A Buzz in the Meadow

by Dave Goulson

  You might question whether this matters. If we never even knew they were there, who is to miss them? As the broadcaster and journalist Marcel Berlins wrote in the Guardian newspaper in 2008:

  Should we worry about the endangerment of all species? Pandas and tigers for sure, but armadillos? I passionately believe in saving the whale, the tiger, the orang-utan, the sea turtle and many other specifically identified species … Will the world and humankind be very much the poorer if we lose a thousand or so species?

  I hardly know where to start in explaining how misguided and ignorant this is. Berlins seems to be under the misapprehension that there is only one species of whale and sea turtle for a start, but that is a minor point. His lack of regard for the humble armadillo is disturbing – I’ve always found them to be rather endearing. He seems to think that species are only important if we have identified them, which presumably means that he thinks the large majority of life on Earth is irrelevant. His choice of examples suggests that the only important species are big ones, which reflects a very poor understanding of ecology, but then who said journalists need to know anything about their subject before spouting their ill-informed opinions to millions? We do not stand to lose ‘a thousand or so’ species, but are probably losing this many every month. The true foolishness at the heart of Berlins’s statement is best explained by another quote, from Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s 1981 book Extinction:

  As you walk from the terminal toward your airliner, you notice a man on a ladder busily prying rivets out of its wing. Somewhat concerned, you saunter over to the rivet popper and ask him just what the hell he’s doing. ‘I work for the airline – Growthmania Intercontinental,’ the man informs you, ‘and the airline has discovered that it can sell these rivets for two dollars apiece.’

  ‘But how do you know you won’t fatally weaken the wing doing that?’ you inquire.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he assures you. ‘I’m certain the manufacturer made this plane much stronger than it needs to be, so no harm’s done. Besides, I’ve taken lots of rivets from this wing and it hasn’t fallen off yet. Growthmania Airlines needs the money; if we didn’t pop the rivets, Growthmania wouldn’t be able to continue expanding. And I need the commission they pay me – fifty cents a rivet!’

  As the Ehrlichs go on to explain, no sane person would fly on such a plane. At some point in the future the wing will fall off, but that point might not be at all predictable. In exactly the same way that plane-rivets perform a vital role, we know that the Earth’s organisms perform a whole range of important functions. Bees pollinate flowers, flies recycle dung, bacteria in root nodules fix nitrogen from the air, plants release oxygen for us to breathe, store the carbon that we release and provide us with fuel, food, clothing and drugs. Carbon and nitrogen cycles, which are vital to the health of ecosystems, involve hundreds or thousands of species, as do the processes that produce and maintain healthy soils. We rely on complex webs of interactions between species for food, clean water and clean air – interactions that we are only just beginning to understand. As with the rivets, we cannot say which species are vital and which are not. We haven’t named perhaps 90 per cent of species on Earth, let alone worked out what they do. We cannot say how many species we need. What we do know is that we are losing species – popping rivets – at an unprecedented rate, and that this is reducing the ability of the Earth to support us.

  There is already evidence that there are not enough pollinators to visit our crops in some parts of the world, and that as a result yields are dropping. In the apple and pear orchards of Sichuan in China, farmers have to resort to hand-pollinating every flower on the trees, sending their children clambering up to reach the flowers on the higher branches, because insects have been eradicated by the heavy use of pesticides. In India yields of insect-pollinated crops such as many vegetables are falling, due to a shortage of bees. Analyses of data from around the world by the Argentinian scientist Lucas Garibaldi have recently demonstrated that yields of insect-pollinated crops have become variable and unreliable, compared to wind-pollinated crops such as wheat. Pollination is one of the most tangible, readily explained examples of man’s dependence on wildlife, but there are many more.

  For all our intelligence, we do not seem to have learned from our mistakes, or seem willing to take the dire predictions of our scientists seriously. Our track record since we walked out of Africa is not good. If we continue on our current trajectory, the future is bleak, just as it was for the Easter Islanders. As we erode the capacity of the Earth to support us, so food and water shortages will become more common, probably leading to famines and wars over the dwindling resources. The human population will inevitably drop, one way or another, and that process is not likely to be a pleasant one. There will simply not be enough resources to support our large cities, and it seems likely that our civilisation will crumble. Our children will lead much poorer and harder lives than we do today.

  To some extent this depressing future is unavoidable, for the damage we have already done is considerable. The Earth’s climate will continue to warm for decades, regardless of whatever action we take now, leading inevitably to famine and hardship. Countless species are already extinct, or exist only in relict populations that are doomed to extinction. But that is no argument not to act – and to act now. At a global level, conservation efforts so far have been a dismal failure. We need to up our game. The sooner we stop ravaging the Earth, the less awful our future will be.

  This book is intended to inspire, to encourage everyone to cherish what we have, and to illustrate what wonders we stand to lose if we do not change our ways. Biodiversity matters, in all shapes and forms. Conservation is not just about Javan rhinos and snow leopards; it is just as much about bees and beetles, flowers and flies, bats and bugs. Places such as Chez Nauche are islands where nature can thrive, but at present they are too few and far between, and they are being lost far more quickly than they are being created, particularly in the tropics, where the majority of biodiversity lives.

