Butterfly paradise

Last week my filming class had an exercise filming in the tropics. This situation provides  all sorts of problems for camera equipment and the people who operate them, not least of which is lenses fogging up. But we gave it a go and I cam out with some nice bits and pieces, although my heat addled brain didnt do much sequence building so it’s come out a bit montage-ey.

But because it’s bug related, here it is especially for your enjoyment, because everyone loves butterflies:

Despite my aversion to the heat I have to say the tropics are a pretty exciting place for a bug geek to visit, heat ad humidity tends to mean lots of big and beautiful bugs, pity the tarantulas were behind glass or I would have some footage of them too 🙂

Biodiversity

pic by Suburbanbloke

So 2010 is the international year for biodiversity.

In a world suffering one of the the greatest recorded rate of extinction ever, what does that even mean?

There are easily more than 30million animal species alive today, and the estimation is likely to be a wild underestimate as those that are unknown or undescribed are impossible to guess.

Insects alone have an estimated between 6 and 10 million species, and because of the cryptic lifestyle of many, it’s hard to imagine we will ever know whats out there, really.

But thats no reason to give it up completely, this is where the taxonomists come in. Taxonomists are those hardworking geeks that are meticulously identifying and catalouging the immense and stunning complexity that is the world that is around us. The problem arises with extinction, and that there aren’t enough taxonomists to keep up. We need to slow this extinction, and take more care in finding out whats around us. A taxonomists ‘call to arms’ might also be handy.

……….. Ok, thats enough doom and gloom – we need to do this, and fix that. It’s true, but there is hope – and it’s in our control. The thing is we can make a big difference, just by taking a little more care in how we treat our world.

Climate change has been a popular choice to blame for this decline, but the truth is the issue is far more complicated than that.

An area I am interested in is farming, its the biggest export industry in little old New Zealand and it it one of the big players in biodiversity issues across the globe. In response to increasing economic demands and advances in technology, our use of land is intensifying and this is affecting the type and number of species that can survive there. It seems obvious that acres and acres of monoculture are going to cause problems for biodiversity – but whats being done about it?

How about using biodiversity to support farming? Can we make changes that are both economically and ecologically beneficial?

Why does it even matter that all these critters are going extinct, if we don’t even know what they are will we even miss them? Well aside from their intrinsic right to life, and the fact that this planet belongs to all the things living on it (a thought which may, and is often debated. But is my way of thinking) is the enormous value we have got from the natural world. We have learnt to much from the world around us the classic example of which is finding a cure for cancer – but as suggested in the links above, theres more than one reason to take care of our critters.

The pool of creatures that makes this planet what it is is drying up, what are you going to do about it?

The bug doth make the farm

Fresian cow, pic by Maurice Pullin

 

We were once hunter gatherers, roaming the plains for berries and protein rich bugs, stalking wild animals to fill our bellies. But increases in population size and a more settled culture requires a more consistent food source, which is where we turned to the domestication of wild animals to provide our nutritive needs. 

New Zealand is very much seen as a farming culture, the greatest of these (in size and income) is Dairy. Considered by some to be an ecological disaster in progress. 

But what’s to do with bugs? well the success in growing just about anything depends on the bugs you do and dont have in your system. For the best grass growth you at least need worms to turnover the soil, and to avoid the destructive grass grub and porina moth means more for your cows to eat, and turn into milk.  

pic by FOE

In my opinion, the problems with Dairy can be boiled down to scale and intensity. 

A healthy environment including a diverse insect population can cope with  a surprising ammount of mistreatment. If we support strong healthy environments can we alleviate the negative effects of dairy?

We can promote bugs responsible for waste processing, pollination, and pest control. But ony if we can take care of them.

A homogenised environment such as that dominated by a handful of species of pasture grasses and one species of large mammal (all introduced) is not ideal. What happened to those wild verges, hedges and shelterbelts and ‘waste’ areas not fit for pasture? It’s not just about the replacement of native habitats, the removal of those patches of  ‘wasted’ land leaves little refuge for our beneficial insects.

The value of dairy has pushed the agriculture industry towards more, larger and more intense dairy farming operations. You only have to drive through the canterbury plains to see the difference, wide open spaces dominated by giant irrigation booms –  I wouldnt like to be a cow when the wind blows. 

