Possible Causes of Honeybee Colony Collapse Found

US scientists associated with the US Army and the University of Montana, have ascertained a possible cause for the annual decline in honeybee colonies in the USA.

To contextualize, the phenomenon is not unique to the United States and has been found to be affecting bee populations across the globe for a number of years.   In 2004, apiarists started to discover that large portions of their colonies were either dying or not returning to their hives.  Substantial losses year-over-year both in North America and Europe, have lead to a concerted global effort to ascertain the causative agents behind this situation.  Francis Ratnieks, a biologist at University of Sussex in Brighton, has stated in Wired magazine that there is no single rational at the global level, why bee populations are in decline.  He elaborates that honeybees are "probably dying for all kinds of different reasons from loss of their foraging grounds to increased exposure to global pathogens."  Pesticide usage, monoculture agricultural practices, urban sprawl, and climate change are also a few of the other causes that investigators have looked at to understand why bees are in decline.

The NY Times is reporting that American scientists, utilizing military research tools, have identified a fungus and virus pair that is present in 100% of all colony collapse cases evaluated in their labs.  Their findings suggest that "both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised."

The article reports on the host-parasite interaction:

“It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”

The mechanisms that the fungus-virus pair is utilizing to undermining the bee populations is yet to be determined.

Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death. One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility, he said, is a kind of insect insanity.

Further research into this phenomenon is necessary to understand a means of preventing future outbreaks.  However, we also know as in a case study in Britain where changes have been made to enhance the natural environment of bumblebees, such as "putting in pollen and nectar-rich flower margins to fields, growing red clover hay meadows and rotating the grazing of animals on land," that immediate improvements in the health of local bees could be achieved.

Quote of the Day: New Labour is a Parasite!

George Monbiot in yesterday's Guardian UK describes why Gordon Brown's new Labour cannot be trusted any longer:

There's a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii that colonises the brains of rats, altering their behaviour to attract them to the scent of their predators. The rats seek out cats and get eaten, allowing the parasite to keep circulating. This is New Labour. It has colonised a movement that fought for social justice, distribution and decency, rewired its brain and delivered it to the fat cats who were once its enemies.

He challenges the voters in the UK to admonish the most right-wing government in the UK since 1945.  The party that once claimed to support working class people, introduced legislation that criminalized public protest, eviscerated civil liberty laws, engaged in torture, subordinated national defense and international affairs to Washington's Imperial whims, and turned the nation into a quasi-police state, with more CCTV cameras than anywhere in the world and a 41% increase of prisoners since Labour took office.

Ahmadinejad's Poor Choice of Analogies

Under an agreement hammered out by negotiators from France, the US, and Russia, Iran would send 1.2 tons of low-enriched uranium to Russia in a single shipment, where it would be converted to fuel exclusively for a Iranian research reactor. However, Iran's president Ahmadinejad has refused to respond to the proposal and wants in typical fashion to have more discussions on the matter.

In my opinion, Ahmadinejad has always been underwhelming. He clearly has no grasp of international politics and by his own pathetic antics in this summer's bloody suppression, has shown that his primary interest is in propping up the corrupt and exceedingly maladroit theocrats of Tehran. This past Sunday, in response to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comment that the US was "not going to wait forever" for a response to the IAEA's proposal, Ahmadinejad gave this classic bit of mindless frivolity:

"While enemies have used all their capacities ... the Iranian nation is standing powerfully and they are like a mosquito," a government Web site quoted Ahmadinejad early Sunday as saying. ... "Given the negative record of Western powers, the Iranian government ... looks at the talks with no trust. But realities dictate to them to interact with the Iranian nation.

A mosquito? I'm assuming he meant housefly or some other irritating insect, because there is no single animal that has caused more misery and death than the mosquito. Alexander the Great who conquered and dispatched the ancient Persians was fallen not by foreign swords but by the malaria parasite delivered by a mosquito. Entire armies have been wiped out by malaria and other mosquito borne illnesses throughout the course of history. During the American civil war, for example, malaria accounted for 1,316,000 episodes of illness and 10,000 deaths. The parasite furthermore fell more allied troops in the Pacific theater during World War II than did enemy combat.

If Ahmadinejad does mean to equate the West with mosquitoes, then he should prepare for an adversary that has proven both unstoppable and ultimately lethal.

Declining Oceans, Declining Life

On the front page of today's Globe and Mail (Canada), it is reported that the BC sockeye salmon population has "mysteriously" collapsed to a record low for the second summer in three, eliciting international concern among scientists that the species’ long-term survival is threatened. An estimated 10.6-13 million sockeye were expected to return to the Fraser Valley this summer. However, the official count according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) is that only a paltry 1.7 million have returned.

Causes:

Ocean temperatures have risen substantially over the past years and researchers state that, “Warm water can affect things like food availability for the fish... [whereas] sockeye are plankton feeders, and plankton of the west coast of B.C. tend to thrive when conditions are cold.” On Aug. 10, the Fraser River temperature was 18.8 C at Qualark Creek, BC, 1.1 degrees higher than the average for that date. As such, "water temperatures in this range may stress migrating sockeye and slow their upstream migration" the US-Canada Pacific Salmon Commission said.

Sea lice that flourish near fish farms are another possible source of decline. "The parasites are known to latch onto young wild salmon heading into the sea and are suspected as a factor in the decline of other wild-salmon populations" along the BC coast.

Alexandra Morton, who several years ago correctly predicted a collapse of pink salmon runs in the Broughton Archipelago because of sea lice infestations, in March warned the same thing could happen to Fraser sockeye. She said researchers used genetic analyses to show Fraser sockeye smolts were getting infested with sea lice in Georgia Strait.

It is too early to ascertain if the current sockeye collapse will be repeated with other species that are expected to return this year; notably pink salmon which are projected to number 17 million.

9200 uncatalogued pathogens found at US lab - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist

9200 uncatalogued pathogens found at US lab - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist

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My old research advisor was a pack rat and as a result, I always had to pull out the biohazard friendly circular filer bin to make room for my enzymes, chemical preps, and assorted stuff by cleaning out the fridge. In the process I'd find sticks of C-14 still clicking away, expired petri dishes, and miscellaneous chemical reagents from 1977.

The article illustrates why you need super-clean "Seinfeld-eque" nerds running labs. When you open your freezer and there's a couple hamburger patties that got loose that's one thing, but when 9,200 vials of the most deadly human pathogens on the planet just happen to be floating around at the bottom of your crisper its time for the Military Police to start doing audits.

And to think all they had to do was check their liquid nitrogen filled crisper's to catch the Anthrax-mailer!