I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.
Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey ( duh ). But they are more useful than just that: people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them. If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops.
There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications.
What are you proposing exactly? We stand back and lose all of our biodiversity because we have to pay a few conservationists 1/5 of a mediocre SAAS CEO's salary? Give me a break.
Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves. "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money."
And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?
> I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.
FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem, they were imported from europe. They are likely important if not critical to the pollination of several cash crops, but they're not an ecosystem concern in and of themselves.
However giant asian hornets are rather indiscriminate in their hunting, in fact their main prey in japan are large insects like mantises (as well as other hornets). GAH taking root in the US would be an unmitigated disaster all around, not just for beekeeping.
I cannot agree more. If i could upvote twice i would.
We are loosing biodiversity at a rate comparable to the last mass extinctions, we are loosing our "life support systems" as climate/biodiv. experts say, yet no one is concerned.
This is beyond the worst i ever expected in my worst nightmares. And this is happening now.
And no one says a world. No one even dare spending 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.
If we go extinct (with 95% of the other species first) it will be well deserved.
> You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.
At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.
>I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking".
Technical audiences usually go with the "technology, right or wrong" angle (as nationalists go with "my country, right or wrong").
It's more about identity validation and peer group thinking than critical and systems thinking. Plus they're into technology because they disproportionally like, glorify, and are attracted by tech in the first place.
What is this strawman that you are attacking even proposing? Since you’re not replying to anyone or even quoting it seems like a vague bogeyman that hates nature?
Yep, genetic diversity is a resource. It's painstakingly written natural code that solves various biological problems. We're just now getting to the point where we can start to understand this massive legacy codebase that creates the biosphere, and it's like we're just deleting huge swathes of it without analyzing it because we want more space to store cat jpgs or something stupid like that. So goddamned shortsighted.
Reminds me of an old adage I heard in high school: If you take the frogs out of the environment, you don't have the same environment minus frogs, you have an entirely new ecosystem.
What does this have to do with an invasive species? Do you assume that we allow Murder Hornets to spread and displace multiple native species? I'm confused about the intent of your post.
Remember, a lot of people on this forum hate their own biological heritage and want to "upload their memories" into silicon super-computing chips and seek to escape the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The biological world and interdependence are repugnant to them. They are wannabee versions of Skynet essentially.
I completely agree with what you're saying here, but I'm going to just discuss one thing that you said:
> "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."
I don't think that's the case. I think you're giving humanity too much credit. If humanity kills itself from overpopulation and overconsumption, the earth will do just fine without us. Even if we harm it as badly as we did with something like the Chernobyl disaster (look how it has bounced back there).
We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history and billions of years from now we may not be here, but the earth probably will be.
In general, I find people, probably due to the sheer difference in timescale that is beyond palpable understanding, to appreciate that our collective environmental impact precludes other species the evolutionary time to adapt to our impact and to fill gaps in "species web" to fill all the extinctions that are occurring.
Mass extinctions in the past were over a timescale of thousands of years, so there was some time for evolutionary "computation" to adapt.
Human mass extinction is occurring on the timescale of decades.
Just to add on this, pollinators cannot replace each others. Some plants can only be pollinated by specific species, like red clover and bumblebees in the uk.
This is in no way a rebuttal to your points, but merely out of interest: how does pollination by honey bee work in countries where the hornets are endemic?
I'd recommend this book, it explains a few interactions between species of animals / insects / plants and shows how everything is more of less connected in ways we can't imagine
Nature is full of pollinators. The reason we need to carry around bees to pollinate crops is because we have dedicated vast areas to monocultures where no insect diversity can be established. They become diversity deserts. So a known and tried solution: mixed crops, crop rotation, and insect oasis. We keep paying in environmental health so our food is cheaper and easier to produce. That needs to end.
Calorie crops mostly self pollinate or similar (wheat, corn, soy, etc). Bees don't matter there.
For things like apples, it's actually affordable to pay humans to do it. Which is not to say that bee's aren't better than humans in most ways, just that it doesn't come down to 'no options'.
And like other people are saying, honeybees are livestock, they aren't 'nature'.
Ya. Cognitive dissonance. Humankind has full agency (dominion) with an utter refusal to even acknowledge consequences, much less accept responsibility.
"Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections."
Yup.
In the Anthropocene, we are the gardeners. Laissez faire is a terrible gardening strategy.
There is no safe harbor. We will always need nature to sustain ourselves.
We are nature, full stop. But if you include our digestive tracts, that fact is inescapable. We are a sentient bioreactors. I’m thinking we can destroy nature and keep going is suicide.