Does the only hope for bugs reside in areas such as organic farms where beneficial insects are supported and natural insectivores encouraged for management of pest insects. Or where riparian planting (good for allsorts of reasons) provides that bit of variation in habitat?Variety is the spice of life, lets have some.

Other dairy links: Waste management, Sustainable dairy, NZ dairy company.

From Homogenous to Honey

 

Photo By JenJen

 

When was the last time you thought about bees?

At breakfast when you spread honey on your toast? Or, if you’re like me, drizzled it in your morning cuppa? 

Or when you wandered past a fragrant garden and saw them buzzing about, busy as the proverbial bee.

Honeybees are an insect that is a generally accepted and appreciated part of human life. but do they belong here? and what are we doing to take care of them?

The European honeybee Apis mellifera has been making it’s way around the world thanks to honey loving adventurers. It appears to have its origins in south east asia, but can now be found well outside it’s natural environment. It’s wide distribution can be attributed to a great love of honey, and perhaps it’s health properties, but bees also play a crucial role in pollination.

Despite this great effort to take our honeybees to the world, there is a problem with our bees, they’re disappearing!

Some of this can be attributed to the spread of predators such as the Varroa mite.

More is likely to be associated with a worldwide increase in insecticide use.

But much is still unaccounted for, and the phenomenon is called CCD or colony collapse disorder.

One of the theories behind this, and the one I am interested in at the moment is the homogenization of our environment. Increases in the intensity of agriculture and horticulture around the world has been necessitated by our enormous wasteful population, and aided by changes in technology and the push to make more money faster.

But this also means acres and acres of single crops, and minimisation of ‘wasted’ land left as wild verges, hedges or ‘scrubland that supports insects in different stages of their life.

Something to think about, more on this soon!

Also, there are some great wiki posts on bees, have a nosey.

Welcome to the wetlands…

…where the air is still and the forest is cloaked in a mysterious mist, inviting you in.

Stepping into a forest in the Catlins of New Zealand feels like entering another world. Trees encased in beards of moss are dinosaurs of a forgotten age, with ghosts of kokako amongst their branches.

Constant sounds of trickling, dripping water fill your ears, mosses, lichens and filmy ferns reign supreme.

The atmosphere aches with life. The abundant water providing an ideal home for soft bodies, vulnerable to dehydration, here the forest protects them. Clay banks of mosses speak of glowworms waiting for the night and the kill and crystal clear streams promise a summer of mayflies and stoneflies.

These stunning invertebrates and many others spend much of their lives in the clean streams of New Zealand. Their larvae hunt and gather amongst the stones and leaves that carpet these waterways and they are the first to go when things go wrong.

The EPT is a measure of water quality used across the globe, measuring the presence of Ephemeroptera (Mayflies), Plecoptera (Stoneflies) and Trichoptera (Caddisflies).

These groups act as indicator species because of their place in the lower levels of the food web and the way in which they feed. Chilling at the bottom of the food web they are filter feeders and detritovores, literally scraping the bottom to collect a meal of fungus, or building an intricate net to trap particles carried in the current, and even the predatory amongst them are only after small prey.These traits make them particularly susceptible to any impurities in the water as they will be collected and accumulated through food and water filtration, and small bodies struggle to process them.

The use of chemical indicators of water quality  are an essential component in measuring the health of a waterway. But measures of oxygen content, clarity and contaminants are measures of now, and the now in a waterway where the water is never the same is fleeting. The only way to really know a waterway is to ‘ask’ the things that live there, they can tell you if something was spilt or dumped, and whether there is no oxygen available at night, they will tell you the secrets of their home. Protection and preservation come first through knowing.

Wild places like the Catlins are worth taking care of.

Curious clifftop topiary shaped by the ruthless gardener that is the wind, blowing sand and salt to bite soft leaves. The greenery fights back, with tight walls of thorns and branches. Here is a place where the forest meets the sea, one of the few places left where the coastline hasn’t been taken over by cribs and batches, home to some of the wild places.

Harsh exteriors hides the microclimates that shelter the wildlife that brings the place to life. Home to Sealions and penguins, spoonbills and dolphins, and thousands of glistening bugs each with their place in the web.

