Mosquitoes Develop a Taste for Reptile Blood in the Galapagos

The evolution of mosquitoes in the Galapagos Islands spells trouble for reptiles including the iconic giant tortoise. While most mosquitoes prefer the blood of mammals, the black salt marsh mosquito has developed a taste for reptile blood, putting the islands’ unique native wildlife at risk of contracting new mosquito-borne diseases.

From Science Daily:

The research team believe the shift in feeding behaviour is an adaptation to life in Galapagos, since the islands had few mammal species prior to the arrival of Man some 500 years ago.

“When we started the work we thought that this species was also introduced by humans, so it was a surprise that it turned out to be so ancient,” says Arnaud Bataille, the University of Leeds and ZSL PhD student who carried out the work. “The genetic differences of the Galapagos mosquitoes from their mainland relatives are as large as those between different species, suggesting that the mosquito in Galapagos may be in the process of evolving into a new species.”

“With tourism growing so rapidly the chance of a disease-carrying mosquito hitching a ride from the mainland on a plane is also increasing, since the number of flights grows in line with visitor numbers” says Dr Andrew Cunningham, from the Zoological Society of London, one of the authors of the study. “If a new disease arrives via this route, the fear is that Galapagos’ own mosquitoes would pick it up and spread it throughout the archipelago.”

Because of their long history of being separated from creatures on the mainland, Galapagos Island wildlife doesn’t have the same immunity to new diseases, making it extremely vulnerable to complete devastation.

In an effort to keep mosquitoes from arriving in the Galapagos from other areas and spreading disease to the native mosquitoes, Ecuadorian officials have introduced a requirement for planes flying in to have a residual insecticide treatment on interior surfaces.

Link [Science Daily]
Photo credit: FireflyForest.net

Taiwan Shuts Down Highway for Butterfly Crossing

Drivers in Taiwan are slowing down – and even stopping – as the annual migration of milkweed butterflies across a highway commences. The Taiwanese government shut down one lane of the highway, lowered the speed limit and even putting up protective nets as the insects cross the road. Trees have been planted along the highway to offer a longer-term, natural net.

The whole process takes about a month, as thousands of butterflies fly over a section of freeway in northern Taiwan on their way home after spending the winter further south.

From MSNBC (Reuters):

Before the Taiwan Area National Freeway Bureau took protective measures in 2007, many butterflies were hit on the highways or killed by wind from speeding vehicles.

“More than 10,000 butterflies will spread their wings to fly high, bravely crossing the highway, on a different kind of life-or-death journey,” the bureau said in a statement, calling the migration “one of a kind.”

The roadkill rate of butterflies has fallen to 0.3 percent last year from 3 percent before the highway department took action, the bureau said.

First the squirrel walkway across a highway in Scotland, now this. As fast as life is these days, it’s so nice to see people go out of their way to stop a moment and help small creatures like these. It seems that for most people in this world, it’s too easy to forget that we can coexist peacefully with all of the other forms of life on this planet instead of just barrelling through.

Imagine if this happened in America, though – something tells me that Mr. Impatient Ass in a Hummer isn’t going to slow down for butterflies, though he’d have quite a clean-up job ahead of him once he passed through the procession.

Link [MSNBC]

Maggots in Your Mushrooms: Contamination is Rampant in our Food Supply

Insect filth. Rodent filth. Parasites. Mildew. Cigarette butts. Mammalian excreta. These are just a handful of the revolting things that are currently named as “allowable defects” in an FDA booklet entitled “The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazards for Humans”. The very booklet that food producers use to determine just how much they can let slide.

All of a sudden, after the news about the Georgia peanut plant that sickened thousands with salmonella – which was also home to mold and roaches – people are starting to pay attention to how our food is made and what’s in it. Better late than never, I guess – but the details of how much is actually passable by federal law will sicken you.

From The New York Times:

Tomato juice, for example, may average “10 or more fly eggs per 100 grams [the equivalent of a small juice glass] or five or more fly eggs and one or more maggots.” Tomato paste and other pizza sauces are allowed a denser infestation — 30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams or 15 or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per 100 grams.