> And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?
I generally agree, but could you further define what Nature means to you? especially when you say "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."
The problem is that people think environmentalism is about preserving the environment. The planet's gonna be fine, it's humans who are gonna have a bad time.
Bee careful when talking about wiping out invasive species. Honeybees aren't native to north america. Nor are the majority of crops that they pollinate. "Invasive", by government definition, means not just foreign but also economically dangerous. Conversely, screwworm is native but we chose to wipe that species from north american because it was economically dangerous. I haven't heard anyone talk of allowing it back.
I’m a beekeeper and every passing year it becomes harder to keep my colonies alive. I’m really glad that we’re taking this threat seriously, because we don’t need one more problem on our list of things that kill our bees.
While I’m at it, please allow me to remind everyone that there are thousands of solitary bee species in the world. They are the ones that go extinct or in real danger compared to our honey bees. There are many struggling beekeepers like me in the world, and we’re doing our best to keep our bees alive. But thousands of species are without keepers and they are dying. Please be gentle to the nature. Let them live.
It makes me a little nauseous to think about all the resources going to tracking down these insects, but this is truly an area where an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure.
The scope of North America's invasive species problem is enormous. For many folks in urban areas, it's possible that you might go your whole day only encountering one native bird species (American Crow), but a whole host of invasive species (Rock Pigeon, House Sparrows, European Starlings).
‘All the resources’ make you nauseous? Seems like a weird reaction.
Washington State department of agriculture’s budget is public information; they spend about a quarter of a billion dollars a year on all their programs. I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend. According to the captions of those photographs, they have entomologists and pest control specialists on staff already. Salaries are also public. Sven Spichinger, shown in one of those pictures, Managing Entomologist, is on $87,000 a year - whether he’s hunting for murder hornets or not, presumably. There are three different levels of ‘Pest Biologist’ job in the department. It kind of looks like this is a project that is taking up the time of a few people who they already had on staff, to deal with exactly this kind of problem.
Does all government spending make you nauseous, or only when it’s visibly helping?
Is there any evidence of such attempts to neuter Mother Nature actually working? Unless, global trade ceases, can this effort be maintained and successful over the long haul?
I'm not suggesting it's bad or wrong to try, only whether there's evidence that the odds favor doing so.
I've never had to deal with a murder hornet infestation, but I can approve of their 'vacuum' method for clearing yellowjacket nests in high-traffic areas.
Partially fill a shop vac with soapy water, stick the nozzle as close to the nest entrance as possible, then turn on the vacuum and hear the wasps get sucked into the machine as they try to enter or exit the nest. It takes a few hours, and potentially a couple of separate sessions to mop up any stragglers.
No fancy beekeeper suit necessary, and, best of all, no need to spread nasty poisons.
> trapping and using dental floss to tie tracking devices to the hornets
What? That seems crazy (and cool) to be able to create a tracking device light enough for a hornet to fly and still have enough battery to transmit even a periodic chirp.
Those protective suits look like something from a science fiction work. It even looks like a cell shaded rendering at second glance. I guess these hornets earned their title.
Blaine Washington is right along the Canadian border and next to many islands. The islands are sparsely inhabited and infrequently visited by humans it makes me wonder if maybe there is still a colony out there. It seems like a difficult area to do containment so glad they tracked these down.
It looks like in 2019 Vancouver island (which is huge) had a colony get eradicated, but otherwise haven't seen much else reported.
Murder hornets are a real threat to honey bee hives. A handful of hornets can take out a hive of thousands.
What's interesting is the way that honey bees defend against them. A bunch of bees surround each hornet, then they intensify the flapping of their wings, which then generates enough heat to kill the hornet. In other words, the hornets are cooked alive.
In the Pacific Northwest, we have a couple other slow moving ecological train wrecks. The first is the himalayan blackberry, an invasive species that kills everything else and completely dominates where it has taken root. It grows everywhere.
A similar story for the scotch broom. And the english ivy, which is killing the trees.
All of these are everywhere and very difficult to kill.
1994: We'll need airtight space suits for an Ebola outbreak.
2020: Surgical masks are a bit much to expect people to wear during a pandemic, Ebola has been circulating in Congo since 2014, and we'll need airtight space suits for a murder hornet outbreak.
I was kayaking on the John Day river in northern central Oregon in 2017 and ran into a moderately sized swarm of these hornets crawling on the mud eating other bugs. Definitely been well over two years since they showed up in that part of Oregon.
