*A magnificent plant called yellow lantern is flowering along the west coast. It’s a vibrant vernal beauty.
These western inhabitants thrive in rich mucky, wet swamps near red alders, Sitka spruce, western redcedars and grand firs.
*Science is exhilarating, challenging and rich with rewards. As a scientist, the bees have shown me many things.
Last week, the bees revealed a lesson on speed and stamina. At 230 wingbeats per second, on my bicycle, I clocked one gal soaring down the street at 27 miles per hour (mph)!
She had an empty load. When topped-up with nectar, pollen, water or tree resin (used to make propolis, or bee glue), a honeybee can reach an impressive 20mph. She can maintain that stamina for possibly a couple miles or more.
*America’s bees are in big trouble. Instead of protecting our important buzzing brethren and those who faithfully tend to them, the Trump administration is overtly pandering to Big Chem, the makers of more deadly nerve poisons.
Normally, a beekeeper can expect to lose about 12 percent of a colony to overwintering deaths. Since 2006, U.S. beekeepers have lost around 30 percent of their hives each winter. The winter of 2007-08 recorded a death spike of 36 percent. Some beekeepers were forced into bankruptcy.
Since then, my colleagues have conducted hundreds of scientific studies on the deadly effects of a wide array of nerve poisons used in commercial insecticides e.g. neonicotinoids, sulfoxaflor, flupyradifurone, chlorpyrifos. When honeybees encounter less than a dozen parts per billion of these nerve poisons, they instantaneously exhibit the full strength symptoms of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. The Einsteins of the insect world lose their minds and shake to death. Horrible. Keep Reading
*June was the hottest month ever recorded. At the G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, U.S. President Donald Trump refused to sign a joint statement by the other 19 members on combating Man-made global heating. In the meantime, baking, starving and flooding are accelerating globally with vengeance.
Last week, France recorded its all-time hottest temperature, 114.6F (45.9C). Scientists reported that the recent European heatwave was at least five times more likely and 7.2F (4C) hotter due to global heating from burning planet-destroying fossil fuels. Keep Reading
*Go outside. Close your eyes. Listen. What do you hear? There’s a whole world around us that’s rich with Nature’s symphony, or, soundscape, that we are all inexorably linked to.
Do you suffer from anxiety, stress, depression, burnout or low energy? If so, spend 17 minutes each day quietly breathing in Nature, preferably next to big trees. It will miraculously recalibrate your brain and boost your autoimmune system.
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*The Great Barrier Reef and the Salish Sea have been thrown under the bus by Prime Ministers Scott Morrison and Justin Trudeau, Australia and Canada respectively, for more global heating subsidized fossil fuels.
What can be done to protect our only home from roasting to death?
It’s so hot that more starving Russian polar bears are entering into towns hundreds of miles away from the sea. On Monday, another heartbreaking report of a climate refugee with its paws caked in mud, emaciated, exhausted and frantically searching the streets of Norilsk, Russia, for food.
*Earth is roasting right before our very eyes.
The heatwaves in Siberia and Lapland have begun with fury, again. Alaska recorded its hottest spring on record. It’s warming at 2.2C (3.96F), or, twice that of continental United States.
The more fossil fuels burned, the faster the globe heats. That means less polar ice and more global heating methane and laughing gas from the thawing soils. A deadly feedback loop.
At the melting North Pole, researchers have linked Man-made heat from fossil fuel combustion with the jet stream’s erratic sinuous behavior.
*Exploring the tallest forests is exhilarating. The treetops are 38 storeys, or, more than 380 feet away. The air is rich with oxygen. This must be heaven on earth!
Ambling slowly through these ancient living cathedrals is like peering back 100 million years through the looking glass of time. The dinosaurs have come and gone but not these colossal members of this exceptional race of trees.
In order to reach higher into the sky than any of the other 80,000 kinds of trees, these lofty monarchs need a helping hand to both get a start and survive for thousands of years. Keep Reading
*The cruel, violent rampage against the dolphins began early this year on New Year’s Day.
The dolphins intend Man no harm. Yet, each year, the bloodthirsty crazed Faroese stain the coves and shorelines of their far North Atlantic islands with our brethren’s mammalian blood.
