Santa Monica Daily Press March 31, 2009

A mass of plastic in the Pacific, increasing tenfold each decade since 1945, is now the size of Texas and killing everything in its wake. And recently masses of plastic likened to toxic chunky soup has been documented in both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans as well as the Mediterranean Sea.

Each day North Americans throw away more than 385,000 cell phones and 143,000 computers – electronic waste is now the fastest-growing stream of garbage. Lead and mercury are seeping from this waste into ground water.

Most of this electronic waste is shipped overseas where it is dismantled and burned, deleterious to the environment and human health. Some of the e-waste, however, is winding up in the sea.

Each hour North Americans consume and discard about 2.75 million plastic water and soda bottles; that’s 24 billion a year. Some of those bottles are now in the oceans.

Globally, 100 million tons of plastic are generated each year and at least 10 per cent of that is finding its way into the sea. The United Nations Environmental Program now estimates that there are 46,000 floating pieces of plastic for every square mile of ocean. Some of that trash circulating the globe is 95 feet deep.

Worldwide, each year 250 billion pounds of small plastic pellets called nurdles – the feedstock for all disposable plastics are shipped and billions are spilled during transfer in and out of railroad cars. Those spilled nurdles are ending up in gutters and drains and eventually carried into the ocean. And some are even washing up on the shores of Antarctica.

In just three days in 2006 a quarter of billion nurdles washed down the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers into the Pacific Ocean.

The U.S. produces about 15 billion pounds of plastic each year and only 1 per cent of it is recycled. As a matter of fact, the average American uses 223 pounds of plastic each year and by 2012 it’s projected to be as high as 326 pounds per annum.

Plastic is a petroleum by-product and the most commonly produced resin in North America includes: polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene.

Long chain molecules that make up plastic are durable and long lasting. In the ocean they may take 500 years to break down. Sunlight photo-degrades plastic breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces. Yet, even a single molecule of plastic is indigestible by any known organism.

At least 80 percent of the plastic in the ocean originated from the land. Thousands of cargo containers fall overboard in stormy seas each year. In 2002, 33,000 blue-and-white Nike basketball shoes were spilled off the coast of Washington.

Plastic in the ocean acts like sponges attracting neuron-toxins like mercury and pyrethroids insecticides, carcinogens such as PCBs, DDT and PBDE (the backbone of flame retardants), and man-made hormones like progesterone and estrogen that at high levels induce both male and female reproductive parts on a single animal.

Japanese scientists found nurdles with concentrations of poisons listed above as high as a million times their concentrations in the water as free-floating substances.

Each year a million sea birds and 100,000 sharks, turtles, dolphins and whales die from eating plastic.

Nurdles resemble fish eggs or roe and tuna and salmon feed on them indiscriminately. Around 2.5 billion humans eat fish regularly. Plastic and other man-made toxins are polluting the global food chain and it’s escalating at an unprecedented rate.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is actually comprised of two enormous masses of ever-growing garbage. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California. The Western Garbage Patch extends east of Japan to the western archipelago of the Hawaiian Islands. A narrow 6,000-mile long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone connects the patches.

The Atlantic Garbage Patch floats between Bermuda and Portugal’s mid-Atlantic Azores Islands. The highest concentrations of plastic occur between 22 and 38 degrees northern latitude an offshore patch equivalent to the area between Cuba and Washington, D.C.

The massive clockwise North Pacific Gyre is carrying plastic that is over 50 years old. Last year, plastic found in the stomach of an albatross had a serial number traced to a World War II seaplane shot down just south of Japan in 1944 and identified over 60 years later off the West Coast of the U.S.

Currently, there is six times more plastic than plankton floating in the middle of the Pacific.

The North Pacific Gyre, its ocean currents and winds have essentially become a giant toilet bowl that regularly disgorges feet of plastic onto Hawaii’s Big Island. Kamilo Beach is often covered in plastic lighters, toothbrushes, water bottles, pens, nurdles, baby bottles, cell phones and plastic bags. About a half a trillion plastic bags are manufactured each year around the globe.

Oceanographers and conservation biologists believe the only way to contend with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is to slow the amount of plastic flowing from the land to the sea.

Buy six organic cotton shopping bags. Use them instead of supermarket single-use disposable plastic bags. Make it a habit to return those organic cotton bags to the trunk of your car after unpacking groceries.

Re-use your plastic water bottles. If you can refill one bottle for a day then why not attempt it for a week.

Thermal conversion landfills – like those of Golden Spirit Enterprises – will soon render all landfill trash neutral and prevent landfills from contaminating ground water and haphazardly leaking the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere.

In the meantime, each of us must deliberately reduce the amount of trash we generate, and in particular the quantity of disposable single-use plastic that are carelessly being discarded – because the ocean and all of its life forms are suffocating.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

The Arctic is a barometer of the health of the planet. Its indigenous Peoples, animals and plants are marvelously adapted to the harsh environment. Airborne toxins and global warming are rapidly altering life in the far North.

The area north of the 66^th parallel is called the Arctic Circle. Eight countries – Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and the United States – surround the Arctic. The Inuit, Denes, Metis, Inupiat (some still called Eskimos), Aleuts, Yup’ik, Chuckchi, Nenets, Saami and the Faroese – all Arctic Peoples eat 194 different species of wild animals, most of them come from the sea.

