species expertise?
I'm not saying you're wrong overall here, I'm just saying there are pretty obvious points where the average person won't know the answer or which of these skills end up mattering the most.
> It's a wonderful aspiration to live in a society where anyone will have the free time to "level-up" to a taxonomists level of experience
My apologies if it sounded harsh, I read it and a "go look it up on Wikipedia" type concept flashed in my head.
> But DNA extraction doesn't require deep knowledge about the species.
The act of extraction doesn't, but interpretation of the results does. So to does actually knowing where to get the specimens in the first place. So to does building up experience knowing where to look, how to collect, building up a feeling for the diversity and variation in the group you study. Without these tools in hand all the images, sequences, and assays etc. in the world will a) cost you way more than anyone wants to pay and b) will have you floundering around in a giant pool of dirt-common species that are well known rather than pulling that series of uncommon and ultra-rare specimens and making a contribution that really extends our knowledge. It takes years to know where to focus precious time, this isn't peculiar to taxonomy.
Not at this time. Sequencing is cheap and easy, but hymenopteran genomics is a young field with many more open questions than answers; morphological taxonomy is much more mature, and aided besides by highly specific genital configurations which are, in no small number of cases, the only way currently known reliable of telling two macroscopically indistinguishable species apart. Too, in order to evaluate genomic relatedness precisely enough to update taxonomy, you need your sequence database to be broad as well as deep - unless you already have a broad and deep sequence database of other solitary bees, for example, it's hard to get very precise results out of a given solitary bee's genome. It may not even tell you anything you didn't already know.
In any case, it's not rare in the literature to encounter whole genera categorized almost entirely through analysis of the males' aedagi, with microscopic imagery and line drawings included to highlight features by which distinctions are made. Some of these features are only easily distinguished at SEM scale, so that's what is used.
That said, it's thought among at least some taxonomists that these unique and incompatible genital configurations may be the only thing that prevents interfertility among individuals of these otherwise separate species. So it's going to be really interesting to see what comes out of genomics as applied to the Hymenoptera over the next decade or so - something else that's not rare in the literature is to encounter reclassifications and rearrangements of large branches of the family's taxonomic tree, as phylogenetic research heavily revises prior results. Beyond that, there's a lot else coming out of genomic research into the family, including a rare example of heritable mutualism between a virus and a eukaryote in the form of Bracovirus [1] [2].
So, while yours is a fair question, there is a lot going on with hymenopteran genomics and phylogenetics these days, and my understanding as an interested amateur who does a great deal of reading in the literature is that, for the moment at least, established taxonomical methods still are likely to provide a more precise, albeit still provisional, placement of an otherwise ill-characterized species. In a decade or two, though, that might no longer be the case.
It really is! The more you read about it, the more interesting it gets, too - for example, while the virus is vertically transmitted, that doesn't happen by the ordinary route of mother-to-daughter infection. Instead, the viral genome is integrated into that of the wasp, as are genes that code for a unique type of ovarian cell that's specialized to act as a viral replicator.
And that's just one example! I could give more, like the effect the virus has on the wasp's reproductive host, and how it's honestly surprising that Peter Watts hasn't written a novel about that yet - I'm always happy to talk at length about wasps, or at least to whatever extent my interlocutor of the moment is happy to listen.
I've seen plant identification groups, and the thing is that a blurry picture of half the thing is not conducive to accurate identification.
When these are correctly identified, it's often because the person has a particular investment in that exact plant. So if the expert on irises or two-stripe bumblebees is offline at the moment you might get crickets, or wild-ass guesses.
There is something about video that makes it easier to identify things. The object feels more three dimensional, I suspect, which makes it closer to field identification.
That said, we use camera 'traps' for very shy mammal species. I wonder if we could tune those systems for bees. (A fox or cloud leopard might run if the camera gears make noise, but do bees give a damn?)
iNat is good, but crowdsourced, and anything but a panacea; for example, I'm very confident in my identifications of the Auplopus mellipes and Auplopus architectus metallicus individuals I encountered and photographed last year, but those (plus one braconid, of which I'm admittedly uncertain myself) are the only observations I have on iNat that haven't had any species confirmations from other users. (That's fair; I needed considerable literature review to develop that level of confidence, and I doubt most iNat users share the extent of my interest in wasps.)
Another option is BugGuide (https://bugguide.net), which I've actually found more useful - it did me a lot of good figuring out those auplopids. It doesn't provide any sort of dichotomous key (that I've been able to find), but there are a lot of observations available, often with very high-quality images, which helps a lot when specific identification depends on subtle features.
In general, though, hymenopterans and especially solitary wasps are just difficult. There are many genera and even whole families that are hard to tell apart with much confidence. One of the first things you notice in the literature is the importance to specific identification of male genitalia, which are internal, practically microscopic, and only even potentially useful if you have the good fortune to happen on a very rare male of a solitary wasp species - and even then, sexual dimorphism can be such as to make a solid male identification useless for spotting a female unless you actually observe them to be in copula. (Female mutillids, aka "velvet ants", don't even have wings!)