*About a decade ago, I began sounding the alarm on “The War Against Nature.” For those animal activists and guardians on the frontline, the bloodbath is gut-wrenching.
Dr. Reese Halter on radio.abc.net.au
On May 6, 2019, after having examined 15,000 scientific and governmental sources for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, 145 experts from 50 countries concluded that one in every four species, or, one million forms of life, face extinction.
*Last weekend, an Arctic heatwave caused the mercury to spike to 87 degrees (31C) in northwest Russia. Rapid sea ice loss in April set an all-time record, 479,000 square miles below the long-term average. The supremely adapted Arctic food chain is unraveling in real time, right now. Starvation is highly evident. Keep Reading
*Nature is declining globally at an unprecedented rate. The Man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction is accelerating as quickly as10,000 times the previous five others. Record numbers of Australia’s wildlife species face imminent extinction.
On Monday, 450 scientists and diplomats with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services predicted that one million forms of life are facing extinction. Keep Reading
*The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists hippopotami as red, or, threatened. Their existence is in peril because of destruction of habitat and loathsome poachers.
Why has the Zambian government auctioned off 2,000 healthy masterpiece hippos to trophy hunters for $3.3M?
*Nature is in crisis. Ladies and gentlemen, our only home is under utter siege by a handful of powerful, greedy, deranged men.
Accelerating fossil fuel heat has baked the Arctic. That pole is the warmest it has been in at least 10,000 years. In 2018, fossil fuels infused the equivalent heat into the oceans of detonating 100 million Hiroshima-style bombs. As a result, the Gray whales of northern California are starving to death. Keep Reading
*Orcas are the most widespread of the cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises). These beauties are the pinnacle of mammalian evolution, and so worthy of our admiration and protection.
Image credit: Tatiana Ivkovich, Shutterstock
With brains more than twice as heavy and as complex as that of humans, orcas are feared predators. It’s not just other cetaceans that must constantly watch their backs for sudden ambushes by pods of the intelligent ones. Orcas give great white sharks a lot of grief and occasionally much pain. Keep Reading
*Almost 1,200 dolphins are dead from the shoreline of France’s Atlantic to Greece’s Aegean. The culprit is unmistakably that of Man’s insatiable greed and heinous lust for the destruction of Nature.
Since January, more than 1,100 dolphins, most with their fins cut off, have washed ashore onto France’s Atlantic coastline.
They drowned in the Bay of Biscay as bycatch within fishery nets. 90 percent of these beauties were amputees with broken jaws caused by being trapped in nets, struggling unsuccessfully for life. Subsidized trawlers relentlessly overfishing for hake and sea bass are quickly wiping the dolphins off the French map.
Extinction means forever.
*Around the globe, the dolphins are showing scientists that the planet has become unlivable. Dolphin deaths are piling up.
Globally, 44,000 floating slaughterhouses are marauding the oceans 24/7/365. Measuring a total of 13 million miles, with a couple of billion legal and illegal hooks, they are wiping, tunas, sharks, rays, sea turtles, cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises), sea birds and so many other masterpieces off the planet at an unprecedented rate. Keep Reading
*This week, Nature’s pageantry afforded Angelenos and others a rare and glorious spectacle. A cool wet winter has unleashed a super floral bloom and along with this magnificence came the throngs of painted lady butterflies.
From San Diego to Camarillo, these splendid butterflies danced across the sky. An estimated billion painted ladies brought smiles to millions of people, helping to officially usher the kaleidoscope of spring colors. Keep Reading
*This week, the Department of the Interior, led by acting secretary David Bernhardt, announced plans to delist wolves from the Endangered Species Act across America. A small exception of 114 critically endangered Mexican wolves of Arizona and New Mexico could be spared.
In the early 1970s, masterpiece grey wolves were hunted to near extinction, a horrifying non-stop bloodbath. Keep Reading
*People and honeybees share many similarities including some of the same genes and brain neurons. It’s one of the many reasons why I am awed by these masterpiece creatures.
For my entire professional life, I have followed Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum’s dictum: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.”
The more we discover about the incomparable honeybees, the more respect they rightfully garner. Keep Reading