Marine blubber is low in saturated fats and high in he Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids which significantly lower heart disease. Those fatty acids also reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and perhaps more importantly Omega-3s nourish and stimulate brain development especially in the womb. In addition, meat from marine mammals is high in antioxidants which prevent cancers.

Beluga meat contains ten times the amount of iron compared to beef, five times more vitamins and 50 percent more protein. Six ounces of narwhal (whale) contains the same amount of vitamin C as a glass of orange juice of a cup of strawberries. The indigenous Peoples of the Arctic are able to nourish themselves despite the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables – truly a remarkable feat.

Today, over 200 toxic pesticides and potent industrial compounds are found in very high concentrations in animals and the Peoples of the far North.

Polychlorinated biphenyl compounds known as PCBs have leaked from electrical transformers into the environment. Although banned in the 1970s by most countries at least 21,000 old transformers exist in the U.S. alone, and they contain at least 100,000,000 pounds of PCBs.

When PCBs enter the environment they circulate in the air, land on the ground, re-enter the air and eventually deposit on the snow and the ocean in the Arctic. Essentially, PCBs hop around the planet like the movement of grasshoppers.

About 60 tons of PCB gases arrive each year into the Arctic. Two thirds of them stay put, the rest continue to move.

PCBs are endocrine disruptors. They alter sex hormones, significantly impairing fetuses by damaging the development of the brain in addition to disrupting all vital organs.

In the Arctic they accumulate on the ocean sediments. They infiltrate the single celled plants which are eaten by copepods. Copepods are eaten by cod, cod are consumed by narwhals and in turn narwhals are eaten by Inuits. Moreover, ringed seals eat cod, and polar bears and humans eat seals.

At each levels on the rung of the food chain as the PCBs are passed their concentration becomes magnified – a process called bio-magnification. Polar bears and people of the far North are carrying at least millions of times more PCBs than the waters where their food originates.

PCBs are stored in fat cells, clinging to the body rather than flushing through it. Female mammals pass doses of PCBs to their offspring through their milk. Milk of Arctic women has ten times more PCBs and pesticides than mothers from any of the major cities in Canada. Woman from Nunavik have 22 chemicals, 10 insecticides and 12 PCB compounds in their bodies at extraordinary high levels.

Two thousand polar bears near the Kara Sea contain the highest recorded levels of PCBs, twelve times more than Alaskan bears.

Each year between 5,000 and 10,000 tons of mercury are entering Earth’s atmosphere. Between 50 and 75 percent of that mercury in the environment is human-induced. Coal fired power plant, currently the main energy source on the planet, and chemical factories are the main point sources emitting mercury.

Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin. Ninety-three percent of the woman tested from east Greenland and 68 percent of Nunavut’s region exceeded the guidelines designated to protect the fetuses from neurological damages from mercury poisoning.

Each year 45 to 272 tons of mercury gas flow up into the Arctic. It’s transported from thousands of miles away. In the spring when the first rays of light interact with the salt in the air and the mercury gas a photochemical reaction occurs – mercury sunrise – forcing mercury into the snow and ultimately into the ocean.

Global warming is occurring at least two times faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet. Sea ice is disappearing at a record rate. In 2007 the Arctic was forecasted to be ice-free in 2060. Today, it is predicted to be ice-free in the summer by 2030. Less ice translates into more toxins in the Arctic Ocean.

The sea surrounding Alaska’s Aleutian Island’s have been laid to waste by global warming.

One hundred and fifteen thousand sea otters are missing. And it only took four orcas or killer whales less than a decade to finish them off.

Orcas living near the Aleutian’s traditionally ate Stellar sea lions and seals, both rich in blubber and loaded with calories.

In the early 1980s the Gulf of Alaska rose by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The sea lions and seals soon disappeared leaving just the sea otters. The orcas changed their diet and began to eat the otters. Once the otters vanished the number of sea urchins skyrocketed. The sea urchins have eaten most of the massive 20 feet tall kelp forests, formerly the otter’s habitat.

Also, rising ocean temperatures killed off the plankton which fed the copepods and krill which in turn fed the shrimps and Alaska king crabs. Shrimps, crabs, capelin and herring are gone. A once brimming diversified ecosystem has today been reduced to just sea urchins, cod, Pollack and sharks.

The speed in which all these species have been lost has been likened to that of the loss of the dinosaurs.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

California Lutheran University Climate Change student assessment of Earth Dr Reese Halter's class

Story ran on Huffington Post November 7, 2011

This first week of November (2011) our population surpassed seven billion humans. And in the last week of October (2011) scientists from the University of California at Berkeley irrefutably proved that over one billion temperature sensors registered warming between 1-2 degrees Celsius, in some cases more than three times greater than the IPCCs average of 0.64 degrees Celsius. Humans are forcing the climate by burning carbon-based fuels releasing over 82 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, daily, on our planet.

All life forms are in jeopardy. Our food chain is perilously close to collapsing; yet the lawmakers in Washington regularly ignore this message. My biology and environmental students at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks and I are miffed at why this issue is not front and center in DC.

Prices at the grocery store have been rising dramatically since February 2011 and will continue to do so with no foreseeable end in sight. The climate has changed that much – it’s disrupting our way of life and costing governments around the world billions of dollars in infrastructure damage.

In May of 2009, Don Gorman the publisher of Rocky Mountain Books called and asked me to write The Incomparable Honeybee. A couple months later the first edition was in print and selling like hotcakes. Last week a revised and updated edition was released; we all need to be aware of the health and wellbeing of the bees. Because without healthy honey, bumble, stingless and solitary bees there’s no chance that more than seven billion people can thrive especially since the oceans are fished-out and currently feeding, unsustainably, at least a couple billion people, daily – in addition to acidifying (from absorbing rising atmospheric CO₂) faster than any time in the last 60 million years.

