Hi, all; I've been "gone," lost in the hassle of the end of the semester and then the holidays. Now, I'm back.
To get back into the swing of things, I thought I'd mix it up and explain why some of those books are on my reading list. And I'll start with maybe the least obvious; what does "A Wizard of Earthsea" have to do with environmental science? Is this just an example of my being drawn off topic by a great fantasy novelist?
As it turns out, no. This book made me an ecologist, by inclination if not by training.
Ursula K. LeGuin has a remarkable ability to fold multiple layers into her stories, so on one level you've got some fun escapism and on other levels you have these wise and deep comments on some really serious issues. You can ignore these comments if you like, her books aren't heavy or bombastic in any way, but they wriggle into your brain and then pop out twenty years later when you go "oh! So THAT'S what she was talking about!" I won't follow all of the threads I've found in her writing here, and I won't follow any of them very far (you've got to read them yourself) but one of them is that in her literary world, wizards have to be very careful because while they have the power to change almost anything they please, in so doing they will change the rest of the world in unpredictable ways. This is, of course, quite true of our world, too, and most of you probably know it at least intellectually, but it's one thing to hear a dire warning on a documentary, based on science that might be a little too arcane to understand, or simply not included at all, and it's another thing to read the same idea coming out of the mouths of these fantasy characters talking about Balance, and magic, and dragons.
For one thing, it's more fun. For another thing, it shows us the lives of people who really act on this knowledge in their daily lives, and where acting on it is, if not simple, at least simpler, and less ambiguous; the mighty wizard, capable of changing the weather, sleeping outside, in the rain, wrapped in a wet blanket. Beside him sleeps a little wild animal, not enchanted, keeping him company simply because it likes him.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Do whales poop?
The great thing about biology (which I'm using here in a broad sense that includes the various branches of ecology) is that you get permission to talk openly about all kinds of stuff that otherwise makes everyone get all giggly and weird. Like sex--ever notice this? Turn on a nature documentary, and more often than not, sooner or later you'll see some sex. Granted none of it's human, but still, you've gotta kinda wonder about these people. Or poop. Mostly it's only 12-year-olds and younger who get to talk about poop, but we were talking about poop in class just the other day. See, landscape ecology is all about how different kinds of places interact with each other; climb to the top of something really tall, say a big church steeple, and look out, what do you see? Maybe there's cropland and pasture and little red barns, maybe there's a whole lot of strip malls, maybe it's mostly forest, but in some shape or form you're looking at some kind of patchwork--a landscape that owes its identity to the pattern of patchwork you can see from your tower. But what does it mean? What is that pattern, that identity?
You can look at anything you like and think all sorts of things about it, but only some of those thoughts are going to do you or anyone else any good. Now, science isn't about the search for truth (that's religion's department, for better or worse) it's just a search for useful ways of thinking. It's like a map; a map isn't the truth, it's not the actual land, it's just a tool that's more or less useful. The useful map isn't usually the one that includes the most detail, it's the one that includes the right detail, the detail that makes the pattern jump out, that makes the muddle of the world make sense in a way you can use. If you're trying to get to New York, the detail you need is the network of roads. If you're trying to understand the ecology of certain agricultural landscapes, you need poop. In brief, poop is a major medium of communication between one part of the land and the next, a detail you need to track for the view from the tower to make sense. Which brings us to whales.
Since we, the class, were already talking about poop, it was a short conceptual hop from the poop of cows to the poop of whales, which someone had heard discussed on NPR; apparently whales, like cows, carry nutrients from one part of their world to another by eating here and pooping there; they constitute part of the language by which one place on land or sea communicates with another, communication that makes up the conversation that creates the pattern visible from the tower, whether steeple or lighthouse, bird's eye view whether from crow or gull. I remembered that a friend had been wondering about whale poop recently, and I figured I'd look up the NPR article and write a brilliant article all about landscape ecology and filled with witty little digressions and fascinating bits of scientific tid. As usual I got totally distracted, in this case by the comments posted to the article. I mean, it's interesting that a group of scientists found that by feeding at depth and pooping near the surface, whales fertilize the floating algae that forms the base layer of their own food chain. You can read the article here; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130437080. But what's far more interesting is the series of comments posted on the article, which were mostly complaints about the rigor and importance of the research, challenges, in other words, to what kinds of questions should be asked, and how, and why.
