Tag: bugs

Monarchs Flying South

  • The shorter days are a signal to Monarch butterflies to migrate south. Some travel more than 2,000 miles to winter in Mexico. (Photo by Marty Davis courtesy of Monarch Watch)

Right now, hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies are making an incredible journey south to Mexico for the winter. They’re flying through Michigan for the next couple of weeks so you have a really good chance of seeing one if you’re outside. Steve Malcolm is a professor of ecology at Western Michigan University and an expert on monarch butterflies.

More about Monarchs

Monarch migration map

Transcript

Professor Malcolm, how on earth do monarch butterflies find their all the way to Mexico?


Steve Malcolm, PhD: Um, that’s a good question, we’re not absolutely certain how they do it. It may be that the very fast rates of decreasing day length change trigger physiological changes that cause them to move to the south. But quite how they orientate to Mexico we’re not absolutely certain.


RW: And these butterflies are famous for covering thousands of miles as they’re going on this migration. Is it just one insect making this journey?


Steve Malcolm: In the autumn, the adults that have bred in the Great Lakes region, southern Canada, as they’re flying south will be exploiting nectar resources so they can really build up their fat so by the time they get to the Gulf Coast they’re these huge, obese butterflies. They continue their migration to Mexico and spend five, even six months in Mexico and then they fly north in the spring, and maybe get as far north as central states like Kansas or even Iowa. Then they’ll basically die and it’ll be their offspring that continue the migration back to the Great Lakes region.


RW: There are some butterflies that look like monarch butterflies. How can you tell them apart?


Steve Malcolm: In the Great Lakes region, the viceroy is the only butterfly that looks very like a monarch. But the monarch has this typically lazy flight. It’s sort of a bold butterfly, you know, it just flies around and does its own thing. The viceroy it’s got the same basic coloration of being orange with black wing veins, but it has a more flick-y flight, it looks like a more nervous butterfly. It’s a little bit smaller than a monarch. If you look at it end on, it looks very flat somehow. Monarchs tend to look more like a flapping V if you like when they’re flying around in the environment.


RW: Where are the best places in Michigan to go if you want to see monarchs heading south?


Steve Malcolm: I personally like going to the Wickham music festival which was on this last weekend in the middle of Michigan, and lying on my back listening to the music watching the monarchs flying overhead. Typically you can lie there and watch a monarch flying over every minute. But also going to the shores of Lake Michigan is very good. Anywhere on the west side of Michigan, along Lake Michigan, if you walk on any of the beaches there you can usually see monarchs. They’ll arrive at the water’s edge and then they’ll pretty much fly south down the lakeshore.


RW: What can we do to help the butterflies out?


Steve Malcolm: I think it’s really good to do some butterfly gardening, particularly this time of year, to have nectar plants. It’s really helpful for the butterflies to have lots of food resources so they can build up their fat. Having a patch of milkweed, like common milkweed, or butterfly weed or the swamp milkweed. But I think it’s important to make sure they’re native milkweeds that belong in Michigan rather than some of the exotic milkweeds that are easy to grow.


RW: Well, thank you so much for your time.


Steve Malcolm: You’re very welcome.


RW: Steve Malcolm is a monarch butterfly expert at Western Michigan University.


That’s the Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams.

New Homes for Chimney Swifts

  • The almost-finished tower awaits its new residents on the grounds of the Orono School District's nature center next to Lake Claussen. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)

There’s one American bird that has an unusual habitat problem. Chimney Swifts have adapted in the past as humans encroached on their territory. But now changes in human behavior are presenting new problems for the birds. And some people are trying to help them adapt again. Stephanie Hemphill reports.

Transcript

There’s one American bird that has an unusual habitat problem. Chimney Swifts have adapted in the past as humans encroached on their territory. But now changes in human behavior are presenting new problems for the birds. And some people are trying to help them adapt again. Stephanie Hemphill reports.

In his dad’s window-and-door warehouse in the Minneapolis suburbs, Derek Meyer is supervising the boys in his scout troop as they build a wooden tower for Chimney Swifts.

They’re using rough plywood to build a narrow box twelve feet high with an opening about a foot square.

Derek is doing this project to earn the rank of Eagle Scout. In the process, he’s learned a few things about the lives of Chimney Swifts.

“They originally lived in hollow trees but when the settlers from Europe came over they started destroying the trees, so they decided to live in the chimneys, and then people started putting wire over their chimneys, so over the last 40 years they’ve lost half of their population.”