One of the thrills of studying nature is discovering the magnificent interrelationships amongst critters, plants, insects and ecosystems. My students are constantly amazed at my enthusiasm and passion when I connect the dots in class.

For instance, the brutal drought that is enveloping Texas and much of the southern half of America has adversely impacted the Mexican free-tailed bats that migrate from northern Mexico in the springtime to central Texas. One hundred million bats – the largest bat colony on the globe – feast on an astounding 1,000 tons of insects and pests nightly during the summertime – nature’s exquisite insectivores. Those bats save Texas cotton farmers millions of dollars that would otherwise be spent on purchasing man-made, synthetic insecticides that kill honey, bumble and solitary bees.

The current drought, however, has significantly lambasted the Mexican free-tailed bat population (they can’t find water) and Texas farmers were forced to spend millions of dollars applying carcinogenic, synthetic insecticides to grow their bee-pollinated cotton crops. This will most certainly have a deleterious affect on all bee species.

Surprisingly, bees and humans share a number of similarities. For example, we both require restful and rejuvenating sleep. Sleep deprived bees, just like humans, experience communication problems like finding food and performing an accurate waggle dance to reveal locations of nectar, pollen, water and tree resin. Stressed bees like humans become anxious, depressed and pessimistic; they display emotion-like qualities. Moreover, bees that exhibit a high defensive behavior or optimism are likely to survive a winter rather than perish.

Did you know that humans have been keeping bees in cities for over three thousand years? Bees were kept in the “land of milk and honey” in the Iron Age city of Tel Rehov in the Jordan Valley – the oldest known commercial beekeeping facility in the world. It should then come as no surprise that city councils around the world have recently allowed urban beekeepers to keep hives in Santa Monica, New York, Chicago, London, Melbourne, Tokyo and many other places. In fact, urban beekeepers along with the tremendous support of city dwellers are planting more bee-friendly trees and flowers helping to sustain urban bee populations.

And make no mistake; bees around the globe are dying by the billions from insecticides like neonictinoids, climate-driven mismatches, introduced parasites and diseases, air pollution and habitat loss. In the last four years alone over a quarter trillion honeybees have died prematurely. Of the 100 crop species providing 90 percent of the world’s food – over 74 percent are pollinated by bees.

The amount of electromagnetic radiation emitted from your cellular phone is enough for you to strongly consider using the “hands-free” mode to obviate harmful brain radiation. Researchers from Switzerland discovered that the amount of radiation given off by just one mobile phone has a noticeably negative effect on bee behavior, causing them to immediately become anxious. People would be wise to take note at what the bees are showing us about cellular phone radiation levels.

At the end of each day I take a tablespoon of local beekeepers honey and marvel that it took 12 bees laboring their entire foraging lives of three weeks, combined flying time of about 6,000 miles, to produce 21 grams or a tablespoon of delicious and nutritious honey.

Help save urban bees – please, do not use herbicides, insecticides, miticides or fungicides in your garden.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

Beavers are formidable harvesters. They can drop a 10-inch diameter tree within minutes. Yet, they also know how to regrow forests and promote water conservation.

Beavers are the largest of all North American rodents, weighing a whopping 44 pounds. They move slowly and awkwardly over land and so they’ve mastered the path of least resistance – floating through the forest. In fact, they are experts in the world of fresh water.

Among their remarkable traits is the flat, hairless paddle-like tail that allows beavers to prop themselves up while standing and whack the water in a highly effective, loud warning mechanism. Their dense undercoat of fur provides excellent insulation in water. Their lips close behind the huge, ever-growing front teeth for underwater chewing. They have self stopping ears and nostrils for diving and large back feet with webbed toes make them powerful swimmers. Two serrated claws on each hind foot are used for combing water repellant oil through their coat. Small, agile front fingers allow delicate handling of tiny objects.

Huge, slightly yellowish teeth are perfectly designed for felling trees. Mostly nocturnal, beavers appear just after sunset and are active up till sunrise. They are expert dam builders. Placing layers of sticks, logs, roots and stones, plastered together with mud and sod – they regulate the flow of water through the forest which enables them to move to and from their feeding grounds.

Their main source of food is sugars, starches and vitamins inside tree bark and twigs. They prefer willows, birch, balsam poplars, cottonwoods and aspens. They also eat leaves, twigs and seeds of water plants. Conifers are the last resort for food. An acre of medium sized aspens is needed to support one beaver for one year.

Beavers are very thrifty and have special stomachs designed to break down wood. They cannot digest all the cellulose (the fibers which make up most of wood) and so they excrete the partially digested vegetation. They re-ingest it and the second time through their digestive system all the left-over nutrients are fully absorbed.

Beaver ponds are large, often reaching depths greater than 10 feet and interconnected with other ponds via elaborate canal systems.

When a pond reaches its critical size (deep enough so the water won’t freeze solid) a lodge is built.  Constructed of sticks and mud, it can be 10 feet tall and 20 feet – an interior living space of 5 X 2.5 feet high and dry quarters, with ventilation at the top and at least two tunnels at the bottom.

During summer, fresh twigs are stored on rafts, tied to the bottom of the pond in water that will remain ice-free when winter arrives. These twigs sustain beavers over the winter.