Whys about whys; how could I resist?
So DO whales poop? Of course they poop, they're mammals; they eat, so they poop. According to the paper the NPR article was based on (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013255), whale poop is sort of liquidy, and makes clouds several feet across that hang in the water for a while. The clouds are "visibly heterogeneous," meaning not the same all over--I imagine it swirling unevenly like underwater incense. It's the color of over-steeped green tea.
But this is something a lot of the comments focused on; just as I can say "of course whales poop," they said of course whale poop has at least some minimal fertilizing effect. The implication was that this didn't need to be studied. Now, friends, there may be many reasons not to study something, not least that there's always something else you could study, and how do you choose which to focus on? But "everybody knows this" is not one such reason. Because a lot of what everybody knows is wrong.
I'm sure you can think of a lot of examples yourself--people thinking the world is flat is the most obvious example, though one of questionable historical accuracy itself. One of the things science is good at, maybe the thing it is best at, is proving that things everybody assumes to be true aren't. And science isn't done yet...it's not even close. I used to think that science had pretty much covered all the easy stuff already, and that new discoveries were mostly happening in places that are difficult to study, like Mars, or inside the spleens of very rare aardvarks. Then I started seriously dipping into the Why River myself, and I realized that there's lots of stuff that just nobody has gotten around to yet. My teacher likes to tell the story of someone sent out to research the conservation status of one hundred threatened species living in the immediate vicinity of a major university, only to find that for 96 of those species, the data was either totally missing, or useless. I mean, these are some of the most convenient species to study in the world, practically in the backyard of a whole nest of researchers, and just nobody had gotten around to really studying more than four of them. With a record like that, there might be a whale that doesn't poop, and no one would know.
Scientists are kind of caught in a bind, if you think about it; if the study confirms expectations, people wonder why she bothered. If the study doesn't bear out the researcher's hypothesis, people think she failed. This is altogether uncool. Actually, any time anyone take a good look at anything and records the result, that's a piece of the puzzle, whether the piece is expected or not. And such is the vastness of what we don't really know, there's a good chance it will be a piece that nobody's looked at before. Even if it's whale poop.
You can look at anything you like and think all sorts of things about it, but only some of those thoughts are going to do you or anyone else any good. Now, science isn't about the search for truth (that's religion's department, for better or worse) it's just a search for useful ways of thinking. It's like a map; a map isn't the truth, it's not the actual land, it's just a tool that's more or less useful. The useful map isn't usually the one that includes the most detail, it's the one that includes the right detail, the detail that makes the pattern jump out, that makes the muddle of the world make sense in a way you can use. If you're trying to get to New York, the detail you need is the network of roads. If you're trying to understand the ecology of certain agricultural landscapes, you need poop. In brief, poop is a major medium of communication between one part of the land and the next, a detail you need to track for the view from the tower to make sense. Which brings us to whales.
Since we, the class, were already talking about poop, it was a short conceptual hop from the poop of cows to the poop of whales, which someone had heard discussed on NPR; apparently whales, like cows, carry nutrients from one part of their world to another by eating here and pooping there; they constitute part of the language by which one place on land or sea communicates with another, communication that makes up the conversation that creates the pattern visible from the tower, whether steeple or lighthouse, bird's eye view whether from crow or gull. I remembered that a friend had been wondering about whale poop recently, and I figured I'd look up the NPR article and write a brilliant article all about landscape ecology and filled with witty little digressions and fascinating bits of scientific tid. As usual I got totally distracted, in this case by the comments posted to the article. I mean, it's interesting that a group of scientists found that by feeding at depth and pooping near the surface, whales fertilize the floating algae that forms the base layer of their own food chain. You can read the article here; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130437080. But what's far more interesting is the series of comments posted on the article, which were mostly complaints about the rigor and importance of the research, challenges, in other words, to what kinds of questions should be asked, and how, and why.
