Vicious Cycle Links Loss of Pollinators to Diminishing Grasslands

Natural Resources Defense Council
Two different very different studies were released this week. But if you look at them together, they paint a potentially alarming picture for both pollinators—like bees and butterflies—and the native grasslands and prairies they depend on.
In the first study, the European Environment Agency presented the results from two decades of monitoring butterfly populations across Europe. They show that, “compared to 1990, the European populations of the 17 indicator species have declined by, on average, almost 50 percent”
The report lays the blame for this decline at the feet of intensifying agricultural activities on easy to cultivate land and the abandonment of cultivated grasslands, used for livestock grazing and growing hay, on marginal lands. Both activities end up destroying butterfly habitat, either through the creation of monocultures and the use of pesticides or the reversion of habitat to scrub and forest.
But what if the decline of butterflies also causes the decline of grasslands?
That’s the implication of a different study, conducted in Colorado, where scientist looked at the reproductive success of plants on plots of land in subalpine meadows containing 10 species of native bumblebees. Then they removed one of those species. Computer models had suggested that “plant communities will be resilient to losing many or even most of the pollinator species in an ecosystem” as the remaining bees take up the slack.
But that’s not what scientists found at all. Instead they reported that removing even a single bee species reduced wildflower seed production a third. Why? Because competition decreased, bees stopped specializing in “their” flower and began moving more between different species of flowers which, if you happen to be a flower, does you no good whatsoever. This decline of “floral fidelity” was dramatic—78 percent—and resulted in lower reproductive success by the plants.
Does the same mechanism come into play for butterflies? I don’t know. The studies were of different species, in different ecosystems, and on different continents. But butterflies, like bees, are important pollinators of flowering plants so I don’t think that possibility can be dismissed. The result would be a potentially vicious cycle: plant decline begetting pollinator decline which, in turn, causes further plant decline. At the very least, both studies shine a harsh light on decline of animals that we take for granted at our peril.
Visit EcoWatch’s BIODIVERSITY page for more related news on this topic.
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A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
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