Beavers are exceptional foresters. After all the trees in an area are felled, dams are breached, ponds are drained, and they move on. The flood waters cause the recently harvested poplars, aspens and willows to re-sprout new stems, thus regenerating the cut-over lands. Beavers return in a few years to once again harvest the new crop of trees.

Our furry wood-workers are truly “busy as beavers,” constantly working the land. Their female-dominated society’s have had a huge hand in shaping the exquisite forests’ of North America.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

The Australian continent has experienced some extreme climates during the past 65 million years. Its fauna and flora are testament to those extremities. The genus Eucalyptus, with some 700 species or so, is an excellent example of floral adaptations. Australian fauna, in particular the marsupials, have also been sculpted by climate change.

In the early 1990s I conducted my PhD studies in the subalpine snow gums forests of Mt. Stirling in the Victorian Alps. For 36 consecutive months I spent at least one week in the wild. During the winter months I back country skied into my research site.

The array of critters that I encountered during my visits were phenomenal including large awkward flying lyre birds, bounding rock wallabies and deadly king copper snakes. The most intriguing creatures I’ve ever encountered and had the pleasure of observing were wombats.

Wombats are large burrowing, massive flat skulled herbivores. They have short powerful front claws and they excel at digging. At 3.3 feet long and 4.3 feet high this 77-pound tunneler has been rightfully likened to the “hobbit” of the Australian forest.

Though they may appear at first glance to be cumbersome these beasts can accomplish feats greater than Cirque du Soleil performers. For instance, they are able to flatten their bodies within 4 inches of the ground. Also, they can attain speeds of 25 miles per hour and maintain it for 164 yards. Wombats are excellent swimmers and strong wrestlers.

They have thick hides with a one-centimeter layer of skin and a plate of bone muscle and cartilage on their backs. In their burrow they can squeeze under and intruder entering their tunnel and slam them against the roof.

There are three species of wombats. The bare-nosed or common wombat of southeastern Australia has a population of about one million. The southern hairy-nosed species of south Australia has a stable population of about 300,000. The largest species weighing a whopping 88 pounds is the northern hairy-nosed of Queensland. They are the rarest animal in Australia and may be the rarest mammal in the world.

Wombats have incredibly efficient metabolism as recorded by the lowest plasma concentration of thyroid hormones of any mammal. They are low-intake feeders, three times more efficient than kangaroos.

The key to wombat digestion is a very slow fermentation of starches and proteins from fungi, roots and grasses that are absorbed by the stomach and small intestines. A bacterium in their gut ferments the vegetation extracting every last drop of energy. The process may take several weeks.

Wombat pooh is the driest of any mammal because they are the most efficient consumer of water that mammalian evolution has produced.

Wombats have complex brains with intelligence equal to that of primates.

Wombats are marsupials and except during breeding they are solitary critters. Marsupials give birth to live young – essentially a fetus – that develops inside the mothers pouch. Wombats usually give birth to one offspring, rarely two, after one month of gestation. The young pup is about the size of a jelly-bean weighing five grams. About eight months later they leave the pouch weighing 4.4 pounds. By the time they reach two years a common wombat can weigh 49 pounds. They can live at least 15 years in the wild.

Interestingly, marsupials are a later evolutionary development than the placental mammals, because they can discard their fetuses at any time. Wombat-like creatures, possums and kangaroos date back to 35 million years.

Fossilized teeth of wombats show that over the last 25 million years that they adapted from a once lush rainforest continent to its present day aridity. The crowns of wombat teeth have become higher and higher over time until their roots finally disappeared.

The onset of desertification from ice ages replaced forests with grasslands. Today, their 24 rootless ever-growing teeth are specially designed to grind low-grade vegetation. In addition, wombats possess split lips which enable them to pick choice green stems off the ground.

Specialized teeth have enabled this large herbivore to live underground in burrows. It evolved to burrow in order to escape the heat; below ground burrows are cooler. In the winter the reverse is true.

Above 4,921 feet on Mt. Stirling snow cover can stick around for up to three months each year. Soil temperatures never freeze, and as a matter of fact, 3 feet beneath the surface is much warmer than the snow covered ground surface.

Every two or three days in the winter a wombat will leave its tunnel and venture into the snow. One of my most memorable moments on Mt. Stirling occurred in the winter of 1995. There was 3 feet of snow on the ground and I witnessed a mother wombat piggy-backing her young.

Wombat tunnels can extend for 66 feet horizontally under the ground and they mimic the pattern of tree roots in their branching configuration.

During the last Ice Age – the Pleistocene – fossils from the Gregory River in Riversleigh, Queensland showed that one species of wombat reached an astounding weight of 551 pounds. I cannot even begin to imagine the size of its burrows.

Wombats are survivors and therefore they have thrived in Australia for millions of years. They have endured ice ages and prolonged aridity on the driest continent on Earth. They are water conservationists extraordinaire. And with climate disruption that is an important adaptation especially since Australia experiences extreme drought (i.e. from 1998-2009).

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

Story ran in Huffington Post Dec 6, 2011

More than a half a century ago one of the most recognized scientists and arguably brightest mind ever – Dr. Albert Einstein said, “Our task is to widen our circle of compassion beyond a few people to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” To encompass this Einstein loved the beauty of bees.

Of the more than 1.6 million known forms of life on our home — planet Earth, bees truly are the “golden-hair” pollinator partners that have been entrusted with sustaining life on land.

