Decomposition of trees represents a vital link in ensuring life for streams, rivers and oceans. In fact, the remarkable relationship between the land, its fresh waterways and tidal estuaries along the west coast of North America depends upon a constant source of big, dead trees.

Known as driftwood, the trunk, roots and large branches of dead trees form dams and pools, creating backwater areas along streams and rivers. Driftwood provides nutrients and becomes the foundation for biological activities that spread energy throughout the water, trapping newly-created sediments.

These big trees may topple along the stream bank due to undercutting. They might enter the waterway from areas of wind throw, along ridge tops, carried by landslides and massive stream erosion during major floods. Other trees are felled by beavers, adding thousands of tons of wood to coastal streams annually.

Once driftwood enters fresh water, fungus, bacteria and spineless insects called invertebrates go to work. They shred, gouge, scrape, graze, collect and even devour the decomposing wood. In the process, their fecal content feeds the sediment beneath the water’s surface. Larger insects like caddis and stone-flies eat wood infested with nitrogen-rich fungus. In turn, the streamside trout devour these flies.

Driftwood controls water flow, temperature and maintains trout and salmon egg-laying habitats, and habitat for survival of young fish. Pools are created by slowing currents which cause deep depressions to be formed along the banks. This provides secure habitat where fish are able to hide from predators. Deep pools allow different species as well as different ages of the same species to coexist. These pools are crucial over-wintering habitat for stream-residing fish. Driftwood creates critical diversity.

Every 20 years or so, a massive flood event relocates large amounts of driftwood downstream onto flood plains. The driftwood then becomes essential habitat for small mammals including dear mice, voles and chipmunks, and soon draws predators like weasels and minks. Mergansers, Harlequin ducks, spotted sandpipers and night hawks use the driftwood for nesting, while song sparrows, violet green swallows, robins and cedar waxwings use it for perches. Bald eagles and blue herons use it as feeding grounds.

Eventually driftwood moves once again to the mouth of the river where the ocean’s arm will meet it. Vast amounts of stored carbon — collectively called wood — is broken down and serves as the basis of the saline aquatic food pyramid.

There are two main ocean wood-borers that undertake this initial decomposition process. Gribbles are tiny and begin to overtake the driftwood by shear numbers. However, as the first wave of the invasion they are only able to penetrate a few millimeters into the driftwood. The second and final wave is undertaken by the gruesome shipworms, some of which can attain lengths in excess of 5 feet. Captain James Cook had good reason to demand that his crafts always had double hulls, for shipworms could easily plow through a single hull, as a hot knife going through butter.

Because shipworms bore to grow, much of the wood is not digested but rather flushed directly out of their tunnel as fecal pellets. These pellets serve as an important food source for flatworms, roundworms and predatory snails.

Larger mammals rely upon driftwood too. Harbor seals use it as rafts to climb out of the water and rest, while spotted skunks prefer to excavate their dens under large, buried and beached driftwood.

Much of the driftwood in the North Pacific remains inshore due to oscillating currents. However some large western red cedar, Sitka spruce and Douglas-fir enter the open ocean and the great North Pacific gyre, a vast circular vortex, which carries driftwood as far as the Hawaiian Islands, and beyond.

Driftwood at sea is heavily populated with plants and animals including the only known insect to successfully invade the open ocean — the ocean strider. It lacks wings so it alternately floats and skates on the surface of the sea and attaches its eggs to floating driftwood.

An individual piece of driftwood can have in excess of 100 species of invertebrates and some 130 species of fish are known to congregate on and around it. Having collected plankton and attached first small fish and then larger predatory fish, such as dorado and tunas, the combined weight of its associated tunas alone may reach as much as 94 tons. Although the tuna and other predatory fish deplete their available prey quickly, they move away, but use the driftwood as a point of reference and return to it.

Tuna time their migration to the North Pacific Continental Shelf for spawning to coincide with the onset of monsoon (December to March) rains. In turn, the resulting floods, carry new driftwood to the ocean arriving as the young tuna hatch from their eggs.

Over-harvesting of big trees and deliberate removal of large driftwood by harbor patrols has significantly reduced tuna habitat. Environmentally, what needs to be understood is that dead trees inexorably link the forest to the sea, sustaining thousands of unique species in many different ecosystems.