I wonder why they didn't use an insecticide on the nest. The exterminator I hired used a powder on the entry to our attic and the Yellowjackets carried it into the nest and it wiped out the whole thing brilliantly (and we sealed the hole). A targeted application would require very little product. With a powder, it would also kill any insects that got away, and it could trace/damage other nests if the hornet moved to another colony. It seems to me a vacuum would be less thorough, and I would think they'd want to be very thorough in this instance, maybe even to the point of doing both.
This is a good step and we should take this seriously, it can be done.
Did you know that the province of Alberta has no rats?
Literally. No. Rats.
It takes a serious, concerted and systematic effort but it can be done. [1]
Much like we're still not doing a very good job at COVID (i.e. still applying crude measures because it's all we can do right now whereas we could be taking cues from Taiwan etc.), we can 'get good' at these things with good leadership.
Humans create a problem, try to solve it with human effort, and either prolong the problem or create a bigger one. We try to kill starlings and yet they are still here, all we've done is waste time and resources murdering them. We try to kill japanese knotweed by pulling them out of the soil or by applying herbicide and the knotweed spreads further because it thrives in a disturbed environment. Asian longhorned beetle, gyspy moths, garlic mustard, etc. Whether plant or animal, it's all the same. All wasted efforts because we're collectively unable to think on the same timescale that nature does as it works to achieve equilibrium again after the disturbance.
[+] [-] honkycat|5 years ago|reply
Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey ( duh ). But they are more useful than just that: people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them. If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops.
There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications.
What are you proposing exactly? We stand back and lose all of our biodiversity because we have to pay a few conservationists 1/5 of a mediocre SAAS CEO's salary? Give me a break.
Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves. "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money."
And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?
[+] [-] masklinn|5 years ago|reply
FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem, they were imported from europe. They are likely important if not critical to the pollination of several cash crops, but they're not an ecosystem concern in and of themselves.
However giant asian hornets are rather indiscriminate in their hunting, in fact their main prey in japan are large insects like mantises (as well as other hornets). GAH taking root in the US would be an unmitigated disaster all around, not just for beekeeping.
[+] [-] immmmmm|5 years ago|reply
We are loosing biodiversity at a rate comparable to the last mass extinctions, we are loosing our "life support systems" as climate/biodiv. experts say, yet no one is concerned.
This is beyond the worst i ever expected in my worst nightmares. And this is happening now.
And no one says a world. No one even dare spending 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.
If we go extinct (with 95% of the other species first) it will be well deserved.
By the way, the science says that the dynamics are NOT in our favour: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|5 years ago|reply
At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.
[+] [-] coldtea|5 years ago|reply
Technical audiences usually go with the "technology, right or wrong" angle (as nationalists go with "my country, right or wrong").
It's more about identity validation and peer group thinking than critical and systems thinking. Plus they're into technology because they disproportionally like, glorify, and are attracted by tech in the first place.
[+] [-] kortilla|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notabee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinbreau|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x86_64Ubuntu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Santosh83|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|5 years ago|reply
We have honey bees in Japan. While I agree it will have huge implications, it’ll hardly be the last of them.
That said, I’d rather murder hornets go away everywhere.
[+] [-] milchek|5 years ago|reply
> "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."
I don't think that's the case. I think you're giving humanity too much credit. If humanity kills itself from overpopulation and overconsumption, the earth will do just fine without us. Even if we harm it as badly as we did with something like the Chernobyl disaster (look how it has bounced back there).
We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history and billions of years from now we may not be here, but the earth probably will be.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
Mass extinctions in the past were over a timescale of thousands of years, so there was some time for evolutionary "computation" to adapt.
Human mass extinction is occurring on the timescale of decades.
[+] [-] boudin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haberman|5 years ago|reply
What position do you mean? Your comment is not replying to anybody.
I don't see anybody in this thread who is arguing that we should do nothing.
[+] [-] gorgoiler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lm28469|5 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...
[+] [-] toper-centage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|5 years ago|reply
For things like apples, it's actually affordable to pay humans to do it. Which is not to say that bee's aren't better than humans in most ways, just that it doesn't come down to 'no options'.
And like other people are saying, honeybees are livestock, they aren't 'nature'.
[+] [-] abandonliberty|5 years ago|reply
https://www.wired.com/2014/05/will-we-still-have-fruit-if-be...
Wonder how the economics are now!
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
Ya. Cognitive dissonance. Humankind has full agency (dominion) with an utter refusal to even acknowledge consequences, much less accept responsibility.
"Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections."
Yup.
In the Anthropocene, we are the gardeners. Laissez faire is a terrible gardening strategy.