All of which is to say, I would expect the more obscure solitary bees to pose the same sort of difficulty.
Do you know of any place where one could simply contribute?
Bugguide seems to be North America only, but while I stayed in a remote area of the Indio Maiz reserve in Nicaragua I stumbled upon a spider that I haven't identified in years and can't quite find any place to simply share the photo[0].
Without having the eye arrangement is not easy, but taking in mind the habitat and shape, a member of Ctenidae would be my first candidate
Compare for example with Ancylometes or Ctenus.
If not, we could start weaving further from there. Zoropsidae, Lycosidae or Sparassidae (check Heteropoda venatoria for example) would be other acceptable family candidates. Those last couple of legs seem very characteristic.
Definitely Araneomorpha Lycosoidea, so there are ten families of interest or so. We don't have the eyes so we'll never know. Cuppiennius appears often in banana leaves, but doesn't have that strange angle in the last legs (Maybe is an abnormal specimen or an effect of the camera?).
The legs were definitely like that, and it's too bad I didn't get the eyes then!
I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't particularly known, considering it was deep within the Indio maiz reserve (not just by the only town of Greytown but 5-10 hours by boat into the reserve from there)
Yes, iNat is worldwide and that's the first place I'd try.
That said, I wouldn't necessarily expect a whole lot. I'm not even an amateur arachnologist, but my sense is that spiders are about as complicated as hymenopterans, if not more so; especially outside well-known families like the salticids, it seems like it's not rare to find difficult identifications.
The machine vision on iNaturalist is great, but it's not necessarily adequate for distinguishing between insect species -- there can be details that are difficult to photograph, let alone identify from a casual user's photograph.
And we still need training data (i.e. identified by the expert taxonomists) for future work.
I have been at talks by their devs. They candidly admit it will never meet the needs (accuracy) to address questions at this level of specificity. Some things will be extremely successful, many (most) will not.
Think of biodiversity as a curve, with a long tail. Will AI on poorly taken images specimens work for the bell? Probably. Will it actually get at the numbers at the tail? Almost certainly not. This is largely because 1) getting at the tail requires intimate knowledge of where to find that biodiversity (the vast majority of iNaturlaist pics are shockingly close to civilization, where diversity may not be) and 2) intimate knowledge, often of internal features or other non-imagable data, so that one can actually record data that fits in the tail.
Last year I installed a beehive in our garden. Didn't take their honey, didn't treat them for Varroa. In the midst of winter I was sure they were all dead. Then a few days ago temperatures shot up to about 18°c and suddenly they were back, basking in the sunlight and buzzing around the hive. Made me so happy...
Seriously, I've come to understand that contrary to what most of us seem to believe, it's not about what we can do to minimize our negative impact, but rather what we can do to have a positive impact on our environment. Not just ecologically, but also socially and politically.
That is true. I've been dealing with Varroa in the US since I started beekeeping. I've lost many hives because of Varroa. I ran my own experiments treating some hives and not treating others, trying to see if nature would allow me to select the strongest (Varroa-resistant) colonies and selectively breed them. I didn't succeed.
That said no bee breed is 100% resistant. To breed the resistance that this breed has took a very long time and active management like killing susceptible drones to artificially select for the trait. It’s not going to happen with one hive.
And as others have said you might do more harm than good by letting a hive get badly infected, spreading heavy infection to other hives. You should definitely actively manage it.
With the beeweavers I still get some mites, and you need to do a mite count. Typically a mite count of 3% is in danger and needs treatment.
Here in France basically all hives are infected, and male bees are the main propagation vector, since they go and visit other hives.
For me he choice is between an intrusive apiculture - introducing poisonous chemicals into the hive, frequent interventions, essentially having a dependent, weak bee population - and a more gentle one where I keep intervention to a minimum, and instead focus on giving the bees a healthy, thriving habitat, a garden without pesticides, access to water, and lots of flowers.
Depending on where you are they may not be out of the danger zone yet. Here in Colorado we regularly get mid-to-high 60F days and I know people who lost hives as late as April.
You didn't take their excess honey, but I assume you still inspected to give them room otherwise they could easily have swarmed.
That is fantastic. We really have no hope unless there is some initiative that encourages literally everyone to do this kind of thing. I just came across this yesterday and it really inspired me:
It is so much work though and only a few people would really have such commitment to do it on their own. We need new legislation that requires e.g. every new land development to rewild some fraction of that land, or some great benefits for people that otherwise perform ecological stewardship. It's the only way we can turn this around.
The root cause seems to be an unknown problem with bacteria that produce thiamine at the base of food chains, as well as some invasive species (which for example caused big problems in the Great Lakes in the USA). Thiamine is pretty fundamental to life so it might explain the decline in insects as well as the other effects described in the above article. Reading about thiamine antagonists it seems sulfates can destroy thiamine:
"Rumen bacteria also reduce sulfate to sulfite, therefore high dietary intakes of sulfate can have thiamine-antagonistic activities."