Canned mushrooms may have “over 20 or more maggots of any size per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or “five or more maggots two millimeters or longer per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or an “average of 75 mites” before provoking action by the F.D.A.

The sauerkraut on your hot dog may average up to 50 thrips. And when washing down those tiny, slender, winged bugs with a sip of beer, you might consider that just 10 grams of hops could have as many as 2,500 plant lice. Yum.

Giving new meaning to the idea of spicing up one’s food, curry powder is allowed 100 or more bug bits per 25 grams; ground thyme up to 925 insect fragments per 10 grams; ground pepper up to 475 insect parts per 50 grams. One small shaker of cinnamon could have more than 20 rodent hairs before being considered defective.

The New York Times estimates that every year, you’re probably ingesting one to two pounds of flies, maggots and mites without realizing it. The FDA permits all of this because, in their words, it is “impractical to grow, harvest or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects.”

If that doesn’t make you want to start growing produce and making your meals from scratch, nothing will. Of course, it’s still virtually impossible to avoid ingesting gross stuff every now and then, even if you do – we live in a world covered in bugs, germs, feces and animal dander. Still,  all of this really makes it clear how far removed we are from the production of the food we eat.

One thing is clear: you can’t trust the government to keep rodent hairs out of your cinnamon and insect guts out of your peanut butter. Our choice is basically to take total control over our own food in any way we can, or get used to the idea of eating nasty crap.

Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: Flickr user jmichaeli

Global Warming May Spread Tick-Borne Disease

Warming weather may expose humans to disease through bites from brown dog ticks, which have previously far preferred dogs to people. Brown dog ticks became unusually aggressive around April 2007, which was abnormally warm.

Several cases of serious illness were reported in people who had been bitten, so scientists began investigating and found large numbers of brown dog ticks infected with varieties of Ricksettia bacteria, which causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Mediterranean spotted fever and other life-threatening diseases. The most recent outbreak was in France, where researchers collected 218 brown dog ticks in less than an hour from around the house of a woman who had been bitten.

From MSNBC:

To see how much the temperature, in particular, mattered, Raoult and two colleagues turned themselves into human guinea pigs. They incubated 500 brown dog ticks at 77 degrees Fahrenheit and 500 at 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, they placed the ticks on their own arms.

“They take a very long time to attach,” Raoult said, bravely. “It’s not like a mosquito. They don’t have time to bite you.”

After an hour, about half of the ticks incubated at 104 degrees tried to burrow in, Raoult said. None of those incubated at 77 degrees did. The results appeared in November in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Raoult suspects thirst drives the ticks to seek human blood at higher temperatures.

As global climate warms, dog ticks might be more likely to bite people, and tick-transmitted diseases might become more common, the researchers concluded.

The researchers say that the sudden surge from 77 degrees to 104 degrees is too extreme to mimic a realistic global warming scenario, so more testing is needed. But the scenario in France shows how quickly and unexpectedly ecosystems can react to changes in climate.

So, that’s another one to add to your list of global warming doomsday predictions – food shortages, disappearing coastal communities, malaria outbreaks, animals going extinct, extreme weather patterns and tick-borne diseases. Fun, fun, fun!

Link [MSNBC]
Photo credit: Animal Diversity Web

The Lost Ladybug Project: Help Scientists Save Disappearing Ladybugs

First it was bees, which are important to the balance of the environment in so many ways – especially pollination.  Now, populations of ladybugs around the world are inexplicably disappearing, and these once-ubiquitous little beetles also perform an important service in the natural world: controlling the population of harmful crop-destroying insects.  After noting a sudden, startling drop-off in the numbers of ladybugs in the Northeast, scientists have launched a nationwide project in the hopes of discovering the cause of this disquieting development.

From MSNBC:

“We don’t know why this happened, what impact it will have on controlling pests or how we can prevent more native species from becoming so rare,” said John Losey, a Cornell University entomologist who leads the Lost Ladybug Project.

Funded by a $2 million National Science Foundation grant, the project is recruiting citizen scientists, particularly children, to search for C-9 and other ladybug species and send photos of them to Cornell for identification and inclusion in a database.