Consider that at least 20,000 but perhaps as many as 40,000 species of solitary, stingless, bumble and honeybees quietly have gone about enriching the tapestry of life for over 100 million years.

Our early ancestors perhaps as far back as the Old Stone Age, millions of years ago, and certainly in the Middle Stone Age (beginning around 280,000 years ago) revered the bees and sought their honey because it’s the sweetest natural substance that nature has to offer.

Drawings carved into rock-walls, called petroglyphs, in almost 400 sites in 17 regions — including Europe, North and South Africa, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia recorded the cherished “honey-hunts” in spectacular details.

I’m constantly encouraging my students to travel. For those privileged enough to have visited any of the honey-hunting petroglyphs — there is an incredible energy and mysticism that’s exuded through this art. Researchers hypothesize that some honey-hunters were actually clan shaman, reputed to have supernatural powers.

Throughout the ages people have been fascinated with bees and for many good reasons.

Take for example a honeybee hive. It’s a city of about 100,000, mostly females, governed by a queen, who runs a very tight and highly profitable food service industry with zero unemployment amongst workers.

The industry begins before sunrise and continues to operate seamlessly until well after sunset. Like any one of our human industrial operations, honeybees work with up-to-date information. Bees, unlike humans, are able to quickly change their production lines and in a matter of minutes, tens of thousands of worker bees update their memory banks and immediately begin new tasks — all for the common good of the city or hive.

I suspect that William Shakespeare spent many hours watching honeybees around Stratford-upon-Avon for he, too, was intrigued with them and wrote about bees in Henry V: “For so work the honeybees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”

And it turns out, each year, that not only do honeybees give humans 2.65 billion pounds of honey; 44 million pounds of beeswax (for which the Roman Catholic Church uses 3.1 million pounds in candles); cotton to cloth us; powerful bee venom or apis drugs that offer relief to those suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia and tendonitis; but also of the 100 crop species providing 90 percent of the world’s food — about 74 percent are pollinated by bees.

Bumblebees are two to three times bigger than honeybees, visit two to three times more flowers than their smaller brethren, resulting in 16 hour works days, seven days a week. In fact, helicopters mimic the same aerodynamic principles used by bumblebees to lift-off and fly. Helicopters use reverse-pitch semi-rotary blades. Each time bumblebee’s wings swing back and forth (one oscillation cycle), a type of cavity or vacuum is produced in the air above the wing. This cavity provides extra lift for the large bumblebee and her heavy payload of pollen, nectar, water or tree resin.

Bumblebees are helping humans solve the age-old question that the traveling salesman constantly grapples with: how to find the shortest path that allows him to visit all locations along his route. Although their brains may be the size of a pinhead, bumblebees clearly show advanced cognitive capacities with very few neurons.

Today we are one step closer to understanding how bumblebee brains work because of ground breaking research conducted by 28 British schoolchildren aged 8 to 10 who discovered that buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) use a combination of colors and spatial relationships in deciding which color of flower to forage from.

The facts are that bees and humans share a number of remarkable similarities: we both like sleep, enjoy nicotine, cocaine, perfume, voting; and as we age — our memories begin to fade.

The honeybee hive is a superlative architectural masterpiece. It takes 66,000 bee hours of activity to produce 77,000 splendid hexagonal cells that form the comb of the hive. It takes about 20 pounds of honey for young worker bees to produce 2.2 pounds of beeswax. Bees eat the honey and trigger a gland in their abdomen to secrete wax. That 2.2 pounds of beeswax is then magnificently engineered into chambers, back-to-back, at exactly a 13-degree angle to prevent 48 pounds of honey from dripping out.

Many decades ago, the aeronautics industry recognized the phenomenal strength of the honeycomb and adapted nature’s flawless honeybee design to enhance the bending and stiffness of all aircraft wings, as the wings support heavy fuel loads in the aircrafts.

Nobel laureate Dr. Karl von Frisch (1886-1982) dedicated his life to unraveling the many mysteries of the honeybee. The bee waggle-dance is indeed one of the most extraordinary forms of communication in the entire animal kingdom. This dance conveys precise information about the food’s location, including its direction and distance from the hive — as far as 8 miles away.

There are, very thankfully, at least two known healthy populations of honeybees in remote locations on our home — planet Earth. They remain disease-free, offering new genetic traits to bolster our beleaguered, worldwide, bee populations against the toxic world we have inadvertently created. One population was recently located in Libya’s Kufra Oasis and the other exists on the least populated and most remote jurisdiction in the world, the Pitcairn Islands.

Please support your local beekeepers; Google them and buy their honey — it’s an excellent, practical holiday gift.

In these very troubling times that we are living-in; let’s all take a moment, drift back to 1928, smile and dance with Cole Porter’s mellifluous lyrics… “Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it, let’s fall in love!”

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

The most remarkable aspect of nature is how organisms have carved out an existence in the harshest of environments.

Plants, as an example, have adapted to live in soggy and sometimes perpetually saturated soils and ponds that are extremely acidic, very nutrient poor but with lots of bugs buzzing around. They still survive, like all other green plants, from the sun’s energy. But they’ve also learned to supplement nutrient deficient soil from an unusual source: Welcome to the world of green plants that eat ants, grasshoppers, slugs, spiders, mosquitoes, flies and even green tree frogs. These are carnivorous plants!