Sulfates in the environment are one result of burning coal. So it is possible that one side effect of burning coal for decades is the food chain has been interrupted at the bacterial level, reducing the amount of thiamine available. If true, I'm not sure if that would be easy to fix; at the very least it would probably require coal burning to stop immediately and perhaps manufacture of thiamine and distribution of it in the environment, which could take a decade and might be somewhat risky with side effects if done on a large scale. If it really is coal burning causing thiamine deficiencies over wide areas it should be easy to tell by looking for thiamine deficiencies downwind of coal burning plants.
There is a large body of existing literature linking pesticide application to decreased biodiversity. I’m not saying this speculation about thiamine is unfounded, but if there’s good supporting data for it, it’s likely to be an additive rather than alternative factor contributing to the loss of biodiversity.
Possibly they could be interrelated, if say thiamine deficiency made insects more susceptible to pesticides or pesticides also increased thiamine deficiency. The link between pesticides and decreased biodiversity would still exist, but the root cause or chain of causes might be something happening at a lower level than simple direct poisoning. This paper is interesting in that respect "A 2018 Horizon Scan of Emerging Issues for Global Conservation and Biological Diversity":
Thiamine Deficiency as a Possible Driver of Wildlife Population Declines
Evidence is increasing that a range of taxonomic groups, including bivalve molluscs, ray-finned fish, and birds across the Northern Hemisphere, are deficient in thiamine (vitamin B1) 19, 20. Thiamine is required for basic cellular metabolism and functioning of neuronal membranes. Thiamine deficiency rarely is a direct cause of mortality, but impairs health and can cause immunosuppression or leads to behavioural and reproductive problems that ultimately could cause population decline or extirpation. Days of thiamine deficiency may present long-lasting sublethal effects, which makes recognition of the extent of thiamine deficiencies more complex. The deficiencies likely are caused by insufficient dietary intake, which may be related to shifts in thiamine-producing algal populations. A recent and extensive survey along the northwest coast of the US found evidence of thiamine depletion in the water column [21]. Additionally, exposure to environmental pollutants may interfere with thiamine uptake. The extent to which thiamine deficiency may pose a substantial long-term risk to a range of species remains unclear.
End quote.
So thiamine deficiency may also be partially induced by environmental pollutants which possibly includes insecticides (though the paper gives no citations for which pollutants). The scale of the known thiamine problems, at least in water systems, are scary, as is the fact that we don't really know what the extent of it is, especially on land. My experience in research, software, and life is that there are usually multiple simultaneous problems behind observable issues.
> Humans think about certain things as being infinite, until they aren't
I think the real issue is that humans DONT think beyond their own needs. You have people who think having a picture perfect green lawn is somehow an achievement. If its not perfect, you must be a lazy sack of crap or have no pride. Think Hank Hill from the animated TV series, King of the Hill.
Same goes for gardens and so on. To achieve this they poison the earth again and again and again. Continuously spraying and pumping all sorts of life destroying chemicals into the air and ground. Just so they can stand on their porch, arms akimbo, nodding in satisfaction of the holocaust they just unleashed against multiple forms of life, both insect and plant. All for a crappy lifeless lawn.
If grass needed bees to grow you can be sure we'd be up to our eyeballs in bees. (I come from NYC/Long island so I'm more familiar with urban earth poisoning. I'm sure farming has as great or a much larger impact as well. Just my POV)
Actually in many suburban and exurban places, more chemicals are used in lawns than in farms. On farms they have to watch their costs since they have very tight margins. A person spraying their yard every so often may get 2x or 3x what they need, just to be "safe" and then go ahead and spray any left overs until it is all gone, because why not. Same goes with fertilizer.
This isn't to say that farms don't have this problem, they definitely do.
If every suburbian yard was filled with native plants, wild bees would be doing amazing. Reminder to everyone, only honeybees can forage on a wide variety of flowers. Most bees can only consume native flowers to the area.
I disapprove of that unnecessary lawns and hoa sterile “gardening”. Like they mandate planting rules or hire “gardeners” to maintain a landscape in a sterile, generic state but there is no thought or reason to it. What hoa had their landscaping designed by ecologists with the environment in mind? It’s hoa boards who don’t care but just want something standard and cheap and to put as little consideration into it as possible. All for the “Maximize/maintain house value” lie. Minimum effort at a cheap bland environment harming aesthetic does not maximize value.
Humans suck (at least via intuition) when it comes to exponential processes. E.g. - people think a 2% growth rate of population in a town is good, but that means in 35 years it's double of what it was!
Interesting to note that population of central boroughs of London (which is used as a canonical example of population growth and overcrowding in Europe) is roughly half what they were 100 years ago. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Islington#De...
And likely decreasing now again, as people find less cultural benefit of living in an expensive city during an ongoing pandemic.
I don't think population size or density is really the problem - the problem is poor planning to account for probable changes in population size or density. Consistent 2% growth should be relatively easy for politicians to anticipate and manage.