  Go outside, look and listen. The wack-wack bird is calling. For how much longer will we hear its lonesome cry?

  Epilogue

  The wack-wack bird may have so far eluded identification, but the ferocious snake- and owl-eating beast finally gave up its secrets after nine years. It taunted me in the meantime … by leaving partly eaten corpses, not just of the owl and snake, but also of two kestrels, presumably snaffled from their roosts in the eaves of the house, and a rat. The occasional footprints in soft mud or on the Velux windows showed it to have five clawed toes, front and back.

  After eight years during which we had made no progress whatsoever in identifying the beast, I decided to buy a trap. Cage traps are readily available in France – most hardware stores sell them – although I dread to think what they are generally used for and what happens to the animals they catch. My boys and I spent a summer setting the trap in places where we had seen the footprints, baited with all manner of delicacies. We tried eggs, raw meat, cooked meats and peanut butter, all to no avail. We tried peaches, grapes and apples, but the beast was not impressed. We tried cheeses – surely it could not resist my favourite, Saint Agur? It seemed that it could. Even the dormouse’s favourite, Cantal cheese, drew a blank. In desperation we moved on to more exotic temptations: a selection of patisseries, including pain au chocolat, tartelette au citron, chocolate éclairs, but still with no success.

  We moved the cage from place to place, trying all sorts of locations, and with an ever-growing pile of different baits in the trap. Finally, early one drizzly morning towards the end of the stay, the boys came sprinting back from an early-morning reconnoitre shouting, ‘We’ve got it!’ Success! I jumped out of bed, threw on some clothes and sprinted to where we had placed the trap, near the horse-chestnut tree at the top of the drive. Inside the trap was a large, bedraggled and very angry feral cat. I was pretty sure this was not the mythical beast – cats’ claws retract, so they are not visible in footprints. Releasing the c
at was a nerve-racking business as it was hissing and spitting, seemingly intent on revenge for its incarceration.

  The next year I tried a different approach – a camera trap. This nifty gadget has a motion-sensitive camera and an infrared flash, so that it can photograph in darkness. We set it up, starting in one of the barns, with the camera trained on a chicken’s egg. The camera has a digital display on the front, which reveals how many photographs it has taken during the night. On the first morning it had taken three pictures – although the egg was still there. It was very exciting to download the pictures on to my laptop and look through them, but there was nothing there: the camera seemed to randomly take occasional snaps, perhaps set off by passing moths or other tiny creatures.

  We tried again, running through another vast selection of French titbits, to little effect. We photographed endless mice and a few voles. They at least seemed to appreciate our efforts. On one occasion a large piece of bread and peanut butter simply disappeared from right in front of the camera – there were early-evening shots, with the bait sitting there, and then shots with no bait, but no pictures of the moment when something had snuck in and made off with the bread. Clearly the camera wasn’t entirely reliable, unless we were dealing with a creature that moved faster than the speed of light.

  We started combining the camera trap and the cage trap – baiting the cage trap and sprinkling food all around it, and then setting up the camera to photograph anything that came near. We caught two more furious cats in the cage, and managed to photograph a nocturnal visit by a stray dog and even a roe deer, but no beast. But nine years after I purchased Chez Nauche, long after we had become resigned to the fact that the beast would elude us for ever, suddenly there it was. Four photographs, in sequence, showing a magnificent beech marten – a chunkier European relative of the pine marten – sauntering slowly around the cage trap. It was a beautiful animal, with a rich chocolate-brown coat, a creamy chest and a huge bushy tail. In the final photograph it looked disdainfully at the camera, its nose in the air, as if sniffing the wind. And then it was gone.

  Notes

  1. A Stroll in the Meadow

  1. It is quite likely that you have never heard of water bears, also known as moss piglets or, more properly, as tardigrades. These tiny, eight-legged creatures, which rarely exceed one millimetre in length, are amongst the hardiest animals on Earth. They can survive a decade without water, being cooled to -273°C, heated to 150°C, crushed at 6,000 atmospheres pressure or exposed to 1,000 times more radiation than would kill a human. I have absolutely no idea why scientists have taken it upon themselves to try so hard to kill these innocuous little creatures.

  2. The UK also used to have escapee coypu in East Anglia, accidentally introduced in the 1920s. They caused havoc by burrowing through the banks of the many drainage ditches and canals in this very flat part of the UK, often causing fields to flood. In 1989 I met a scientist who had recently taken a job at the MAFF-funded coypu control centre at a time when, although no one had yet realised it, coypu had already been successfully exterminated; the last one was seen in Norfolk in 1988.

  3. Due perhaps to their large size and striking appearance, mantises have long been associated with all sorts of odd beliefs. In North America it was commonly held that they could blind men and kill horses. The French regarded them as more benign, believing that they would point the way home to lost children, while in parts of Africa they are thought to bring good luck and occasionally resurrect the dead. Not bad for an insect that is but one step removed from a cockroach (they are close relatives).