Whys about whys; how could I resist?
So DO whales poop? Of course they poop, they're mammals; they eat, so they poop. According to the paper the NPR article was based on (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013255), whale poop is sort of liquidy, and makes clouds several feet across that hang in the water for a while. The clouds are "visibly heterogeneous," meaning not the same all over--I imagine it swirling unevenly like underwater incense. It's the color of over-steeped green tea.
But this is something a lot of the comments focused on; just as I can say "of course whales poop," they said of course whale poop has at least some minimal fertilizing effect. The implication was that this didn't need to be studied. Now, friends, there may be many reasons not to study something, not least that there's always something else you could study, and how do you choose which to focus on? But "everybody knows this" is not one such reason. Because a lot of what everybody knows is wrong.
I'm sure you can think of a lot of examples yourself--people thinking the world is flat is the most obvious example, though one of questionable historical accuracy itself. One of the things science is good at, maybe the thing it is best at, is proving that things everybody assumes to be true aren't. And science isn't done yet...it's not even close. I used to think that science had pretty much covered all the easy stuff already, and that new discoveries were mostly happening in places that are difficult to study, like Mars, or inside the spleens of very rare aardvarks. Then I started seriously dipping into the Why River myself, and I realized that there's lots of stuff that just nobody has gotten around to yet. My teacher likes to tell the story of someone sent out to research the conservation status of one hundred threatened species living in the immediate vicinity of a major university, only to find that for 96 of those species, the data was either totally missing, or useless. I mean, these are some of the most convenient species to study in the world, practically in the backyard of a whole nest of researchers, and just nobody had gotten around to really studying more than four of them. With a record like that, there might be a whale that doesn't poop, and no one would know.
Scientists are kind of caught in a bind, if you think about it; if the study confirms expectations, people wonder why she bothered. If the study doesn't bear out the researcher's hypothesis, people think she failed. This is altogether uncool. Actually, any time anyone take a good look at anything and records the result, that's a piece of the puzzle, whether the piece is expected or not. And such is the vastness of what we don't really know, there's a good chance it will be a piece that nobody's looked at before. Even if it's whale poop.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Is Global Warming Going To Happen?
Ok, I'd wanted to save this one till a few weeks out and do Has The Oil Spill Gone Away? I Don't Hear About It Anymore or maybe More Bedbugs first, but I'm a busy graduate student and this one I can do based on a project I did as an undergrad. Anyway, it's not as if it weren't topical....
The great thing about this question is that it's the wrong question. I'll get to why it's the wrong question in a minute (and I'll address some corresponding right questions), but this--what the question is--is important, so we'll stay here for a bit, ok?
See, questions are almost as important than answers. Maybe they're more important. My adviser, who is a lot like Yoda, except with better grammar and smaller ears, and is really good at wise one-liners, says "you might get a great answer to the wrong question." Scientists, who are really good at getting great answers, are prone to this. If you don't get the question right, you can't get the answer right, because the question is like a nozzle pointing the waters of the Why River in a given direction, and if you squirt your curiosity over here you just won't get the flowers of understanding over there watered. Sorry. Or you can just clog up your hose to begin with by asking a question with no answer at all, like if you ask an innocent husband (or an unmarried jackass) "have you stopped beating your wife yet?"
There's no shame in asking the wrong question, unless you do it on purpose, and I have to say this is a particularly fascinating wrong question, because it's a hybrid type. Like Yoda's Warning, it has an answer (the answer is "yes, probably") that fails to satisfy because it doesn't get at the heart of the issue. Like the Accusation of the Innocent Husband, it depends on a context that, being wrong, renders any answer meaningless.
Context is what allows you to answer a question like "where is the cat?" which makes immediate sense if you know what cat I mean, but not otherwise. If the context of the question is I saw movement in the bushes, the context could be wrong if the movement was actually a skunk; you can't tell me where the cat is, because there is no cat in that context.