I worded this poorly. I meant to point out the counterintuitive nature of 2% growth, not that growth of a city is bad. Mayors who don't realize what 2% means are doing a bad job governing.
That viewpoint might be pre 1970s. We’ve been hammered with environmental news for quiet some time.
Especially with the popularity of Boy Scouts and Camp Fire starting way back in American history.
At least the common person.
Most people know what’s going on, forests destroyed and changing habitats. They just don’t care or have higher priority issues like having a job to eat or electricity/productive resources.
It's an unfortunate consequence of our biology. We're not thinking machines, we reproduction machines. Thinking was never even tacked-on, it just was just a side-effect from our (quite amazing) capability to abstract and model the systems around us to make predictions about them. The monkey systems around us.
So, all in all it's not surprising that we lack the necessary algorithms to correctly deal with the dangers that come from being a species that found the ultimate exploits in the game of life.
Well, it's romantic to think that there's a higher calling for humankind. And I guess that for the story-telling narrator in our head who is interpreting and commenting the events unfolding in front of our eyes, it's just impossible to not treat the entity harboring it as very, very special, unique and bestowed with destiny.
The Earth does not belong to us, rather we belong to the Earth. The Earth is more important than we are, we should put the Earth's needs ahead of our own needs. We must stand up for the rights of the Earth, or else human rights will be impossible to maintain.
I consider to be very convincing the theory that most of our capacity for reasoning actually revolves around the modeling of other humans' thought processes. Together with language (which allows us to 'groom' many people at once, where individuals from other ape species have to groom each other one by one. Grooming as in 'interact to bond and build cooperative associations') it has allowed for incredible cooperative achievements.
So; monkey systems -> other humans, albeit flippantly.
I have come to the conclusion that most of my colleagues, friends neighbors and acquaintances are living in a stoically enforced willful blindness.
No one in their right mind can nowadays honestly deny that we are moving, slowly but ever accelerating, into a human-made ecosystem collapse that no one is able to stop before it is too late.
But still people are finding ways to weasel out of actually making the conscious effort of accepting the fact that we - as a species - are killing ourselves. Either by denying the facts - the climate is not changing, the animals are not dying, the rivers are not poisoned! - or by ascribing to some kind of techno-utopism where everything will be fixed in the future.
I'm wondering if this is part of psychological coping mechanism; that the fact of our species ending is such a trauma that we - even though we cannot deny it in all honesty - have to suppress our own conciseness from realizing the direful consequences for every single person we know and love. We have to deny reality, because the implications of accepting the facts are just to painful. And so we continue this charade of daily going to work and shopping and comparing our income to those of our neighbors and continue our meaningless competitions for status and rank.
I think deep in our hearts most of us know that it is really far to late.
I don't know what sociologists & psychologists would say, but I think the group action problem continues to be a big hurdle. There is a tremendous variety of changes I & my spouse would be willing to make, costs we would be willing to pay- except if only we do it, it makes not one iota of difference. (Our compromise has been that we focus our efforts on positive changes that also save us money, like insulation, efficiency, shade, biking, etc)
Frankly it's also currently a lot of work to constantly make all the "right" choices. Taking the "right" actions would be significantly easier with a stronger "systems" solution. For example, a carbon tax or neonicotinoid ban would instantly make it zero-effort to buy low-carbon or bee-friendly.
Consumer-choice oriented campaigns like the Rainforest Alliance et al are absolutely well intentioned but the message of saving the world through our purchasing decisions may have indirectly disenfranchised our capacity for collective action.
Don’t think about doing the « right » thing. Thinking like this is extremism.
What is important is acquiring the knowledge of your impacts.
Once you decide to acquire this knowledge, there is no more « right » or « wrong » way to act. There is only « reasonable », « unreasonable », « exceptional », « I don’t know let’s check this I’m curious ». You have the right to make the wrong choices as long as you are able to accept you were wrong.
What I like with this approach, is that it’s not self-flagellation anymore, it’s the joy of understanding the beautiful and complex world we live in.
You are not thinking about what the others do, you are just working towards being a better human. And this is easily transmissible around you without proselytism.
Surely you're the enlightened one and everyone you know is willfully blind.
Or maybe they're pragmatic and begrudgingly accept that to maintain any semblance of modern life, they have to participate in however society functions *now*.
I'm in no position, financial or otherwise, to go off-grid, ride my bike everywhere, delete my car, home cook every meal with locally grown ingredients. Or to decrease my energy consumption through buying less VPS time, buying and using test equipment, parts, protypes made overseas with no pollution regulations. I can do better than I'm doing now, but not by much unless there truly is some massive, global-level, snap-of-the-fingers change. Reason being, if I do, it's essentially self-harm, like a social suicide. I suffer, I lose jobs, contracts, my livelihood, relationships, etc while the rest of the world happily moves on without me. Which yeah, it fits the idea of your of complaint.