Not just wire, but rain caps and other devices to keep moisture and critters out of chimneys.

The new home these boys are building for Chimney Swifts is destined for the nature center next to a nearby school. The school district was planning to tear down an old brick chimney as part of a remodeling project. Rebecca Field found out about that, and she tried to stop it.

“I said, wait a minute, I’m sure there are Chimney Swifts in there and they’re really good birds because they eat about 2,000 insects a day, each of those birds. And their favorite insect is the mosquito.'”

Field is on the board of Audubon Minnesota, and she’d been watching the swifts hanging around the chimney in the evenings. Individually they look like fat cigars with wings, but when they get ready to swoop down into the chimney for the night, there are so many of them, they look like a funnel cloud.

“How they communicate I have no idea, how they put the brakes on when they dive into that chimney so quickly, it’s a mystery but it’s a fun thing to watch.”

In the end the school district decided to leave the chimney up.

So now, a few weeks later, and just in time for the Chimney Swifts to fly back up from the Amazon, the tower is standing on a concrete pad at the school’s nature center.

School naturalist Marleane Callaghan has already brought all her classes, grades three-through-five, to check it out.

“We’ve talked about the bird, what it looks like, the dimension of it, I’ve invited them to come back with their parents to watch in the school parking lot in the evening up at the high school where they’ve left the chimney, and then to walk on down, to be able to identify them.”

This project is part of an effort by Audubon groups all over the country to raise awareness of Chimney Swifts and their need for homes.

In Minnesota, project director Ron Windingstad wants to convince homeowners to make existing chimneys more welcoming. He says people can take the caps off their chimneys during the summer, or just raise them high enough so the birds can fly in from the sides.

Soon these school kids will be able to see the amazing acrobatics of the Chimney Swifts. Windingstad says they hardly ever stop flying, from morning til night. They’ll even sip water and take a bath in a nearby pond, without stopping.

“They’ll scoop down, lower their bill, and fly across it and drink in the water. They’ll use some of these shrubs around here to break off little twigs about the size of a wooden matchstick or toothpick actually, and use that to build their nests, and they do that while flying as well. They are marvelous creatures.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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Bedbugs Booming

  • Complaints to pest control firms about bedbugs have tripled in 4 years. (Photo courtesy of the CDC)

The US is suffering through a
resurgence of bedbugs and the itchy
welts their bites cause. So now,
some health officials are asking
the Federal EPA to bring back an
old pesticide. Bill Cohen reports:

Transcript

The US is suffering through a
resurgence of bedbugs and the itchy
welts their bites cause. So now,
some health officials are asking
the Federal EPA to bring back an
old pesticide. Bill Cohen reports:

Complaints to pest control firms about bedbugs have tripled in 4 years.

Two reasons. More people are scavenging infested mattresses thrown out on the street. Plus, the bugs are getting resistant to current pesticides.

That’s why Ohio is asking the feds to let home exterminators use propoxur. Red tape and questions over possible side effects like nausea shelved the pesticide years ago, but local health official Paul Wenning fears, without it, frustrated itchy homeowners will turn to more dangerous weapons to fight the bugs.

“Our greatest fear is that someone is going to get ahold of some old pesticide – like DDT or something – are going to treat their house, and we’re going to have a lot of very sick and possibly dead people.”

Ohio expects other states will join the drive to bring back propoxur.

For The Environment Report, I’m Bill Cohen.

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Heading Out on a BioBlitz

  • JP Anderson, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore Park Ranger, at the start of National Geographic and the National Park Service's 2009 BioBlitz at The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. (Photo by Enrique Pulido)

The National Park Service has a slightly embarrassing problem. It manages some of the nation’s most
environmentally valuable land – but it doesn’t have a full account of plant and animal species that live in
the parks. One remedy is the BioBlitz. A BioBlitz is a kind of whirlwind count of all the species in a
specific place. The Park Service has been co-sponsoring BioBlitzes with National Geographic. We sent
Shawn Allee to their latest:

Transcript

The National Park Service has a slightly embarrassing problem. It manages some of the nation’s most
environmentally valuable land – but it doesn’t have a full account of plant and animal species that live in
the parks. One remedy is the BioBlitz. A BioBlitz is a kind of whirlwind count of all the species in a
specific place. The Park Service has been co-sponsoring BioBlitzes with National Geographic. We sent
Shawn Allee to their latest:

The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore is spread along Lake Michigan’s southern shoreline.

