Thursday, June 18, 2009

All invited to participate in Bee Spotter program, National Pollinator Week events

All invited to participate in Bee Spotter program, National Pollinator Week events

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One day last August Johanna James-Heinz of Peoria took time at her lunch hour to photograph the plants in bloom at a prairie restoration in the Peoria Park District’s Robinson Park. She’s a landscape architect by trade, and she collects pictures of plants for her files. Outside her professional life, James-Heinz is also a member of the Bee Spotter network, and that day she was happy to see and photograph a bumble bee with a distinctive marking on the back of its abdomen. [The photo here is one she took.] She recognized the rusty-patched bumble bee, Bombus affinis, for a species she hadn’t seen before. But she didn’t realize that this once common bee was now so rare that scientists were not even sure it could still be found in Illinois.

The photos she took that day caused a sensation among people interested in the well-being of pollinators, and they represent the most remarkable observation yet to be recorded as part of the Bee Spotter project.

Based at the University of Illinois, Bee Spotter is a program that encourages everyday people to participate in an important scientific effort. That is to establish baseline information about the numbers of honey bees and bumble bees buzzing around in Illinois.

We know that managed honey bee colonies have suffered steep losses in recent years, and it seems that numbers of wild honey bees and bumble bees are also declining. But a 2006 report issued by the National Academy of Sciences emphasizes that researchers don’t have enough information about populations of wild pollinators to know for sure whether or how steeply there numbers are dropping.

What does it take to be a bee spotter? You do not need a degree in entomology, only the capacity to photograph bees with a digital camera and upload your pictures to the Bee Spotter website. You need not be able to identify every bee yourself, although the Bee Spotter project provides some excellent tools for making identifications. Most bee spotters simply photograph bees when and where opportunities arise, although the project also includes an option for setting up regular monitoring of a specific place, too.

Although no specific training is required to sign up as a Bee Spotter, people who are interested in the program are welcome to attend demonstrations of how to participate on the afternoon of Sunday, June 28th, at the recently established Pollinatarium on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana. At these demonstrations, participants will learn how to navigate the Bee Spotter website and get hands-on training in bumble bee identification. The afternoon will also include a workshop on photographing bees and other insects in nature.

The Bee Spotter workshop on the 28th will serve as a sort of grand finale for National Pollinator Week, which kicks off this weekend. Pollinator week is designated to recognize the importance of pollinators to ecosystem health and agriculture and to support efforts to increase awareness about pollinators. The celebration of pollinator week in Champaign-Urbana will include a show of bee-themed art, workshops on the types of bees found in Illinois and ways to benefit them in landscaping, and nature walks guided by U of I experts on plants and insects.

For further details about National Pollinator Week events and the Bee Spotter project, follow the links from the UI Department of Entomology website at http://www.life.illinois.edu/entomology/.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Time to undo artificial connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River basin?

Time to undo artificial connection between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River basin?

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It's ironic that the Prairie State is bordered by two of the world’s most extensive aquatic systems. On the northeast we’ve got Lake Michigan, the fifth largest lake in the world and our connection to the rest of the Great Lakes system and by extension the Atlantic Ocean. On the west we’re bordered by the Mississippi River, which, with all of its tributaries, drains nearly half of the continental United States. Indeed, except for a tiny sliver of Lake Michigan shoreline, the whole of Illinois lies within the Mississippi drainage, since all of the other waters that flow from the state wind up in the Big Muddy.

Prior to the year 1900, these two colossal systems were nowhere directly connected. They came very close to one another in an area of what is now the southwest suburbs of Chicago. There, the upper Des Plaines River, which is part of the Mississippi drainage, and the West Branch of the Chicago River, which then flowed into Lake Michigan, were separated only by a slim drainage divide, known as the Chicago Portage. But because there was this land divide, however narrow, fish and other aquatic organisms were unable to easily pass back and forth between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River systems.

The land barrier between the two systems was breached in 1900 by completion of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which famously reversed the flow of the Chicago River and enabled the City to flush its waste into the Mississippi basin rather than Lake Michigan. The extensive Chicago Waterway System still serves that function. In addition, it supports significant recreational boating and commercial shipping.