The majority of your acquaintances who you've written off as stuck in the dark ages don't have the ability to make the extraordinary changes that you demand for removing that label. Your statement was more philosophical than demanding specific action, but ignoring the reality of humans and human society so you can shit on us from your tower is not helpful.
So this is how you justify it to yourself? Honest question. It seems you acknowledge the legitimacy and urgency of the problem but are unwilling to make changes due to it being social suicide?
This is kind of where I feel I am, so I'm curious for you to expand. Do you have kids? Will you be able to tell them you did something positive about this problem? Or greedily stayed complicit due to the inconvenience? Are you prepared to tell your daughter you were the part of the people killing all the wildlife on earth? I know that sounds super aggressive but I'm legitimately asking. This stuff goes through my head for myself, so I'm curious how you address it?
I stay at a level of selfishness that I'm comfortable with. I do what I can to make the little things I can control better, I lead by example when I get the chance, and I understand that I'm not going to change society so it's (selfishly) not worth it for me to be a zealot.
I don't have kids, but I'd like to. I know even that's the "selfish" answer, but I can attempt to justify it by teaching them to be good stewards and thereby doing something positive about the problem. Calling it passing the problem on, but they'll have better tools than me to cope with it because we're building those tools right now. At the very least, I'd hope my daughter would be smart enough to understand that being "part of the people killing all the wildlife on earth" is a gross simplification of an incredibly complex social and scientific environment.
I don't justify anything. In my opinion, a first world life as it exists today is unjustifiable. But that doesn't mean it's my fault, or that I can do anything about it.
> It seems you acknowledge the legitimacy and urgency of the problem but are unwilling to make changes due to it being social suicide?
It would be impossible for me personally to make meaningful changes. I live in a city with no infrastructure. The USA has so much inefficiency baked into its supply chain due to globalism it's ridiculous. Everyone is anti-nuclear, no politician represents me or these interests. I recycle, I carry my own bag to the store, etc. I drive more than an hour every day even though I would like to not own a car. I can't ever not be employed because losing the insurance would literally kill me due to a medical condition.
> Do you have kids?
I will probably never have children because I don't really believe in the future.
> Will you be able to tell them you did something positive about this problem? Or greedily stayed complicit due to the inconvenience? Are you prepared to tell your daughter you were the part of the people killing all the wildlife on earth?
Here's the deal. All of our carbon footprints here probably suck, but you're playing into the hands of the real evil by framing things this way. Counterintuitively, pushing for individual responsibility for pollution and environmental degradation is exactly what big corporations want because it enables their destruction more than any other single thing. If I had a child, I would educate them not to make this argument but to push for structural reform and deprogramming of this mindset.
Have you ever heard of the Keep America Beautiful [1] campaign? It's where a lot of this sentiment comes from, and it was funded by Coca-Cola in response to a rise in sentiment supporting legislation to reign in environmental destruction on the part of big corporations. Greenwashing campaigns have been very effective at shifting public attention away from corporate responsibility and towards the individual. I'll 'do my part' to consume less, but I refuse to put responsibility for these corporate / government structures on myself. Especially after they've gone to such lengths to gaslight us all.
> This stuff goes through my head for myself, so I'm curious how you address it?
One thing I've brainstormed with a similarly-concerned friend would be to create a series of localized handout materials tying politicians that people in the area can vote for to specific environmental atrocities directly in an easy-to-understand fashion. That would be a pretty non-trivial effort though, would require cooperation from a lot of other people, and could get us in a lot of trouble. Maybe one day.
I don't understand why you think that I would write off anyone as 'stuck in the dark ages'.
So I guess that might be misunderstanding my argument. I'm not demanding any actions, my point is not that everyone but me is doing to little and that we should do more to save the environment and our planet. That's a good argument (well, except for the 'everyone but me' part) but not the one I'm making.
My argument - or rather; the conclusion - that I've come to - is that we are mentally unable to accept the dire consequences of our current situation. It's not even that we don't /want/ to fix things, it's that most of the people cannot accept the fact of the situation we're in, because the of the absolutely devastating consequences we are facing, namely extinction.
We are unable to accept that. It's too big. It's too grandiose, too preposterous. We cannot imagine this happening. And so we deny it, continue with the lives we've grown accustomed to, with the pleasures we enjoy and the dangers we know. And because everyone around us continues the charade and we feel comforted in our not-quite-conscious decision to ignore the situation and continue as before.
I expect that this is to a large part the fate of any species "finding the ultimate exploits" in the game of life. That also answers the questions of; why isn't there anybody out there: any species evolved in the context of competition for resources is unable to handle the transition to a steady-state and after a brief and glorious period of unchecked growth collapses into itself.
I grapple with this every day. It is painful to look around and see that no one is paying attention or cares. There is all this talk of being Woke nowadays but I believe these people are only woke in the one particular way - around race, sex, etc. To be truly Woke you need to be cognizant of how everything you do impacts the world around you. People go to great lengths to understand racial injustice but won't spend even a minute talking about the ecological issues. Crazy thing is that no matter your race, sexual orientation, pronoun, or whatever else basically have nothing in comparison to climate change and ecological collapse. These things affect all, not just some groups. I don't mean to diminish racial justice, but this is so much bigger than that. I'm scared.