“The scientific end of our project is, there are so many ladybugs, so many places to look for them and not very many entomologists, so we really need help building a database and mapping out where these beetles are,” said Leslie Allee, a Cornell research associate.

The C-9 ladybug is the nine-spotted Coccinella novemnotata.  Children between the ages of 5-11 in Native American, rural, farming and low-income areas are especially encouraged to help in the Lost Ladybug Project, taking photos of any ladybugs they find and sending them to Cornell for identification and inclusion in a database.  The organizers of the project hope that they’ll be able to excite these children about science and conservation of the natural world as they carry out this important research.

Scientists don’t yet know whether the disappearance of the 9-spotted ladybug will spur a swell in the population of crop-devastating pests – it’s not clear whether other varieties of ladybugs will be as effective.  It’s thought that the disappearance is likely tied to a combination of habitat loss and invasion of foreign competitors or predators.

For more info on the Lost Ladybug Project and how you can help, check out LostLadybug.org.

Link [MSNBC] + [Lost Ladybug Project]
Photo credit: Flickr user peasap

Ant Problem? Tackle it with Green Solutions

Once you start seeing ants around the house, it seems like it’s a never-ending problem – unless you want to resort to dangerous chemicals, which can be toxic to kids and pets (not to mention the environment). There are actually some fairly easy, humane, green ways to kill ants – or if you’re really a softie, to divert them away from your house.

Your mileage may vary with these four methods from wikiHow, and which one you choose might depend on your ability to stomach ant violence. Method 1 involves pipe tobacco, glue, baby powder, red pepper, chalk and lavender – check it out on the wikiHow page. The following three methods are a bit simpler:

Method 2: Fill a spray bottle with highly concentrated soap water. When you see ants, just spray them and they’ll be dead on contact. Wipe up the carcasses with whatever they were trying to eat. Within an hour, any stragglers will have dissipated.

Method 3: Collect a large number of ants from one ant hill (easy to do just leave some food in a container, return after 2 hours and you should have heaps. Drop all the ants in the container onto another ant hill and the ants will start fighting each other resulting in many casualties.

Method 4: Spray 3 parts dish soap and 1 part water on them and they will die instantly.

Method 3 seems kind of cruel but fun for those with suppressed homicidal maniac tendencies. If you’re too squeamish to kill them, one tip is to place a partially open jar of honey up in a tree in your backyard. The ants will seek out the honey instead of raiding your home in most cases.

Link [wikiHow]
Photo credit: Flickr user striatic

Clean Rivers in Maine Lead to Black Fly Swarms

Maine struggled with polluted rivers for years, and it took a lot of effort to get them cleaned up. After the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972, the clean-up tasks in rivers such as the Penobscot and Kennebec began, and now Maine residents are enjoying dozens of species that weren’t seen while the rivers were polluted. Unfortunately, they’re also dealing with an infestation of black flies, which are very sensitive to pollution and thrive in pristine flowing waters.

From Boston.com:

It’s an unintended barometer of good ecological health, but Maine officials are adamant they will not mess with nature in any way to provide relief.

“They can be so thick you breathe them in and they get stuck in your throat. They even get under your eyelids,” said Julia Brilliott, an Eastport resident who showed off four lumpy red welts on the back of her neck after climbing Mount Katahdin in Baxter State Park last week.

For the uninitiated, black flies are blood-sucking insects with a menacing reputation worthy of a late-night science fiction movie. Not all bite humans – some feed on other mammals and birds – but those that do are relentless daytime feeders. Even the nonbiting flies are often despised because they emerge by the millions in warm months and, lured by the carbon dioxide we exhale, swarm around people.

Situations like this require a tricky balance. Obviously, it’s better for the rivers to be clean so that more species can thrive – and animals like birds and trout feed on the flies. Though other states like Pennsylvania use chemicals to kill the fly larvae, which they claim are safe for the ecosystem, Maine officials refuse to use them, having the foresight to realize that a substance that’s toxic to one organism will likely be toxic to others as well.

Hopefully Maine officials will find a solution before residents decide that they’ve had enough of the black flies and get back to pollutin’.