[+] [-] mykmallett|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
There is no safe harbor. We will always need nature to sustain ourselves.
We are nature, full stop. But if you include our digestive tracts, that fact is inescapable. We are a sentient bioreactors. I’m thinking we can destroy nature and keep going is suicide.
[+] [-] ganafagol|5 years ago|reply
Mars, apparently.
[+] [-] X6S1x6Okd1st|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teawrecks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yawz|5 years ago|reply
While I’m at it, please allow me to remind everyone that there are thousands of solitary bee species in the world. They are the ones that go extinct or in real danger compared to our honey bees. There are many struggling beekeepers like me in the world, and we’re doing our best to keep our bees alive. But thousands of species are without keepers and they are dying. Please be gentle to the nature. Let them live.
(Edit: wondering how you can help, here's what I humbly suggested below in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889023)
[+] [-] Exmoor|5 years ago|reply
The scope of North America's invasive species problem is enormous. For many folks in urban areas, it's possible that you might go your whole day only encountering one native bird species (American Crow), but a whole host of invasive species (Rock Pigeon, House Sparrows, European Starlings).
History shows that early, active intervention can pay enormous dividends. For example, Alberta remains the only area in North America without non-native rats due to a major interventions: https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...
[+] [-] jameshart|5 years ago|reply
Washington State department of agriculture’s budget is public information; they spend about a quarter of a billion dollars a year on all their programs. I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend. According to the captions of those photographs, they have entomologists and pest control specialists on staff already. Salaries are also public. Sven Spichinger, shown in one of those pictures, Managing Entomologist, is on $87,000 a year - whether he’s hunting for murder hornets or not, presumably. There are three different levels of ‘Pest Biologist’ job in the department. It kind of looks like this is a project that is taking up the time of a few people who they already had on staff, to deal with exactly this kind of problem.
Does all government spending make you nauseous, or only when it’s visibly helping?
[+] [-] fnbr|5 years ago|reply
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/657947826782505650/
I have no idea how accurate it is, of course.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|5 years ago|reply
I'm not suggesting it's bad or wrong to try, only whether there's evidence that the odds favor doing so.
[+] [-] johnghanks|5 years ago|reply
well that's a little dramatic
[+] [-] samcheng|5 years ago|reply
Partially fill a shop vac with soapy water, stick the nozzle as close to the nest entrance as possible, then turn on the vacuum and hear the wasps get sucked into the machine as they try to enter or exit the nest. It takes a few hours, and potentially a couple of separate sessions to mop up any stragglers.
No fancy beekeeper suit necessary, and, best of all, no need to spread nasty poisons.
[+] [-] sokoloff|5 years ago|reply
What? That seems crazy (and cool) to be able to create a tracking device light enough for a hornet to fly and still have enough battery to transmit even a periodic chirp.
[+] [-] Frost1x|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonplackett|5 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/EZ1eAM8CChc
30,000 bees killed by just 30 hornets in an hour or so. The bees just have no defence against them at all.
Brutal.
[+] [-] jessriedel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emcq|5 years ago|reply
It looks like in 2019 Vancouver island (which is huge) had a colony get eradicated, but otherwise haven't seen much else reported.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/asian-giant-hornets
[+] [-] doc_gunthrop|5 years ago|reply
What's interesting is the way that honey bees defend against them. A bunch of bees surround each hornet, then they intensify the flapping of their wings, which then generates enough heat to kill the hornet. In other words, the hornets are cooked alive.
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
A similar story for the scotch broom. And the english ivy, which is killing the trees.
All of these are everywhere and very difficult to kill.
[+] [-] ethbr0|5 years ago|reply
2020: Surgical masks are a bit much to expect people to wear during a pandemic, Ebola has been circulating in Congo since 2014, and we'll need airtight space suits for a murder hornet outbreak.
Truly, the 90s were a simpler time.
[+] [-] mrfusion|5 years ago|reply
Whatever happened with that? I haven’t heard about them in years.
[+] [-] SoSoRoCoCo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praptak|5 years ago|reply
Interesting. Why do they use red lamps?
[+] [-] whatsmyusername|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcurtiss|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
Did you know that the province of Alberta has no rats?
Literally. No. Rats.
It takes a serious, concerted and systematic effort but it can be done. [1]
Much like we're still not doing a very good job at COVID (i.e. still applying crude measures because it's all we can do right now whereas we could be taking cues from Taiwan etc.), we can 'get good' at these things with good leadership.
[1] https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...
[+] [-] davexunit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EricE|5 years ago|reply
His whole channel is also excellent.