"Humans had their chance, and nature selected them... for extinction." ~ paraphrasing Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park.
Human intelligence is a product of evolution, and that evolution apparently didn't provide us the kind of attributes that would keep us from destroying ourselves or our environment (or destroying ourselves is some kind of evolutionary advantage, but that's the kind of assessment that can only be made by whatever comes after us).
I don't think it's too late from a "technical perspective". We could absolutely change our behaviour and priorities and fix the problems that will ultimately end us as a species in the near future if we do nothing. We have that capability.
But since witnessing the pandemic and how the human race has responded to it, rapid vaccine development notwithstanding, I have pretty much zero confidence that will happen. At this point when I look at climate change and other impacts from our insistence on exploiting and trashing our planet and its ecosystems, I would be shocked to learn that humans were around and thriving a couple hundred years from now.
The difficult reality for me is not that there's nothing we can do, it's that there are things we can do, but a sufficient portion of the human population will simply not be convinced to do those things before it's too late, even as the impacts of the very problems they are being asked to acknowledge and accept are destroying their own lives.
I'm afraid we are - as I mentioned further up in the thread - are just not mentally equipped to be able to process the situation we - as a species - find ourselves in.
This is the Fermi paradox as it is happening - civilizations invariably destroy themselves after short periods in astronomical time scale, otherwise we should see more evidence of extraterrestrial life if Drake equation is a remotely accurate model.
I built my house about 5 years ago in a subdivision. First year on the back deck at noon there were a handful of bees buzzing around and at dust I was getting eaten alive by mosquitos.
After 5 years of watching my neighbors spray for mosquitos in their lawn, and anti-grub stuff, synthetic fertilizer all spring and summer -> they're all basically gone.
When you think about all the forests getting knocked down to build new houses not just in the US - but even more so in rapidly growing 3rd world countries...it makes sense.
Yeah, when we bought our house , we stopped the maintenance of the backyard with chemicals that the previous owner did. Planted more native shrubs and trees and now eight years later we have got a pretty vibrant patch, with lots of birds feeding on the bugs.
Of course this has put me in conflict with my neighbors who make snide comments about a poorly maintained yard... sigh
I agree with you all’s sentiment. But, I wish it was a simple as letting things get ‘back to nature’ but it’s not unfortunately. I live in a rental, halfway through our second year lease.
We have a really large, fantastic yard. It is landscaped nicely with mostly ’native’ plants. Rhododendron, azaleas, among others. Also full of large, old growth trees. Many probably 150-200 years old according to the arborist who came out and surveyed recently.
Due to the large tree canopies in the neighborhood, we have an unbelievable bird population. Numerous small birds special, huge seasonal flocking birds passing through, hawks, even a couple resident owls. Huge amounts of squirrels and small mammals.
Unfortunately, we still have a horrible mosquito problem in the summertime. It’s really almost unbearable. I strongly considered having the yard sprayed last year, but resisted the temptation.
Anecdata, but I feel like I don't see that many bugs in general since the 1990s (born in mid-80s). In my adult life I don't bother buying bug spray or citronella candles anymore, butterflies don't seasonally pass overhead, crickets are very quiet in the fields, and picnics rarely get raided by ants.
When I was a kid in the 1970’s and early 80’s, my grandparents would drive 100’s of miles along I-95 to visit us from Florida and arrive with the grille and windshield of their car absolutely splattered with bug corpses. You can make that same drive today without killing a fly.
Side note: We also used to see long caravans of migrating birds flying south in the fall. Thousands of them at least, traveling overhead in a steady stream for 15 minutes or more.
Even if we manage to address climate change in time, I worry we’ve already missed the boat for addressing the accompanying ecological collapse that seems to be rapidly accelerating.
"The sharpest decrease occurred between 2006 and 2015, with roughly 25 percent fewer species spotted"
This short time scale doesn't seem to fit with climate change being the cause (assuming that the decrease is actually real at all, not an observational artifact).
Yup, but I'll bet a significant sum it corresponds with tonnage of neonicotinoid and other pesticide production (application).
This is truly a problem that free markets will never handle, by design
The market is great at identifying the utility of aggressive pesticides. Need found, production started, pricing, & distribution - insect crop damage 'solved' (for some values of 'solved').
Discovering that this 'solution' actually breaks the food web will also be 'solved' by the free market, as the last remaining produce that requires those pollinators spike from $/bushel to $/gram levels.
But, that will fail to create more production when pollinators are extinct, and even if they could be ressurrected from DNA libraries, the poisons are still spread.
Oh, and all the customers also died
Yes, regulation is massively inconvenient, and apparently inefficient, and one can always find egregious bad examples. But intelligent regulation is necessary for our survival.