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor – http://drreese.com/resources/audio/2011_02_13-OckhamsRazor.mp3

Save the Corals http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX3hxjOnlXw

Earth Dr. Reese Halter is an award-winning Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology,  distinguished conservation biologist at Cal Lutheran University and public speaker.  His latest book is The Insatiable Bark Beetles http://www.amazon.com/Insatiable-Bark-Beetle-Reese-Halter/dp/1926855663/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1305661961&sr=8-6 Follow him:http://twitter.com/DrReeseHalter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2011. All rights reserved.

Plants contend with snow and cold winter temperatures with a variety of different strategies. Unlike some animals of the West, they cannot migrate to warmer environs.

Many herbaceous plants do the next best thing to migrating: they shed all of their above ground parts and seek a safe place to spend winter beneath the soil. Aspens, maples, birches, alders and other deciduous trees protect themselves from winter temperatures by dropping their leaves. Native conifers, except for larches, are evergreen and so they have internal functions or physiological adaptations that help them get through the winter months ahead.

The two most common stresses among trees and shrubs of the north country are the ability to withstand low temperatures and drying-up or desiccation.

In order to prepare for winter, leaves of Northern Hemisphere plants begin to recognize the diminishing length of daylight in August. Certain plant hormones are released to slow and then eventually stop all growth. The first frost of the autumn prepares woody plants for the impending onslaught of winter. In addition, plants experience a water stress which further prepares them for the chilly months ahead.

Trees are now able to deal with freezing temperatures and the controlled formation of ice. The exact location of ice within the tree is very important. Most of the cells within trees are non-living, because their role is to conduct water during the growing season and provide mechanical support or stability. There are, however, living cells within the roots, branches, trunk and evergreen needles which are very important for storing food and kick-starting spring growth. It’s these cells where the exact formation of ice is a life or death matter.

The initial formation of ice occurs outside the living plant cell in a small space within the cell wall. All the water that isn’t bonded to other molecules inside the cell is exported to the space in the cell wall. When ice forms in the cell wall it attracts water to its crystals. The living part of the cell is protected by an elastic cell membrane and the remaining cell sap can withstand temperatures as low as minus 67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 55 degrees Celsius). If, for any reason, the cell membrane becomes ruptured or if too much water is exported into the cell wall the cell sap will become toxic and the cell will die.

Exposed evergreen needles face the greatest water loss problems under bright sunshine and calm winter days. The needles are warmed to above-freezing temperatures and the air is dry, creating atmospheric suction or a call for water from its needles. The tree is faced with a problem: It’s loosing water in its winterized needles and must replace it.

The trunk being darker and warming above freezing like the needles is able to supply minimal amounts of stored water from the cell walls. This becomes a tricky balancing act. On a day such as this, trees prefer even the slightest of breeze, because that cools the leaf surface and prevents any moisture loss and subsequent demand for replacement water.

Heavy snow loads, particularly on the Coastal Pacific Northwest Mountains, can cause entire trees to bend. A 40-foot Pacific silver fir can accumulate a mass of snow and ice nearly 20 inches thick, weighing 6,600 pounds or more than 3 tons.

Exposed areas are subjected to blowing ice which can remove foliage or cause freezing injury and create deep pits eventually wearing away tree bark. Mountain winds, especially during the winter, shape trees and the treeline forests. Some high elevation trees actually resemble a broomstick with windswept branches and trunks with only a mop-head or cluster of foliage at their top.

Browsing activities of mammals create further winter-stress problems for plants.

Yet despite all the harsh winter environmental conditions, our coastal, subalpine, interior and northerly forests of western North America are hardy and able to live for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years, stoically facing months of winter.

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.

Saving the bees and helping students save our bees across the globe; a student testimonial from Quebec

Story ran in the Santa Monica Daily Press April 21, 2009

Dolphin’s (Delphinus spp.) are playful, affectionate, curious, intelligent, social, vocal and enjoy sex – especially after a big meal. Are they the creatures humans would have been had we not left the water?

Dolphin’s are aquatic, top-predator, mammals classified as a type of whale or cetacean. There are two types of cetaceans. Balean whales filter massive amounts of small oceanic organisms like krill with comb-like sieves in their mouths. Toothed whales, on the other hand, grab prey with their teeth. Dolphins and their mistaken twin, the porpoise, are a type of toothed whale. There are about 70 kinds of toothed whales of which there are about 45 species of dolphins, porpoises and false whales, like killer whales or orcas.