Here, the context is the well-publicized prediction by climate scientists that the planet will get warmer if we keep adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere; every time we get a serious heatwave we ask ourselves if this is global warming or if it is just natural variation. Whether the theory of global warming is right is debated in a variety of public media, with proponents pointing out (correctly) that the vast majority of scientists now agree on this, and opponents pointing out (correctly) that science is not a democracy. All of this is subtly, but definitely, wrong.
The planet has been getting warmer, more or less, for close to two hundred years. That the globe is getting warmer is not a theory at all; it's data. Theories are what explain the data, and predict what will happen next. The current popular debate conflates a number of related, but properly very distinct, ideas; global warming, the greenhouse effect, and anthropogenic (human-made) climate change. As long as these issues are mixed up, any questions that come out of the debate will be impossible to answer, and the debate will go on indefinitely.
Briefly, global warming means the atmospheric temperature averaged over the whole planet is getting warmer. Unless you doubt the capacity of meteorologists to make and analyze measurements in an intelligent way (and I wouldn't; weather predictions, which were once a joke, are getting startlingly accurate) this part isn't contestable. The difficult part is that we don't experience average temperatures, we only experience the specific temperature wherever we are, and that varies all over the place making it difficult for individuals to tell what the average is doing. It is impossible to say whether any particular heat wave, or any particular hurricane, is part of global warming, and in a way it isn't a fair question because global warming is a pattern and as such isn't visible unless you look at the whole picture.
The greenhouse effect is the popular name for a property of several atmospheric gasses, notably carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor, that trap heat in much the same way the glass or plastic panes of a greenhouse do. This, also, is incontestable; the amount of solar radiation the Earth receives isn't enough to explain the temperatures we experience. The greenhouse effect is also not a new idea; that carbon dioxide does this was discovered in the 1800's. It's just something we know about the gas.
Anthropogenic (human-made) climate change is the real subject of debate--that and what is going to happen next, which nobody really knows, although there are some very educated guesses. Is the warming we have measured the result of something we, as humans, are doing? Or are we watching some other, more natural cycle in play? A more accurate way to phrase the question is how much of what we're seeing is natural, and how much is not, because other cycles are always in play, and the climate is very complex. It's like if you smoke cigarettes and you get respiratory problems sometimes--well, everyone does, everyone catches colds now and then. There's no reason to believe that if you didn't smoke you wouldn't get sick, because there are lots of reasons to get sick. Even if you smoke, you are still subject to all those other reasons for getting sick--but on top of those reasons is smoking. It makes no sense to ask "am I sick because I smoke?" The better question is "how much of the reason for my sickness is my smoking, and how much is other factors?" This question does have an answer, and I even almost know what sort of statistics you'd need to find it, but good luck figuring out what the answer means unless statistics really make sense to you. A better question yet, for most people, is "if I quit smoking, will I be healthier overall?"
Conflating these three issues allows the national conversation to get hung up badly; the real uncertainty over how much of our current situation is explained by the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, as opposed to other factors (and the uncertainty about what is going to happen next) gets mixed up with the question of whether the greenhouse effect or global warming are real to begin with, producing an intractable muddle where the things we do know are treated as doubtful instead of being used as the basis of an investigation of what we don't know.
So how uncertain is this uncertainty? For our purposes, not very. We don't need to know how much of our climate problems are explained by this cause or that cause, nor do we really need to know which of the various dire predictions is most nearly right. We can leave those issues to the professionals who do understand statistics and who are interested in the details for their own sake. All we need to know is whether the benefits to be gained from changing how we live outweigh the costs of making those changes, and to figure that out we need a rough idea of how reliable current climate science is; the real question, the right question is "is what we're doing to the sky really going to cause a disaster if we keep doing it?"
Consider; we know certain gasses cause the greenhouse effect. We know humans are creating large quantities of several of those gasses. We also know the atmospheric concentration of those gasses is increasing, as is the average temperature of the planet. Sure, it's a possibility that something else is causing the warming--but if the increased concentration of carbon dioxide and other gasses isn't doing it, why isn't it? If you pour a gallon of water into a bathtub and the water level rises, sure it's possible the water level rose for some other reason (maybe the tub is outside and it's raining?) but in that case what happened that the water you poured in didn't cause the water to rise? Likewise, some other source of gas could be effecting the atmosphere--volcanoes, for example--but if human industry, which we absolutely know creates this stuff, isn't changing the atmosphere, where is all the greenhouse gas we make going?