Yes, some change in pesticide use would fit better with the time scale.
But supposing that's the source of the problem, I don't understand your focus on capitalism. In any economic system, some people are going to be trying to increase the efficiency of food production (if not, they'll all eventually starve to death). In doing so, they are going to be responding to incentives of making money, or of getting a promotion after fulfilling the goals of the five-year plan, or simply of having the inner feeling of having done a good job. I don't see why only the "making money" incentive is problematic. And indeed, the former Soviet block was notorious for terrible environmental problems.
Good question, thx. It is the balance that I'm focusing on.
Completely agree that over-regulation, e.g., soviet-style, is a recipe for many of the WORST environmental disasters.
Corporate regulatory capture or elimination of regulation is just crashing the scale in the other direction.
Since the current problem in most of the world is lack of constraints on production of, for example, things that serve some purpose but also break the food web, that's my focus.
Basically, it seems that, whenever people get enough good information, and have good democratic (small-d) control of the system, they find a balance to encourage and regulate development. No one wants to live in a wasteland.
But if too few control things, such as an authoritarian state, or corporatists doing regulatory capture, they have the illusion that they can destroy all they want, externalize the damage, and enjoy life in their palaces. For centurys, it was true. Now, we seem to be approaching the point where the whole food web may break.
As soon as the "ecological collapse" stops, extensive speciation will occur. Nature always wins. There's a lot to be hopeful about even when it seems like there might not be.
As a physics/chemistry person I have a lot of questions, I hope there are some biologists in the house. I am all for environmental preservation and conservation -- do we know the exact effects of certain bee species becoming extinct? Will it really throw off pollination and ecological equilibrium, or will it be a slight perturbation that nature will promptly rebound from? For example if all X pollinators go extinct, could it not potentially leave room for Y pollinators to grow and effectively "take over the job" or "fill the void".
Somewhat dark, but I imagine there are hundreds, if not thousands, of species that could simply go extinct without permanent "damage" to the biochemical ecosystem. Humans are probably one of those species. For example, what if all red ants went extinct? Would the Earth just be completely screwed? I would guess probably not. My question is what separates a critical species from a non-critical one and how do biologists even determine this effectively?
I know nature does not care about what species live and die; evolution has no "desire" to keep anything alive. But is there really a bottleneck species that, if wiped out, would cause an irreversible phase transition for life as we know it?
> do we know the exact effects of certain bee species becoming extinct?
Not, in most cases.
> For example if all X pollinators go extinct, could it not potentially leave room for Y pollinators
Not. We would enter in an extinction vortex. Less pollinators mean less seeds, less plants, and the empty space would be filled by Y, the species that Y pollinators search for. X would disappear. And we would lose Z, M and Q also. Is the same that happens with companies that lose their main customers. They became less attractive, not more. To be rescued by the fanbase of a competitor suddenly moving in mass to your product is not likely.
> Would the Earth just be completely screwed?
Not, you can't screw the planet, but would be painful (Mess with nature, brace yourself for nasty surprises. Nasty and unfixable). If we take in mind similar events from our past many people would probably die.
I cannot make sense of your second paragraph. It's either badly written, badly argumented or both.
I'll try again. If the metaphor you're choosing is a company losing their clients, then your argument is wrong, because what happens is that the competitor(s) fills the void and the system balances itself.
Why would that not happen in the scenario parent comment proposed? What rule prohibits it?
In ecology there is a concept called extinction vortex. It works very much like a black hole. You pass a non-return point and then the extinction process accelerates suddenly. There is just not time anymore for plans B or C. To escape the gravitational field you need to add lots of energy in the opposite direction. You need, lets say it, a "god's hand intervention"; A few humans that will decide to spend huge amounts of money, time, technology and resources to try to save the day. A struck of luck that worked for Californian Condor or European bison, but failed for Californian porpoise.
> If the metaphor you're choosing is a company losing their clients, then your argument is wrong, because what happens is that the competitor(s) fills the void and the system balances itself.
What you say is exactly what I'm predicting that will happen.
If you wipe an obscure species of mosquitoes, and they pollinate X, in the 99% of the cases X will disappear. Period. There is not time for the other species to fill the gap or for X to adapt. Can survive only by cloning itself. If all mosquitoes were equally equivalent and equally replaceable, we would have room in the planet for one single species, not thousands.
While changes to insect populations are a thing, it could be in part that your car is more aerodynamic than the ones you rode in as a kid. That would reduce bug impacts, and increase fuel efficiency.
I agree with another poster that it's likely aerodynamics.
But, it reminded me of an incident when I was a kid. In a minivan, all windows open, highway speeds. Driver hit a swarm of bees. I've never seen a density of bees like it. Made the windshield opaque for many seconds of wipers and spray, and the number of bees that came through the side windows to be smashed against the back windows and luggage was shocking.
I don't know anything about swarming behavior, and it's been years since I thought about that incident. Thanks for the memory!