Big oily mess

The mess in the gulf of Mexico is growing, it’s our fault. Watching the effects on such a grand scale brings up all the big questions, it’s breaking our hearts. We’re asking how could we let this happen?

Sometimes its difficult to remember that the big critters aren’t the only ones stuck here. Everything living within reach of the oil (as well as the burn-off fumes and dispersant chemicals) is affected, including the bugs. Insects, crustaceans and microorganisms are at the front line. And their place at the bottom of this complex food web makes them key in the recovery of the whole system.

The macro-fauna needs much more than an oil free environment to make it through. Without their natural food sources, and with bodies already stressed from the changing environment, it’s going to take a long time to get anything even resembling what it used to be.

But not all bugs will be adversely affected, and some might even be able to help. There are an array of microorganisms that survive and thrive in crude oil, creating and breaking down hydrocarbons. While some people are working to stop the leek, others are finding ways to cleanup the mess, without residue and stimulating natural processes.

Microorganisms are amazing and its hardly a surprise to discover that some of them can breakdown oil. In the long run they are our only hope, while we can and will clean and contain as much as we can, we are really trying to keep species alive until these clever microorganisms, natures cleaning ladies, have done their bit with a little help from the weather.

And thats not all, these little treasures might be the answer to the overreaching problem of producing and using fuels without damaging our environment. But more on biofuels another day.

What happens next? well we’ll clean it up the best we can, hope and wait. It’s impossible to know exactly how things will pan out and it might be 10 years before things are back where they were. Everyone’s got something to say on the topic. What i want to know is does that mean it wont happen again? Today i’m the skeptic.

more on: efforts to contain the leek,  the gulf, the NZ connection, and a great article on the whole issue.

The Kingdom of Cambodia

Me in my safety gear

Last year I spent a month in Cambodia. I was visiting my father who was working there and like to think that because of that I got to see some of the real Cambodia, not just the tourist side of things. 

It was the hot dry season and temperatures were soaring towards the 40’s – yuck! but this tropical climate and the incredibly rains (that I hope to go back and experience sometime) make it a bug paradise – big beautiful incredible bugs. 

Coconut hive

One of the highlights of my trip was meeting the bee man in the tourist town of Siem Reap. Danny is an american Cambodian (he is originally from the states but is firmly a part of Cambodia now) who works tirelessly on behalf of the people and wants to get them in touch with their environment. One of his great successes is the Honey trade. Danny supplies honey to the best resteraunts in Siem Reap, it’s real Cambodan honey and has a unique flavour as well as the ability to survive the intense heat and humidity. And it is collected by traditional honeyhunters, whole families are being supported by these stunning animals. 

Cambodia is home to all kinds of bees. From the tiny, living in a coconut. To bigger honey producers building hives in hollow bases of trees and, when encouraged to do so, man made hives. 

Palm tree hive

Local hives

But the biggest honey producers are the rafter bees. These are wild bees that travel from the lowlands to the highcountry, building a new comb and colony upon finding a suitable rafter. The local honeyhunters set rafters in the bush at an appropriate angle and hope that the bees will find them. they also search out natural rafters. And when the comb is bursting with honey they come to collect. 

Rafter bees, northern Cambodia.

The traditional method is to collect the whole beautiful comb and boil it down. They separate the honey and the wax from the rest, the rest being the larvae needed to sustain these beautiful bees. 

Denny is teaching the locals how collecting only the top corner of the comb (where the honey is concentrated) for a smaller collection but a better long term option. This harvesting method allows several collections of honey over the season instead of the usual once and the bees can recover from it better and don’t loose their next generation – improving the future for these bees and the honeyhunters that rely on them. 

I was lucky enough to meet Danny and some of the honeyhunters he represents. They took us through the kind of wilderness you dont dare visit without a local and showed us their bees. 

This a country where landmines have destroyed so much, but you have to wonder that in this time of development – how much of the ‘wild cambodia’ might be protected by them. 

An incredible country, and wonderful people. 

More on these bees here

Spinning ladies

In the bug world being a silk spinner can go one of several ways. Bugs spin silk and threads to wrap themselves, and wrap food, and to get from place to place.

The obvious spinners are the spiders. And they are one of the more diverse in their use of thread. Just starting out in life it can be hard work to compete with the rest of your family, but if you are a little aerodynamic like charlottes babies (from the book ‘Charlottes web’)  you can travel and find a space of your own.