Remember when I said not to take my word for anything? Well, don't do it now, either. Check out "Global Warming, the Complete Briefing," by John Houghton. It's getting a bit dated (a lot more information has come in since the book was published), but that book does an excellent job of explaining what kinds of information climate scientists actually look at and how. All the factual statements in this essay can be found therein, and reading it will equip you to sort this stuff out for yourself.
And if things get too hot, don't forget to cool off by taking a dip in the Why River.
The great thing about this question is that it's the wrong question. I'll get to why it's the wrong question in a minute (and I'll address some corresponding right questions), but this--what the question is--is important, so we'll stay here for a bit, ok?
See, questions are almost as important than answers. Maybe they're more important. My adviser, who is a lot like Yoda, except with better grammar and smaller ears, and is really good at wise one-liners, says "you might get a great answer to the wrong question." Scientists, who are really good at getting great answers, are prone to this. If you don't get the question right, you can't get the answer right, because the question is like a nozzle pointing the waters of the Why River in a given direction, and if you squirt your curiosity over here you just won't get the flowers of understanding over there watered. Sorry. Or you can just clog up your hose to begin with by asking a question with no answer at all, like if you ask an innocent husband (or an unmarried jackass) "have you stopped beating your wife yet?"
There's no shame in asking the wrong question, unless you do it on purpose, and I have to say this is a particularly fascinating wrong question, because it's a hybrid type. Like Yoda's Warning, it has an answer (the answer is "yes, probably") that fails to satisfy because it doesn't get at the heart of the issue. Like the Accusation of the Innocent Husband, it depends on a context that, being wrong, renders any answer meaningless.
Context is what allows you to answer a question like "where is the cat?" which makes immediate sense if you know what cat I mean, but not otherwise. If the context of the question is I saw movement in the bushes, the context could be wrong if the movement was actually a skunk; you can't tell me where the cat is, because there is no cat in that context.
Here, the context is the well-publicized prediction by climate scientists that the planet will get warmer if we keep adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere; every time we get a serious heatwave we ask ourselves if this is global warming or if it is just natural variation. Whether the theory of global warming is right is debated in a variety of public media, with proponents pointing out (correctly) that the vast majority of scientists now agree on this, and opponents pointing out (correctly) that science is not a democracy. All of this is subtly, but definitely, wrong.
The planet has been getting warmer, more or less, for close to two hundred years. That the globe is getting warmer is not a theory at all; it's data. Theories are what explain the data, and predict what will happen next. The current popular debate conflates a number of related, but properly very distinct, ideas; global warming, the greenhouse effect, and anthropogenic (human-made) climate change. As long as these issues are mixed up, any questions that come out of the debate will be impossible to answer, and the debate will go on indefinitely.
Briefly, global warming means the atmospheric temperature averaged over the whole planet is getting warmer. Unless you doubt the capacity of meteorologists to make and analyze measurements in an intelligent way (and I wouldn't; weather predictions, which were once a joke, are getting startlingly accurate) this part isn't contestable. The difficult part is that we don't experience average temperatures, we only experience the specific temperature wherever we are, and that varies all over the place making it difficult for individuals to tell what the average is doing. It is impossible to say whether any particular heat wave, or any particular hurricane, is part of global warming, and in a way it isn't a fair question because global warming is a pattern and as such isn't visible unless you look at the whole picture.
The greenhouse effect is the popular name for a property of several atmospheric gasses, notably carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor, that trap heat in much the same way the glass or plastic panes of a greenhouse do. This, also, is incontestable; the amount of solar radiation the Earth receives isn't enough to explain the temperatures we experience. The greenhouse effect is also not a new idea; that carbon dioxide does this was discovered in the 1800's. It's just something we know about the gas.
