North Coast Diaries

The next big thing

It's funny how environmental awareness comes in waves. Over the last week or so, the news has been all abuzz with talk of "colony collapse disorder" and the importance of insect pollinators....

Insect pollinators have always been important, going back at least as far as flowering plants themselves, which paleo-botanists tell us was some 120 million years ago. It could even be argued that the very presence of most of our more showy flower types evolved from the interaction between plants and pollinators. The lack of human appreciation for pollinators is part and parcel of the general disconnect we humans have from nature and our unfathonable tendency to over simplify complex ecological relationships. It probably doesn't help that the vast majority of pollinators are insects and that many of these insects have life stages that we consider pestiferous.

News recently revolves around the collapse domestic Honey Bee numbers. Honey Bees are an introduced species in North America, a fact most folks probably don't even realize. Pollination obviously went on just fine before the introduction of the Honey Bee, because North America is populated with dozens of native bee species along with wasps, flower-flies, beetles, butterflies and moths. If the collapse of Honey Bee populations truely does threaten to impact the ability of flowering plants to pollinate, we are obliged to ask: what did we do to all those native pollinators that has put us into this precarious position of depending on a single, non-native species?

No one is quite sure what is causing the recent crash in Honey Bee populations, but some hives have seen 70-80% drops in populations. No dead bees, just sudden and inexplicable reductions in numbers at the hives. Given that bees are considered essential to about $14.6 billion worth of American food crops, the US Department of Agriculture and the House Committee on Agriculture are suddenly taking pollination very seriously. A recent paper published in PLoS Biology details the symptoms and possible causes of Colony Collapse Disorder and it seems likely that the principle cause may be the way we treat insects, generally.

Many plants and insects have entered into a symbiotic pact that trades off pollination for larval food sources. Insect eat plants during one part of their lifecycle and pollinate plants during another. On average, there's a balance between the losses of some plant tissue and gains of efficient, long-distance pollination between individual plants. Human agriculturists, however, see plant tissue loss as unhealthy damage and act accordingly. And unfortunately, most insect pesticides are not nearly as selective as we'd like to think they are. They don't distinguish between bees and beetles and as target species develop resistance, greater amounts of chemicals are applied and the collatoral damage becomes more and more significant. Congress has recently introduced HR 1709, the The Pollinator Protection Act which dedicates resources to research on Colony Collapse Disorder, pollination biology and the impact pesticides and genetically modified food crops may have on Honey Bees and native pollinators. It seems unlikely that the symbiosis between agribusiness and the chemical industry is in any danger from this bill, but when congress start legislating on the behalf of insects, it seem pretty clear some sort of change in in the wind....

Cope's Giant Salamander

Up it the high reaches of (relatively) undisturbed rocky streams here in Clatsop County lives a curious salamander. It is what we in the ecology business call an obligate species with requirements so specialized and so narrow that it is particularly suseptible to environmental impacts. The Cope's Giant Salamander (Dicamptodon copei) requires cold, clear, running streams with rocky bottoms. They prefer their streams to be in dark, closed canopy forests. They are so stream dependent that adults rarely metamorphos into terrestrial adults, instead the adults retain their gills in a condition called neoteny. There are only one or two sites in Clatsop County where Cope's Giant Salamander can be found.

The Cope's often shares its streams with it's larger, more mobile cousin, the Pacific Giant Salamander (D. tenebrosus) and identification can be complicated. The Cope's has a narrower, rectangular head, less frilly gills, a longer body relative to the length of the limbs and distinctive tannish spotting.

In 2005, I took Craig Steele, a molecular biologist, up to Fox Creek to look for Cope's Salamanders so he could obtain tissue samples for genetics work he was doing on the Dicamptodon complex. His findings are soon to be published in the Journal of Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. I was given an advanced copy and can share some of the findings. First, and most importantly, the critters we've been calling Cope's Giant Salamanders are, in fact, Cope's Giant Salamander. The Fox Creek population represents a genetically distinct subpopulation from its nearest Cope's relatives across the river in the Willapa Hills. Cope's apparently broke off from other Dicamptodon's in the Cascades of northern Oregon and expanded west to the Coast Range during the Pleistocene. Post-iceage warming isolated Oregon populations south of the Columbia River from those to the north. Fox Creek populations have been isolated long enough to form their own distictive branch on the cladistic family tree (Baysian topology for all you purists).