It depends on where you live, but winter and flying insects are terms mutually exclusive normally. Many species adapt their cycles to pass winter in form of eggs/larvae or just hibernate in a quiet place. Some migrate. Most adults just die.
If you live in Washington State, you can help by planting bee-friendly flowers in your garden (if you have one). The Noxious Weed Control Board offers a pack of seeds for free!:
https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/bee-u-tify
Where I live (Bavaria), in the last two years public lawns didn't get mowed any more and now grow a beautiful variety of wild flowers and are a great place for bees and other insects. Also, some part of the farmed ground around the village has been dedicated to growing flowers. Sometimes it is very easy to at least compensate a bit the damage done.
Please don't kill insects unless you really need to, I've seen people on Facebook talking about destroying caterpillar nests because they kill trees and it's not even true they might eat some leaves but it's natural and doesn't usually kill the tree. Now I hardly see the nests anywhere anymore and the butterflies either.
We had a massive gypsy moth outbreak this year. They destroy oak trees and no birds will eat them. It's absolutely a good idea to destroy their nests. Obviously this entails knowing what they look like...
I'm not sure what the consequences of this are, but it is a pretty big deal. Bees are responsible for pollinating a lot of plants, and if the bees are dying off, it could have devastating consequences for the food supply.
I'm not sure what the point of this article is. It's not like we're going to be able to do anything about it.
I remember when I was younger, we were told about the killer bees were going to wipe out the modern world. Also, I was told that we would all be living on a beach or the sea because of global warming and the ozone hole lazering everything.
I was told that at a nursery when I went buy a discontinued systemic fruit fly spray (spray twice a year), he had no answer when I told him the local council had banned keeping bee hives in the city. We do have bees, just nowhere near as many as I remember as a kid.
Because it’s time consuming so you have to be paid for this. So you have to sell honey that will suffer the competition of cheap industrial honey.
However, you can have a hive in your land just for the sake of feeding bees (and eat your own honey).
I don’t know how it works in your country, in France, you can legally do it as long as your terrain is large enough to place the hive 20m away any habitation (100m away if it’s a public building). You are also required to follow a 3 day training. It’s not that much but it requires some self-investment.
So I would say that it’s not common but it is totally possible.
I’ve gone on one too many angry rants about inaccurate & deceptive ‘bees are dying’ articles at this point so I will try to be nice :) Also, I’ll give National Geographic credit here for presenting a more ‘balanced’ depiction of the situation than most news outlets offer.
I still have some nitpicks, but this article is a bit more balanced & honest than most, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, because they admit up front, that the majority of pollination in farms comes from ‘managed’ bee hives, offered up as a service by commercial bee keepers. Many articles never mention this, and present the subject as if all crops are pollinated by wild bees.
Secondly, despite the title, the article clearly states that the science and observations on the subject are not well understood. Obviously wild pollinators supplement the managed honey bee hives, but I’ve never heard of any study that tries to measure the impact of wild pollinators have, compared to managed hives.
I think it’s safe to say the large majority of pollination comes from commercial honey bee keepers. For a point of reference, in the US according to the ‘National Honey Board’, ”The USDA has estimated that 80 percent of insect crop pollination is accomplished by honey bees”.
Also, it is important to remember many crops do not need pollinators. When this article states right off the bat that bees ”pollinate 85 percent of food crops and fruits around the world”, this is slightly misleading.
They really mean bees pollinate 85% of crops and fruits that require pollination. The statement that 85% of all crops require pollination to grow would be incorrect.
With all that said, let me be clear. I’m not trying to be an apologist, or say any of this news is ‘okay’, it’s not. We see these articles all the time now for good reason, because it is super important to protect bees and other pollinators.
But commercial honey bee keepers need to be given credit for the invaluable and important work that they do by providing their hives to increase production in agriculture. They are the true champions. It’s not the best system, but it is the reality of large scale agriculture these days.
As the article mentions, depending too much on a single species can be risky. If there is a disease or pest outbreak in the hives, or in the fields, or problems from chemical application, that could have dramatic impacts of yearly yields.
The article also rightly says ”There’s no long-term, very accurate, precise sampling of bees all over the world,” , and ” Nevertheless, he cautions, the records that underpin the study don’t give us enough information to determine if certain species have gone extinct.”
Even with my nitpicks, I applaud National Geographic here. This is one of the more balanced articles I’ve seen on the topic of bee populations. Many of them are either purposely or ignorantly disingenuous.
This is not to say that species richness is not declining, its to say that in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important, and why they require fixed, institutionally-based funding to actually be able to provide the services that would allow us to confidently state that data like these are because of environmental change (again, they very likely are) rather than a lack of experts in the field actually doing basic research.
In other words, it is extremely rare that universities (in the US) actually hire what was once known as "alpha-taxonomists", in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved) in part it is a reflection of the (I would argue "immense") short-sightedness of institutions. "We want answers to complex questions! We've neglected to give scientists time to think deeply, and research over decades to answer those questions. Oh, we see."