Then theres the matter of getting something to eat – the obvious use of a web, and this is where its strength, elasticity and stickeyness come into their own. At first glance something so delicate should break upon impact with a highspeed critter, or at least rebound and throw it back out – but threads stronger than high grade steel, with droplets of sticky glue make capture inevidable.

Spiders spin different threads for different tasks, and we are finding uses for them far beyond the realms of  engineering. It’s qualities are even being investigated for use in healthcare.

Another spinner is the silkworm. Centuries of tradition has shaped our use of these critters for fine fabrics, fed mulberry leaves and curated in baskets until the thread is ready for collection. This thread is another increadible construction, it’s elasticity and durablity along with it’s beauty make it a sought after material.

Then theres the more obscure spinners like the glowworm. Who, like the spider, uses its thread for food capture (see snares). Glowworms, as mentioned in a previous post, arent actually worms but fungun gnats. The larvae of the gnat builds a trap of up to 100 hanging sticky threads with a glowing lure of the ‘worm’ in the middle to draw in any unsuspecting bug. The ‘worm’ then pulls up the thread and consumes it’s meal.

These are materials made by nature, that we exploit and are inspired by in the materials appearing in our day to day life. From my desk i can see a silk skirt, and a spiders web, maybe one day the bandaids on my desk will be spider silk?

But thats quite enough for one post, let me know what you want more info on – ask and ye shall recieve 🙂

Design by bug

It’s not just the bugs themselves that are masterfully designed. While they are carefully crafted by the pressures of evolution – they way they live is under selection too and they themselves are master designers.

 This guy pours plaster into ants nests and digs up the product to investigate their complex structures. Different ants create nests in different shapes and sizes to suit the particular needs of the colony, complete with spaces for breeding, gardening, composting and complex air conditioning systems.

There are all kinds of creatures that build their own protection, from a place to live (ie bag moths, that build a case to protect their body, only sticking their head and forelegs out to eat and move about at night) to a place for change (ie butterflies metamorphosing), and allsorts in between.

And for the ‘brick house’ of the insect world, the award goes to the termites. Termite mounds are so tough that a designer (who discovered this by kicking a termite mound and breaking his foot) is investigating their materials for use in sustainable housing.

They are built in relation to the sun’s path so they get full morning and afternoon sun, but only a little of the hot midday sun – aiding delicate temperature control within the mound. These high rise structures can get up to 13m and are made form a particularly tough combination of termite spit and sand/grit in their surroundings, in some places this incorporation of local materials has some interesting side effects.

Then there’s the marvels of silk spinners – but i’ll leave that for next time.

-ooh! just spotted this, cool mud buildings – beautiful and practical.

In the eye of the beeholder

Another skill mastered by bugs is sight.  The number of ways an invertebrate uses their specially designed eyes to take advantage of their surroundings is astounding.

Insects are known for their compound eyes, made of thousands of tiny light sensing and processing sections called ommatidia. The way they are put together is specifically tailored to the tasks they perform.

Fast moving carnivores, like dragonflies, tend to have more smaller ommatidia. This allows then to easily spot movements, helping them to catch their dinner. The disadvantage of this is the smaller the ommatidia, the smaller the lens – and as the photographers among you will know small lenses let less light in and are only useful during the day. Dragonflies have a third ‘eye’ that acts as a light sensor – but nocturnal critters need some different strategies.

Being nocturnal has allsorts of challenges. One of which is being able to see where you are going. Many critters use senses such as sound and smell to get around in the dark, but sight is still useful. Nighttime travelers such as moths have ommatidia that are fewer, and far larger. Their size maximises the use of all available light allowing the detection of basic shapes and grainy images.

Some insects see in colour, and others in black and white. The way that bees see is not what we see, they don’t detect the red end of the colour spectrum, but can see into the blues to ultraviolets. Some flowers have taken advantage of this ability to make ‘for bees only‘ landing strips on their petals to entice specific pollinators.

The way that bees process images for flight navigation is called optical flow, and is being applied in the world of robotics. Optical flow is a method of processing images in navigation; gauging distances and avoiding obstacles while using minimal brain/computing power. clever huh 🙂

thats enough on eyes for now, see you next time.