These functions notwithstanding, hindsight allows us to see that connecting the Mississippi Basin with the Great Lakes system so directly was not a good idea, either from an ecological or a financial perspective. That’s because doing so enables aquatic invasive species to move between them.

To date the most notorious invaders to make the passage from Lake Michigan into the Mississippi basin have been two small but prolific organisms, a fish called the round goby, and the better known zebra mussel. Both of these creatures cause irreparable harm to ecosystems where they are introduced, and control measures for zebra mussels alone cost millions of dollars annually.

Two species of invasive carp moving in the other direction—from the Mississippi toward the Great Lakes—have caused even greater concern in recent years, enough to generate action. The first line of defense against the movement of these invasive carp into Lake Michigan is an experimental electric barrier that has been operating in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal since 2002. The next step will be the long-anticipated completion of a more permanent electric barrier, which should be fully operational sometime in the near term.

Beyond that, however, a broad coalition of groups interested in the health of aquatic ecosystems has begun to call for the establishment of a more substantial ecological separation between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes ecosystems. In a report released late last year [http://www.greatlakes.org/Page.aspx?pid=818] the Alliance for the Great Lakes outlines six options for separating the two watersheds to prevent the transfer of invasive species between them. None of these solutions is easy or cheap. But in the long run, the financial and ecological costs of pursuing half-measures would be even greater.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Turtle talk

Turtle talk

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At the tail end of a bird walk in May, a friend of mine who was beating the bushes for warblers came upon an eastern box turtle. Since, unlike songbirds, box turtles can’t escape human attention by flitting away, we picked this one up to admire it. As we did, I passed along my two bits of box turtle wisdom—that males can be distinguished from females by a look at their eyes, since males have a bright red iris, and that box turtles can live to be more than 100 years old. “Really,” a fellow birder asked, “how do you know that?”

I wasn’t able to say. So I checked in with Chris Phillips, who is a herpetologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey and U of I faculty affiliate, to get my story straight. First, he pointed out that our Busey Woods box turtle was almost certainly a released pet, since there are no historical records for them in this part of Champaign County. Then he suggested that the 100-year lifespan I mentioned wouldn’t apply to wild box turtles. At the extreme, individuals in the wild may live beyond 50, but 20-30 years would probably be a more typical lifespan. Long life is the norm for turtles, and even some of the shorter lived of the species that inhabit Illinois, sliders and painted turtles, have a lifespan of 15-20 years.

Phillips pointed out that as long-lived, late maturing creatures, turtles present people who study them with distinct challenges. For example, a scientist who wants to assess the health of the box turtle population in a given area may find a whole bunch of box turtles there, and that would seem to be a good thing. But in the case of creatures that live for decades, a good head count today does not tell whether sufficient young are surviving to replace older individuals as they die.

In fact, successful recruitment of new generations seems to be very difficult for some species of turtles in the highly developed landscapes that characterize most of Illinois today. According to Phillips, scientists studying Blanding’s turtles and spotted turtles in the northeastern part of the state have found that nearly all of their eggs are eaten by other animals on the very night they are laid. The direct culprits in this case are highly adaptable, mid-sized predators--raccoons, skunks, and foxes. But it is human development that sets the stage for these particular predators to thrive as they do, at the expense of turtles and other small animals.

In addition to predators, cars currently represent the greatest threat to Illinois turtles. [Photo: My family and I found this Gulf Coast box turtle crossing the road at St. Joseph Peninsula State Park in Florida in late March.] All turtles, including those that usually live in water, lay their eggs in nests excavated on dry land, and they sometimes travel considerable distances to reach preferred nesting sites. When their paths cross roads . . . well, turtles are not adapted to a world in which deadly threats approach at 70 miles an hour.

The month of June represents the peak of turtle activity in Illinois, so be on the lookout for them as you drive. If you can help a turtle across the road without endangering yourself or other people, I would encourage you to do so. Just remember turtles will stay on course even if you try to turn them around, so move them only in the direction they are already heading.