  2. The Insect Empire

  1. In the 1970s a PhD student at Cambridge University named Simon Conway-Morris began a re-examination of Walcott’s fossils, and concluded that many of them represented forms of life quite distinct from any known today. He argued that most were not arthropods, or members of any other surviving animal phylum, but that they belonged to a range of different phyla unknown to science. The prominent and eccentric evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould of the University of Harvard jumped upon this as evidence for his theory of ‘punctuated equilibria’. He argued that the evolution of life consisted of long periods when nothing much happened, interspersed with sudden bursts of activity when weird and strange new life forms were thrown up in profusion, as in the Burgess Shale. He contrasted this with the traditional view that evolution was a gradual process. This led to fierce debate, with many biologists pointing out that there was no strong evidence that the fossils in the Burgess Shale – or anywhere else for that matter – had appeared suddenly. The two camps became known as ‘evolution by jerks’ versus ‘evolution by creeps’. With hindsight, it was all a little silly, for no one had ever claimed that evolutionary change should take place at a steady pace, and nor is there any reason to expect this. More recent evaluation suggests that Conway-Morris was mistaken and that most of the animals in the Burgess Shale are indeed arthropods, or their close relatives, however strange they may appear.

  2. Sadly, funding for taxonomic work such as describing new species has shrivelled in recent decades, so such specialists are now hard to find. Soon there may be no experts left in many fields, so there will be no one to go to for help if you suspect you have discovered a species new to science.

  3. Detritivores are creatures that consume dead organic matter, including corpses, dead leaves and other plant material, and faeces. It isn’t glamorous work, but somebody has to do it.

  4. Mating Wheels and Sexual Cannibalism

  1. There are of course exceptions to this general pattern; insects are such a vast group that there are always exceptions. In stag beetles, for example, the males fight each other for females, and so they tend to be the larger sex, and also have greatly enlarged jaws for fighting.

  2. Tropical orb-web spiders are a fascinating exception. Male orb-web spiders are tiny compared to the females, and it has long been known that they are frequently consumed by their mates before, during or after copulation. It has recently emerged that the male genitalia (strictly their palps, which are used to transfer sperm into the female) often snap off inside the female during sex. This has the advantage for the male that it permanently blocks her reproductive tract, preventing her from mating again and so ensuring his paternity of her offspring. Of course the disadvantage is that he is now a eunuch, and he may as well get eaten since he has no way of ever mating again.

  5. Filthy Flies

  1. Technically flies belong to the insect order Diptera, meaning ‘two wings’, differentiating them from most flying insects, which have four wings.

  2. ‘Vexatious’ is not a word one reads every day. When I read in an end-of-year report from one of my PhD students, who shall remain unnamed, that house flies were vexatious, I recalled that I had read the very same phrase in Jason’s thesis a year or two earlier. In fact, when I checked, much of the report had been lifted word-for-word from the introduction of Jason’s thesis. The unnamed student got into a lot of trouble, not least because – when questioned – he didn’t even know what ‘vexatious’ meant, hesitantly suggesting that it might mean to fly in circles. Plagiarism has become one of the banes of academia, for it is all too easy for lazy students to patch together essays from Internet sources.

  3. A magnificent soft blue cheese – if you haven’t already tried it, you really should – but, sadly, also very popular with flies. Disappointingly there is no such place as Saint Agur, for I would have liked to go there on a cheese-related pilgrimage.

  6. The Secret Life of the Meadow Brown

  1. It seems very likely that Ford was gay. He lived at a time when homosexuality was illegal and subject to horrendous persecution. He never married, had no children and was a prominent campaigner for the legalisation of homosexuality. He seems to have held women in low regard. He campaigned vociferously against their admission to Oxford, as either undergraduates or fellows. A story passed on to me as an undergraduate at Oxford was that on one occasion he turned up to t
each a class to find that only female students were present. Legend has it that he gazed around the room as if looking for someone and then announced, ‘Since no one is here, today’s class is cancelled.’

  7. Paper Wasps and Drifting Bees

  1. Toby was trained by the army to sniff out bumblebee nests, which are usually hidden underground or in dense thickets. Toby and Steph’s exploits are described in A Sting in the Tale.

  2. 2013 was a bumper year for nest-usurping. We placed about 100 buff-tailed bumblebee nests out in the countryside in May, part of an experiment to see how many pesticides they are exposed to. It had been a very cold and miserable April, and perhaps this prevented many buff-tailed queens from founding their own nests. Whatever the reason, we found that almost all of our experimental nests were invaded by wild queens, with some accumulating as many as seven dead queens lying in the bottom of the nest, in addition to the resident. We don’t know how many of these invasions were successful, and what proportion of the original queens survived.

  8. The Mating Habits of the Death-Watch Beetle

  1. Sadly Martin died in 2009, aged sixty-five.

  9. The True Bugs

  1. The many eccentric cures that Darwin tried included wrapping himself in bands of copper and having his butler pour buckets of ice-cold water over his head.

  2. The leaps of froghoppers are amongst the most impressive of all insects’. They can accelerate themselves from a standstill at 4,000 metres per second, subjecting themselves to 400 ‘Gs’ – the force of gravity – in the process.