Anthropogenic (human-made) climate change is the real subject of debate--that and what is going to happen next, which nobody really knows, although there are some very educated guesses. Is the warming we have measured the result of something we, as humans, are doing? Or are we watching some other, more natural cycle in play? A more accurate way to phrase the question is how much of what we're seeing is natural, and how much is not, because other cycles are always in play, and the climate is very complex. It's like if you smoke cigarettes and you get respiratory problems sometimes--well, everyone does, everyone catches colds now and then. There's no reason to believe that if you didn't smoke you wouldn't get sick, because there are lots of reasons to get sick. Even if you smoke, you are still subject to all those other reasons for getting sick--but on top of those reasons is smoking. It makes no sense to ask "am I sick because I smoke?" The better question is "how much of the reason for my sickness is my smoking, and how much is other factors?" This question does have an answer, and I even almost know what sort of statistics you'd need to find it, but good luck figuring out what the answer means unless statistics really make sense to you. A better question yet, for most people, is "if I quit smoking, will I be healthier overall?"
Conflating these three issues allows the national conversation to get hung up badly; the real uncertainty over how much of our current situation is explained by the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, as opposed to other factors (and the uncertainty about what is going to happen next) gets mixed up with the question of whether the greenhouse effect or global warming are real to begin with, producing an intractable muddle where the things we do know are treated as doubtful instead of being used as the basis of an investigation of what we don't know.
So how uncertain is this uncertainty? For our purposes, not very. We don't need to know how much of our climate problems are explained by this cause or that cause, nor do we really need to know which of the various dire predictions is most nearly right. We can leave those issues to the professionals who do understand statistics and who are interested in the details for their own sake. All we need to know is whether the benefits to be gained from changing how we live outweigh the costs of making those changes, and to figure that out we need a rough idea of how reliable current climate science is; the real question, the right question is "is what we're doing to the sky really going to cause a disaster if we keep doing it?"
Consider; we know certain gasses cause the greenhouse effect. We know humans are creating large quantities of several of those gasses. We also know the atmospheric concentration of those gasses is increasing, as is the average temperature of the planet. Sure, it's a possibility that something else is causing the warming--but if the increased concentration of carbon dioxide and other gasses isn't doing it, why isn't it? If you pour a gallon of water into a bathtub and the water level rises, sure it's possible the water level rose for some other reason (maybe the tub is outside and it's raining?) but in that case what happened that the water you poured in didn't cause the water to rise? Likewise, some other source of gas could be effecting the atmosphere--volcanoes, for example--but if human industry, which we absolutely know creates this stuff, isn't changing the atmosphere, where is all the greenhouse gas we make going?
Remember when I said not to take my word for anything? Well, don't do it now, either. Check out "Global Warming, the Complete Briefing," by John Houghton. It's getting a bit dated (a lot more information has come in since the book was published), but that book does an excellent job of explaining what kinds of information climate scientists actually look at and how. All the factual statements in this essay can be found therein, and reading it will equip you to sort this stuff out for yourself.
And if things get too hot, don't forget to cool off by taking a dip in the Why River.
Monday, October 4, 2010
What eats bedbugs?
When I first got this question from a friend I thought it was entirely the wrong sort of question. I wanted to write about noble, contentious issues of conservation concern, not bedbugs. I was wrong. Questions have a way of leading in interesting places.
My first step was towards Google. According to Bedbugger.com, (http://bedbugger.com/2007/03/19/faq-is-there-an-insect-that-will-eat-bed-bugs/) house centipedes, fire ants, and masked hunter bugs eat bedbugs, but none are useful as a treatment option as they are not available for purchase and could become pestiferous themselves. All three bite or sting. Now, I'd never heard of a masked hunter bug, and I don't like to take a random website's word for anything (nor should you, which is why I will always cite my source on anything I expect you to even consider believing), so I Googled "masked hunter bug" (yes, I like Google, and no, I don't work for them) and found a number of references, usually mentioning the hunters' fondness for bedbugs. The website of the PennState agricultural extension, http://ento.psu.edu/extension/factsheets/masked-hunter, gives their scientific name as Reduvius personatus, and an alternate common name as masked bedbug hunter. They are not native to the United States, having been accidentally introduced from Europe, and though they can live outdoors in the warmer parts of the country, they are largely creatures of structures, where they eat other insects who also like living inside structures. Incidentally, they are true bugs; while the word "bug" is generally used to mean any creepy-crawly, entomologists use the word to refer only to one order of insect, vaguely beetlish beings with sucking mouthparts and partially membranous wing covers--though the entomologist who told me that (see, I'm citing my source again), Jenna Spear-O'Mara, also uses the word "bug" like the rest of us do, on occasion.
