Bee update, Save the Frogs contest

Readers of this blog know I have a particular fondness for the smaller (and sometimes misunderstood) forms of life, bats, frogs, spiders and bees in particular. Although I like them for themselves, I also know that when they suffer, when they are at risk, so are we.

The New York Times has pulled together the best information from a number of scientists on the Colony Collapse Disorder that's been plaguing bees in the U.S. and Europe since 2006. It's not good news because the collapse is caused by a multitude of factors. Rowan Jacobsen writes:

Thanks to the terrific gene sleuthing of May Berenbaum and others, it looks like the pieces of the colony collapse disorder puzzle are starting to fit together. And we can stop arguing about who was right: The virus camp, the fungus camp, the pesticide camp, the varroa mite camp, or the nutrition camp. It turns out everybody was right. (Well, everybody except the cell-phone and microwave-tower camps.)

The viruses compromise bees’ ability to manufacture proteins, and proteins are the tools bees use to fight off pathogens, to detoxify pesticides, to repair their cells, and to meet all the world’s other challenges. If bees lived in an utterly non-stressful world, they could go on despite the viruses. But of course they don’t live in a world anything like that.

On the frog front, entire species are disappearing and all frogs are facing habitat destruction, climate change and pesticides and pollution. A friend of mine sent me a link to Save the Frogs, which is holding an art contest. The pictures in this post are from that site. You can go there, register, and vote for your favorite. I had a hard time deciding! Fortunately, you can pick your top three. Come on, take a minute to vote and help spread awareness about the plight of frogs.

Why leopard frogs and other amphibians are dying: closer to understanding

You know how the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts? ScienceDaily is reporting that ten popular pesticides in use in the United States, although they may not cause a die-off of frogs and tadpoles individuaally, become deadly when combined.

One pesticide, though, is deadly alone and in nearly any concentration. Endosulfan kills 84% of the tadpoles and frogs exposed to it.

Surely a rescue plan for our planet must include a return to permaculture.

Frogs die while crops sprayed

Remember the frogs? When I was a kid my friends and I would rescue tadpoles from muddy puddles as they dried up and then grow them in buckets and a wading pool in my back yard. We'd have frogs hanging around all summer, catching flies and churumping in the twilight.

Where I saw ten frogs, today's children would only see three-- amphibians worldwide have declined by seventy percent and one in three amphibian species is listed as endangered.

Frogs are like canaries in coal mines, an early warning system that something's wrong. Their skin is thin and very permeable, easily affected by rising ozone levels. An infectious fungal disease deadly to frogs is spreading rapidly because of the increasing temperature of the earth.

Causes of the decline in amphibians are many and complicated, but today Scientific American reported on a study that shows a clear link between use of the pesticide Atrazine plus fertilizers with the decline of the northern leopard frog. This modest frog, the State Amphibian of Vermont and Minnesota, is being decimated by flatworm parasites that proliferate on snails that grow fiercely in waters polluted by Atrazine and fertilizers.Although this pesticide is banned in Europe, in the last fifteen years it's become the top-selling pesticide in the United States.

Syngenta, the Swiss-based company that produces Atrazine, had this to say about the University of South Florida study: "50 years of use and a vast amount of research has shown that (atrazine) can be used safely with no long-term detriment to ecosystems."

Photo from Transguyjay's photostream at Flickr