Carnivorous plants have generally weak and small root systems because they have specialized – and costly – traps that lure and digest their animal prey. They are perennial, shade intolerant plants that live for at least two years and require a cool winter dormancy period. They don’t tolerate competition and require frequent low temperature fires to burn off dead and dried plant materials, reduce competition and promote seed germination.

Carnivorous plants live in bogs or places in the forest with wet spongy ground often consisting of sphagnum moss and other decomposing vegetation that forms peat. They also live in fens that are flat open sand-based expanses covered with a thin layer of peat with shallow water imperceptibly flowing.

So how exactly do carnivorous plants lure, trap and digest their prey? They produce beautiful flowers that are mellifluous and full of nectar or a sweat fructose sugar that’s referred to as “the junk food of the plant kingdom.”

The traps are quite attractive and, in fact, can be confused by some as flowers. There are four kinds of traps: closing, suction, adhesive and pitfalls traps.

The Venus flytrap is an example of the closing trap and called by Darwin “the most wonderful plant in the world.” Its leaf blade is modified into two parts or lobes that look like a book open at a 45-degree angle. It relies on specialized plant hairs, usually three per lobe, located on the interior surface of the trap to detect its prey. If the prey brushes against the hairs normally nothing happens (unless air temperatures are very high then it snaps shut). If the prey brushes the hair again or touches another hair within 20 to 40 seconds of the first contact, the trap will snap quickly closed.

The Venus flytrap can only be opened and closed about nine times per day. It’s a trigger sensitive trap that will not be activated by either a drop of rain, a blowing plant fragment or a prey that has escaped.

Bladderworts use a suction trap taking advantage of their aquatic habitat. The bladder or trap is a bag-like structure, a few millimeters wide, with an opening or trap door at one end.  When the trap is set it pinches inward and contains a negative pressure – much like squeezing the bulb of an eyedropper. There are sensory hairs protruding from the trap door. When an unsuspecting water animal swims by it stimulates a trigger hair, the trapdoor opens inward and the negative interior pressure sucks the helpless prey in as the door closes. This happens so quickly that modern science has yet to accurately measure it.

Sundews and butterworts use adhesive traps. They produce gooey droplets that glisten in the backlighting sun and entangled the prey. Once entrapped the sundew leaf blades slowly fold inward to the centre of the leaf. The flat leaves of the butterworts, on the other hand, curl on the margins to form a shallow bowl. It takes from 30 minutes to a couple of hours for the adhesive leaves to fold or curl.

Pitcher plants are the largest of the green-leafed carnivores and they use pitfall traps. At the tip of most pitcher plants is a flattened to slightly curved, flap-like structure called a lid or hood. Beneath the hood the waxy neck is lined with stout downward pointing hairs. The neck or tube funnels into a narrow base at its bottom containing a primordial broth to digest its prey. As an insect stretches down into the pitcher in search of more rich nectar it slips and tumbles to its demise.

Bumblebees, however, are able to move in and out freely from the pitcher plants and gorge on nectar as they are important pollinators. Green tree frogs and yellowish green crab spiders hang just inside the pitcher rim and partake in some of the incoming prey. They don’t harm the pitcher but occasionally a frog slips in and becomes a large nutritious meal for the plant. There is some mosquito larva that can actually live in the pitchers digestive juices! The adults enter and exit the pitcher by walking the funneled tube with specially adapted non-slip footpads.

Insects and other small animals are packed with protein and very effective at promoting growth of carnivorous plants. Once the prey is captured, special glands in the leaves release a watery solution made up of fast acting proteins that are able to dissolved the hard outer surface or exoskeleton of insects. The glands also absorb the digestive nutrients and carry them throughout the plants vascular system (just like veins in the human body).

It takes a Venus flytrap about four days to digest its prey and about another four days before it reopens. Each of its traps are capable of three to four digestive cycles in its lifetime.

Habitat destruction, fire suppression policies, introduction of exotic plants and mass illegal collection for commercial-use have all had a disastrous affect on native carnivorous plants.

Carnivorous plants and their extensive habitat in the north country are indeed worthy of protection. Over the past 65 years, Ducks Unlimited has protected and conserved many waterways including magnificent bogs and fens that are home to many carnivorous plants.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Bees helping humankind

Save our Florida corals

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Incomparable Honeybee and The Insatiable Bark Beetle

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

North Hollywood grade 4 student

Story ran in the Santa Monica Daily Press November 17, 2009

Known by different names including phantom cat, cougar, panther and puma, this extraordinary furtive feline is not only at the top of the food chain but is the most perfect hunter to walk the earth. Mountain lions are feared,with good reason, by all prey. They are loathed by farmers and ranchers.

From its small head to the distinct black tip of its tail, a male measures 11 feet long and weighs an average 225 pounds. The ancient Amazonian Tupi tribe dubbed this cat “the false deer” recognizing that this predator blended so completely into its environment with its tawny brown coat. Its eyes and forehead have black markings; its throat and chest are white and its long tail is as thick as a man’s wrist.

Since the last glacial period, this beauty of a beast had the largest range of any animal in the Western Hemisphere. The closest related kin of the mountain lion is the cheetah. Whether it came across the Bering Land Strait or evolved in South America is still debated. All but gone now in the eastern United States, except for a dwindling number of Floridian panthers, it has retreated to the forests of the West extending from the northern Rocky and Coastal Mountains into Mexico and as far south as South America.

The mountain lion depends on forest cover and will deliberately avoid openings, meadows and clearcuts. They are nocturnal, highly secretive, elusive and, contrary to popular belief, rarely seen in the wild. Special adaptations in the eyes enable it to see up to six times better than a human in the dark. And a thin membrane at the back of the eye boosts night vision and gives this animal an eerie mirrored greenish shine when light is shone into its eyes.