Dolphins are miraculously adapted to murky rivers, as in the Amazon River dolphin or boto, shallow coasts like Hector’s dolphins of New Zealand, or in groups of 10,000 bottlenose dolphins roaming the open oceans.

Like humans, dolphins are exceptionally tactile creatures and their skin conveys different levels of information or signals to each animal. Excellent sight enables them to see in the dark. Dolphin’s range of hearing is 10 times that of humans. Each animal has its own signature whistle, which is used to keep in contact with other individuals. Adult dolphins discipline their misbehaved juveniles by driving them to the ocean floor and momentarily holding them there.

So what makes the dolphin such an effective top-level predator? It’s their marvelous combination of intelligence, made-to-order radar system, adaptable hunting techniques and intensely powerful bursts of speed.

Dolphins are innovative when faced with a new, never-encountered circumstance. This goes beyond genetic programming of behavior. Innovation allows rapid assessment of a new situation and reactions to it. Dolphins clearly understand gestures similar to sign language that chimpanzees are also able to learn. Humans and dolphins appear to be the only known animals to spontaneously interpret images on a screen without prior teaching. Dolphin’s are capable of highly flexible behavior and therefore are considered intelligent.

Dolphins constantly send out noises called “click trains” which sound, to the untrained ear, like old creaky doors. These complex series of sounds are the most sophisticated advanced forms of sonar, called echolocation, unrivalled by anything on the planet – man made or otherwise. As the sonar waves move through water they encounter objects, bouncing back shapes and contents to be deciphered by the dolphin’s large brain (which is bigger than a human). Sometimes the sonar is so potent it actually stuns its prey.

Dolphins are able to quickly shift their food gather techniques by either hunting alone or in larger groups that herds shoals or bait balls of schooling fish. Killer whales, the largest of the dolphins, teach their young how to hunt sea lions, seals and porpoises by herding and then isolating them.

Dolphins, like ravens and ants, use tools to assist when foraging. For instance in Australia, bottlenose dolphins scourer the ocean bottom using echolocation and probing their nose or rostrum up to 30 inches into the floor. In order to protect their nose and face from spines and stingers they use a sponge while hunting for buried bottom-dwelling fish.

Most fish tend to move sideways like the sinuous movement of a snake. Dolphins and other whales move up and down as their strong bodies flex like a bounding deer. Incredible strength comes from their tail or fluke that is horizontal rather than vertical.

How is it possible for dolphins to sleep as much as one third of each day when their predators are always hunting them? They usually rest in groups that bunch tightly together. One lazy eye per dolphin remains open and, although asleep, slow methodical echolocatory clicks scan their environment for sharks and killer whales. The group essentially forms a sensory integration system each relying on the others sonar system to detect any trouble whilst they rest.

Scientists have been able to listen to cetaceans with special underwater sound equipment called hydrophones. And the renowned OrcaLab on Hanson Island in British Columbia’s Johnstone Strait has been studying intelligence 24/7 for the past 20 years. They record and track many pods off the west coast of Vancouver Island and know each killer whale by its signature whistle. These complex exquisite creatures share common fishing grounds, belly rubbing rituals on shallow pebble beaches, escort other pods through the strait and gather with an intricate timeless symphony of undecipherable dialects that plays underwater along the southwest coast of British Columbia.

Over fishing, marine and agricultural pollutions and plastic bags clogging intestines have all taken a deadly toll on dolphins. Still today some countries allow the use of 40 mile-long drift nets that senselessly kill all life in its wake including cetaceans.

For at the end of the day, wild dolphins, like all other animals on Earth – including humans, are just trying to make a living and survive.

It’s time that humans STOP desecrating Nature. Dolphins are turning up dead in the Gulf of Mexico from BPs Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 because the petroleum hasn’t disappeared rather it’s killing sea turtles and all forms of life. Enough is enough.

Are you a friend or foe of Nature?

It’s crystal clear which side I stand for – but what about you?

Australia, Radio 1, National: Ockham’s Razor

Oceans Dying

Bees helping humankind

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

Contact Earth Dr Reese Halter

Text © by Dr Reese Halter 2011. All rights reserved.

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.

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.