Link [Boston.com]
Photo credit: Flickr user Benimoto

Woody Harrelson’s First Foray into Environmentalism was Saving Ants

Actor Woody Harrelson gets made fun of a lot in the media for being a hippie. And apparently, it all started when he was just a wee boy: he would put himself in a position to get beat up by other kids by defending a pile of ants.

From Ecorazzi:

“It got me into fights. But every day, I would run out just after class and stand there and stop anyone from stepping on the ant bed. I’d stay put until everyone had passed by and then I’d finally go home. I guess you could call that my first activism.” The actor sums it up: “With a name like Woody, I suppose my path was probably already established. It was inevitable that I’d be doing something like this. But people didn’t really give the environmental movement much importance back then. Now it’s a pretty hip thing to be green. But me, I’ve always been kind of a Hollywood hippie.”

Good for Woody. He went from a nerdy ant protecting kid to a crazed serial killer and porn king. No, but seriously, Woody Harrelson is one of those celebrities who really walk the walk. He lives in a solar powered sustainable community in Hawaii, runs his car on biodiesel and is heavily involved in a wide range of environmental and animal rights causes. You can read more about Harrelson’s activism at SFGate.

Link [Ecorazzi]+ [SFGate]
Photo credit: How to Go Further: A Guide to Simple Organic Living

‘Crazy Raspberry Ants’ Invade Houston, Ruin Computers

You might be wondering whether we’re about to describe the plot of an Ed Wood movie from 1954, but it’s confirmed reality: a species of tiny red ants named after exterminator Tom Raspberry are invading Houston, Texas by the billions and are inexplicably attracted to electronics. They supposedly came in on a cargo ship.

The Huffington Post has it:

The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as “crazy raspberry ants” _ crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and “raspberry” after Tom Raspberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.

“They’re itty-bitty things about the size of fleas, and they’re just running everywhere,” said Patsy Morphew of Pearland, who is constantly sweeping them off her patio and scooping them out of her pool by the cupful. “There’s just thousands and thousands of them. If you’ve seen a car racing, that’s how they are. They’re going fast, fast, fast. They’re crazy.”

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner’s gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction.

And when you do kill these ants, the survivors turn it to their advantage: They pile up the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely over surfaces treated with pesticide.

No one can explain why these strange little creatures are so interested in electronics. The Texas Department of Agriculture has teamed up with A&M researchers and the EPA to figure out how to stop them from eating Houston alive. Typical ant control methods aren’t working.

Craaaaazy, man. Attack of the crazy electronics-eating super fast ants! They’re coming to get you!

Link [Huffington Post]
Photo credit: Warner Bros.

Chow Down on Insects to Help the Environment

Doesn’t the sound and texture of insect exoskeletons being crushed between your teeth make your stomach growl? Especially when their crispy outsides break open and you get that gush of mushy innards all over the inside of your mouth. Some people describe the grayish, greasy meat of the giant water bug as “perfumey, tastes like salty apples”.

Sorry if I just ruined your lunch, but, eating insects is being called a great new way to help the environment. David Gracer, a composition teacher at a Rhode Island community college, has made it his goal to persuade Americans to eat insects in an attempt to “shake up how we all think about our food supply”.

Discover Magazine has it:

Gracer wants people to move away from getting their protein from traditional livestock such as cows, pigs, and chickens because raising livestock has a huge negative impact on the environment, regardless of whether the animals belong to subsistence farmers in developing countries or a Western industrial conglomerate (see “Warning: Contains Pork By-Products,” page 40). A United Nations report released in 2006 calls the livestock sector “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” The report notes that, among other adverse impacts, livestock production is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. (That’s more than what is produced by transportation worldwide.) And the problem is only going to grow, with global production of meat reaching 465 million tons by 2050, double the amount produced in 2000.

Other benefits of insect eating include the fact that raising them has a low impact on the environment, and that they’re low in fat. Somehow, though, I can’t see even the poorest of the poor in America being desperate enough to bite into a cockroach patty sandwich. Considering that America has a narrow view of what is deemed acceptable to eat, broadening our horizons enough to include insects on the menu is probably no more than a pipe dream. More power to those who can stomach it!

Link [Discover Magazine]

Photo credit: Flickr user Barnaby