They cannot focus well in the dark at close range. Front whiskers, usually 24, combine with bristly hairs on their paws to help them feel their way in the dark by sense of touch and by movement of air currents. Specialized and sensitive ears enable them to hear both high and low frequencies and swivel their ears around with the assistance of some 30 different muscles.

So what makes this puma such a fearsome, lethal hunter? It is the awesome combination of sinewy muscles which enable it to spring 30 feet ahead and 18 feet in the air, sledgehammer front paws with retractable switchblade claws, a muzzle with an enormous grasp and teeth that slice and dice better than any butcher’s knife.

Mountain lions are solitary. Their muscular spines lack ligaments and so they are able to slink low to the ground and stealthily hunt their prey. Their preferred prey are mule deer, though elk and moose also comprise a large component of their diet.

No other predator on this planet can take down prey that is eight times larger than itself. Mountain lions routinely sneak-up on their unlucky and unwary prey and pounce. Eight out of 10 times they are successful! Their teeth instinctively pierce the jugular, razor sharp claws rip open the windpipe and powerful front paws pull back the head until the neck snaps.

Mountain lions mate at any time during the year. Males are polygamous. Females are excellent single mums. The mating ritual and copulation can last up to 16 hours! Numerous copulations are necessary to induce ovulation and an unfit male would lack stamina to mate for an entire day. Soon after mating, females chase males away, for males are none to eat young kittens.

When the spotted kittens are born about 90 days later, one to five per litter, they are blind until ten days after birth. Kittens stay with mothers for up to 18 months while they learn the fine art of hunting. A mountain lion does not reach its full size until its fourth year.

The best cougar territory may hold one cat per two square miles. And while a cat may prowl up to 20 miles a day, usually it ranges from one to five miles a day. Males have a home range of up to 500 square miles and are very territorial.

More people are killed by lightning each year than mountain lion fatalities total over the past 100 years. If mountain lions encounter domestic stock they will kill dozens of animals. This is because in nature it’s feast or famine; and when prey is plentiful, instinctively a hunter will kill.

A mountain lion can pack away 18 pounds of meat in a sitting. On average over a winter they will eat about 13 pounds a day, which translates into a deer, elk or moose every seven to 10 days.

A mountain lion needs wilderness. Scientific understanding of this beast is limited and, therefore, it is very difficult to manage.

A house cat and a mountain lion have much in common, with size being the main difference. Wild cats are exposed to the same diseases as are humans but have developed a resistance to them through genetic solutions.

Policy-makers need to safe guard the existence of the truly mysterious mountain lions. They are crucially important in keeping a healthy balance of big game deer, elk and moose populations. They hold the genetic answers to solving many human diseases and, perhaps, ultimately the destiny of our species.
Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Bees helping humankind

Save our Florida corals

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Incomparable Honeybee and The Insatiable Bark Beetle

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

Story ran in The Santa Monica Daily Press Jan 26, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I began preparing for my spring classes. At roughly the same time several students approached me and wanted to know more about our incredible honeybees.

After the conversation ended, a few hours later, I thought about jotting down what was said. The following is the abridged version.

The more scientists find out about how life’s rich tapestry works — and that each critter has such a crucial role to play — the more we are convinced that all life-forms share a number of similarities. It’s truly uncanny.

Take for example humans and honeybees: we are quite similar in a number of ways. We both share addiction and rage management issues. Bees and humans just can’t seem to get enough caffeine, nicotine or cocaine; once we start the euphoric “give-me-more” insatiable gene dominates our habits.

It also turns out that both angry humans (mostly males) and worker honeybees (exclusively females) head-butt one another. In the case of the honeybees, when the hive is under attack bees stop their sexy waggle dance for a tenth of a second and vibrate 380 times a second. Vibrations are accompanied by head-butting fellow workers, which we now know conveys that the hive is under siege.

Over the past four years a quarter of a trillion honeybees have died prematurely on our home, planet Earth. Clearly something is terribly wrong here.

In so many different ways the bees are acting as nature’s canaries in coal mines. Of the 100 crop species providing 90 percent of the world’s food — about 74 percent are pollinated by bees. The bees are the first critters to touch and help make our food; they are getting sick around the globe. As a matter of fact, in March of 2011 the United Nations issued a warning that mass bee deaths signal the writing on the wall for global food security.

The list of bee-caused deaths includes the collision of the following factors: neonictinoid insecticides, climate change, air pollution, introduced mites, bacteria, fungi, bee husbandry, exposure to high frequency cellular radiation and the latest discovery of parasitic flies.

When any organism’s autoimmune system is significantly compromised, not dissimilar to humans afflicted with AIDS, it becomes highly susceptible to a number of potential new ailments including parasites. In the case of our beleaguered honeybees the latter appears to be applicable.

Excellent work from the University of San Francisco recently showed that parasitic flies latch onto honeybees causing them to become disoriented and exhibit “zombie-like” behavior. Bees are social creatures and when they get sick they will not go home. Honeybees carry a selfless gene that sacrifices an individual to safeguard the entire colony.

The Santa Monica City Council is to be congratulated for allowing urban beekeepers the privilege of keeping hives in our city.