Anyway, you do not want these things in your house; they bite, when bothered, very severely. Some of the websites called them "kissing bugs," which was interesting, as I'd read those can be dangerous. Another trip to Google revealed that they are indeed in the same family as the "kissing bugs" that can spread Chagas' disease in some countries, mostly in South America, but they are not the same insects (http://dermatology.cdlib.org/DOJvol7num1/centerfold/triatoma/vetter.html). Still.
But the claim that you can't use any of these animals to treat bedbug infestations bears a little more thought. Clearly, you wouldn't want to buy a jar of fire ants and dump them on your bed to get rid of bedbugs, but that sort of use of predatory insects (though helpful in gardens and quite preferable to chemicals) is a bit screwy anyway, if you think about it. I know it may seem so obvious as to not need saying, but insects and chemical pesticides aren't the same thing. If you think of your garden or your bed, or wherever else, as a thing that normally does not and should not have bugs, then bugs are an aberration, and you deal with them on a case-by-case basis by going in and fixing the problem. It's the same idea as taking an antibiotic when you're sick, or hiring a mechanic to clean the gunk off some unreachable part of the innards of your car. Antibiotics don't belong in your body--you don't get sick from antibiotic deficiency--and a mechanic doesn't belong inside your car, either, but you get your problem fixed and go on your merry way. Right?
Despite the common use of pesticides (and beneficial insects, which you can buy) in just this way, gardens, being alive, are more complex. Dr. Douglas Tallamy explained this very well in his very readable book, "Bringing Nature Home: How You can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants." He describes finding a tomato hornworm--you know those giant green ones?--in his garden and deciding not to remove it because he could see it had already been parasitized by braconid wasps, who were eating the caterpillar's innards in the course of growing up. By keeping that one hornworm, he kept all the wasps who would grow up to kill more hornworms. But some of the wasps were being paracitized by another kind of wasp, killing them. So did he kill the other wasp? No; if the braconid wasps killed all the hornworms, there wouldn't be anything for the next generation of braconids to eat. If the garden was then recolonized by hornworms before the braconids got back, his tomatoes would be sunk. He needed the pteromalid wasps to keep the braconid wasps in check to make sure that there would always be hornworms to feed the braconids to ensure that there would always be braconids to keep the hornworms in check.
If I just lost you there, remember this; the goal in ecologically aware gardening is not to have no pests. It's to have a low, but fairly constant level of pests. If you ever get rid of all of your pests, you also get rid of all of your beneficials, and when the pests come back (and they always will) they'll swamp you. This is what I mean by insects being different from chemical pesticides; to use them well, you've got to have a completely different mindset.
Which begs the question; if we didn't have centipedes and fire ants and masked hunter bugs, would we have more bedbugs than we do already? It's a fair case?
My first step was towards Google. According to Bedbugger.com, (http://bedbugger.com/2007/03/19/faq-is-there-an-insect-that-will-eat-bed-bugs/) house centipedes, fire ants, and masked hunter bugs eat bedbugs, but none are useful as a treatment option as they are not available for purchase and could become pestiferous themselves. All three bite or sting. Now, I'd never heard of a masked hunter bug, and I don't like to take a random website's word for anything (nor should you, which is why I will always cite my source on anything I expect you to even consider believing), so I Googled "masked hunter bug" (yes, I like Google, and no, I don't work for them) and found a number of references, usually mentioning the hunters' fondness for bedbugs. The website of the PennState agricultural extension, http://ento.psu.edu/extension/factsheets/masked-hunter, gives their scientific name as Reduvius personatus, and an alternate common name as masked bedbug hunter. They are not native to the United States, having been accidentally introduced from Europe, and though they can live outdoors in the warmer parts of the country, they are largely creatures of structures, where they eat other insects who also like living inside structures. Incidentally, they are true bugs; while the word "bug" is generally used to mean any creepy-crawly, entomologists use the word to refer only to one order of insect, vaguely beetlish beings with sucking mouthparts and partially membranous wing covers--though the entomologist who told me that (see, I'm citing my source again), Jenna Spear-O'Mara, also uses the word "bug" like the rest of us do, on occasion.
Anyway, you do not want these things in your house; they bite, when bothered, very severely. Some of the websites called them "kissing bugs," which was interesting, as I'd read those can be dangerous. Another trip to Google revealed that they are indeed in the same family as the "kissing bugs" that can spread Chagas' disease in some countries, mostly in South America, but they are not the same insects (http://dermatology.cdlib.org/DOJvol7num1/centerfold/triatoma/vetter.html). Still.
But the claim that you can't use any of these animals to treat bedbug infestations bears a little more thought. Clearly, you wouldn't want to buy a jar of fire ants and dump them on your bed to get rid of bedbugs, but that sort of use of predatory insects (though helpful in gardens and quite preferable to chemicals) is a bit screwy anyway, if you think about it. I know it may seem so obvious as to not need saying, but insects and chemical pesticides aren't the same thing. If you think of your garden or your bed, or wherever else, as a thing that normally does not and should not have bugs, then bugs are an aberration, and you deal with them on a case-by-case basis by going in and fixing the problem. It's the same idea as taking an antibiotic when you're sick, or hiring a mechanic to clean the gunk off some unreachable part of the innards of your car. Antibiotics don't belong in your body--you don't get sick from antibiotic deficiency--and a mechanic doesn't belong inside your car, either, but you get your problem fixed and go on your merry way. Right?
Despite the common use of pesticides (and beneficial insects, which you can buy) in just this way, gardens, being alive, are more complex. Dr. Douglas Tallamy explained this very well in his very readable book, "Bringing Nature Home: How You can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants." He describes finding a tomato hornworm--you know those giant green ones?--in his garden and deciding not to remove it because he could see it had already been parasitized by braconid wasps, who were eating the caterpillar's innards in the course of growing up. By keeping that one hornworm, he kept all the wasps who would grow up to kill more hornworms. But some of the wasps were being paracitized by another kind of wasp, killing them. So did he kill the other wasp? No; if the braconid wasps killed all the hornworms, there wouldn't be anything for the next generation of braconids to eat. If the garden was then recolonized by hornworms before the braconids got back, his tomatoes would be sunk. He needed the pteromalid wasps to keep the braconid wasps in check to make sure that there would always be hornworms to feed the braconids to ensure that there would always be braconids to keep the hornworms in check.
If I just lost you there, remember this; the goal in ecologically aware gardening is not to have no pests. It's to have a low, but fairly constant level of pests. If you ever get rid of all of your pests, you also get rid of all of your beneficials, and when the pests come back (and they always will) they'll swamp you. This is what I mean by insects being different from chemical pesticides; to use them well, you've got to have a completely different mindset.
Which begs the question; if we didn't have centipedes and fire ants and masked hunter bugs, would we have more bedbugs than we do already? It's a fair case?
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Introductions
Hello;
I am not a scientist; I don't even play one on TV. I am a science-buff, a graduate student in conservation biology, and, maybe more importantly, a writer. If you have an environmental science related question, I can find the answer and explain it so it makes sense. I see myself as a bridge, a bridge between questions and answers, a bridge over a river of questions. So keep them coming.
-Caroline
I am not a scientist; I don't even play one on TV. I am a science-buff, a graduate student in conservation biology, and, maybe more importantly, a writer. If you have an environmental science related question, I can find the answer and explain it so it makes sense. I see myself as a bridge, a bridge between questions and answers, a bridge over a river of questions. So keep them coming.
-Caroline
Friday, September 17, 2010
Introduction
Hello;
At present, this blog is under construction. Please check back in a few days.
thank you,
C.
At present, this blog is under construction. Please check back in a few days.
thank you,
C.
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