There’s a tremendous amount each of us can do to help urban bees. This spring I suggest planting native yellow and blue flowers in large patches. Please do not use any herbicides, insecticides, miticides or fungicides in your garden. Also, as the weather gets warmer place a bowl of water in the garden for the bees; they, too, need fresh water. Replenish that water bowl, daily.

Recently an investigative story I wrote was picked up by the Wall Street Journal because it had an important message about honey and our national food security in the U.S.

The Chinese are the biggest honey producers on the globe and they have begun in earnest to micro-filter hundreds of millions of pounds of honey, essentially removing the country of origin or the honey’s fingerprint, making it impossible to trace. China continues to use banned carcinogenic poisons on their crops. In 2002, 154,000 pounds of Chinese honey contaminated with chloramphenicol (which causes bone marrow failure) turned up in our grocery stores, unknowingly.

In America, we import at least 150 million pounds of honey and consume over 330 million pounds of honey, annually. It’s baked into everything from breakfast cereals to cookies and mixed into sauces, beverages, processed foods and even cough drops.

Protect your family, support local beekeepers by purchasing their honey. In Santa Monica we have a splendid Farmers’ Market — buy your honey locally.

Lastly, I strongly advise you to consider planting both vegetables and fruit-bearing trees this springtime. Our urban bees need healthy sources of nectar and pollen; and we need the bountiful produce that bees miraculously create.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Bees helping humankind

Save our Florida corals

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Incomparable Honeybee and The Insatiable Bark Beetle

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.

The mighty oak is truly a remarkable tree. Oaks have sustained humans for more than six thousand years. Oaks have often been referred to as: generous, hospitable, scholarly, surveyors and long-lived.

From Vancouver to Caracas, from Miami to Dublin, from Lisbon to Jakarta and from Seoul to Tokyo there are about 425 species of oaks. Their lineage dates back some 65 million years. They are genetically rich and an incredibly flexible genus surviving geologic upheavals and many climate changes.

Oaks can tolerate fire, the onslaught of repeated insect infestations and prolonged periods of drought. And some oaks can live well past one thousand years. Within the life of an average oak tree it will grow over three million acorns – its seeds. A mature tree will support over 500 million living root tips.

Some oaks are deciduous while others are evergreen. They rely upon wind not insects or birds to spread their pollen – an ancient characteristic more common to the conifers rather than the angiosperms.

Oaks and jays have evolved together. These birds depend upon acorns as a food source. They cache them throughout the forest. Oaks depend upon jays to disseminate their seeds. Those acorns that aren’t eaten eventually become trees.

A mature oak tree can grow 121 feet (37 meters) tall supporting a crown 121 feet (37 meters) wide and provide habitat for over five thousand different species of plants, animals, insects, fungus and bacteria. Including 40 species of wasps – cynipines – that create ping-pong ball-sized growths or galls on oak branches. These wasps have been associated with oaks for the past 30 million years.

Six thousand years ago foresters discovered that when an oak is felled its root system responds by shooting up four or sometimes six new trees from the base of the cut stump. This form of natural regeneration is called coppice. Every five to 25 years it yields a new crop of trees.

The founding forestry textbook “Sylva” was written by John Evelyn in 1664 and it focused on oak trees. Essentially, foresters were trained to be in tune with the health and shape of trees just as a physician is to that of the human body.

For thousands of years people and cultures have depended upon oaks and its acorns as their staple food source. In Tunisia oak means meal-bearing tree. From Iraq to Korea to the Native Americans of California they all collected acorns, soaked them, mashed them and made cakes or soups. One mature white oak tree can throw between 302 to 500 pounds (137 to 227 kilograms) of acorns per year. Records from the early twentieth century show that Iraqis consumed more than 30 tons (27 tonnes) of this cake each year.

Human beings learned from the woods around them. Oak forests made: roadways, frames, doors, palisades, barrels, coffins, henges, boats, tanning and ink.

Fire made human civilization possible. Charcoal – lumps of almost pure carbon – was the fuel that ended the Stone Age enabling the smelting of bronze found in iron. Charcoal is smokeless, it burns more efficiently and it burns hotter. It took, however, 8 pounds (3.6 kilograms) of oak to make 1 pound (0.45 kilograms) of charcoal; an eight to one ratio.

The role of oak was pivotal in boat building. The Vikings and their legendary long-ships were the finest, sleekest crafts ever created. Whether sailing of rowing these boats carrying 40 tons (36 tonnes) were able to arrive on foreign shores unheralded.

Later, Western European countries built huge oak boats weighing the equivalent of a 40-roomed wooden mansion. They could carry 397 tons (360 tonnes) of cargo. Those boats required wood from at least 62 acres (25 hectares) of mature oak forests.

The greatest work of art from the European Middle Ages was the 600 tons of oak that framed the roof of Westminster Hall. Architects, engineers and scholars marvel at Hugh Herland’s use of joints, scarfs and mortise-and-tenon joints in the post, beams and arches created for King Richard II in 1397 AD.

Ink derived from oak galls was used by Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks, by Bach in his scores and by van Gogh in his drawings.

Today oak is used by mankind for furniture, flooring, timber frames, basketry; and the nose of every space shuttle is coated with cork, from the bark of the cork-oak tree, because it provides unparalleled heat resistant protection for the shuttle’s re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere.

The compliment “you have a heart of an oak” is a splendid tribute to this exquisite genus of trees.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Save the Oceans

Oceans Dying

Economy Subservient to the Environment

Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest books are The Insatiable Bark Beetle and The Incomparable Honeybee

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2012. All rights reserved.