During this BioBlitz, scientists and volunteers fan out in teams to search the sand dunes, woods, and
grassland around here.

At first, the mood’s high, but then it rains kinda hard.

We’re supposed to be counting species for 24 hours, but at first, we can’t even get out of our cars.

(ring of a phone)

“Hello? Yeah. We’re stuck in traffic, here. We came out here and I thought we were going
out in the wrong direction.”

I hitch a ride with Dr. Patrick Leacock. He’s a mycologist, a kind of mushroom expert.

I’m actually lucky to be on his BioBlitz team, because organizers from National Geographic and the National Park Service want people to count all the species
in the park.

And they mean everything – not just plants and animals that are a cinch to find.

Allee: “Are fungi something you feel that the average person doesn’t think about when it comes
to biodiversity?”

Leacock: “Yeah, there’s people, you tell them you study mushrooms, and they talk about their
athlete’s foot, or they think there’s only six different kinds or something like
that.”

Leacock says, in fact, the Indiana Dunes Lakeshore has at least 600 fungi species. He hopes the
BioBlitz team will add to that list.

Leacock: “Here we are.”

Allee: “I’m hunting mushrooms with three trained mycologists and there are six other volunteers on my team here. One of them is Zachary Benes – he’s just 9 years old. But, I gotta say, Dr. Leacock is pretty lucky
to have Zachary on the team – since he’s found the most mushrooms of anyone on the team.”

Benes: “Is it poisonous?”

Leacock: “Nope. A real mushroom.”

Tang: “Yeah.”

Allee: “Looks like you found another one, too. Where’d you find it?”

Benes: “Over there by the wood.”

Leacock: “This is collybia sub-sulphurea. Do you know what sulfur means?”

Benes: “No.”

Leacock: “It’s a kind of a yellow-orange color. So, this might be a new record for the dunes. So that’s a good one. Was it
just the one?”

Benes: “Yeah. Just the one.”

Leacock: “It’s in good shape.”

Along the trail, I chat with Yaya Tang. She’s one of the other mycologists on the team.

Tang says she’s glad to see BioBlitz volunteers search for elusive species of bats, bugs, and fungi.

“I feel like that’s an issue with biodiversity in general. Where people care about things that are cute or
that they see immediately. Like, there’s insects, too, that don’t get a lot of attention.”

Allee: “Dr. Leacock, we’re pretty much finished here. You got this container of many varieties
of fungi we’ve collected within an hour, would you have been able to get this many
yourself? If you had come out here on your own?”

Leacock: “No. The more people you have searching, that helps a lot. Different people will see
different things, too, I think. So we’ve 14 or 15 things right in my box. We have two that might be new
records for the dunes.”

The BioBlitz at The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore lasts another 20 hours.

A few days later, Dr. Leacock writes me.

He tells me volunteers turned up at least one fungi specimen no one had ever seen in the Dunes park.

It’s a small success – enough that National Geographic, the Park Service, and other groups are
planning more BioBlitzes across the country.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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EPA Rules on Pesticide Residue

  • One crop that Carbofuran was used on is potatoes (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA)

The Environmental Protection Agency says no amount of the pesticide carbofuran is safe on food. Mark Brush has more on the new EPA rule:

Transcript

The Environmental Protection Agency says no amount of the pesticide carbofuran is safe on food. Mark Brush has more on the new EPA rule:

The EPA has been phasing out this insecticide, but it’s still used on some crops like rice, corn, and potatoes.

When people are exposed to carbofuran, it can cause damage to the nervous system. And the EPA is particularly worried about kids exposure when eating food or when drinking water near treated farm fields.

Potato farmers say they use carbofuran to kill bugs that resist other pesticides.

John Keeling is the CEO of the National Potato Council. He says they were hoping the EPA would let them keep using it.

“We had tried to work with the agency to modify use patterns, or limit the use to particular areas, so that we could continue to use the product – but they obviously didn’t continue in that direction.”

FMC Corporation makes the chemical. Officials there issued a statement saying they’ll fight the EPA’s new rule.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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A New Threat to Grizzly Bears

  • The grizzly bear has a new threat - the Mountain Pine Beetle that's wiping out its food source (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

We’ve heard about a warmer climate affecting polar bears. Now, warmer weather seems to be threatening another kind of bear. Mark Brush reports on some tough times for Yellowstone’s Grizzly bears:

Transcript

We’ve heard about a warmer climate affecting polar bears. Now, warmer weather seems to be threatening another kind of bear. Mark Brush reports on some tough times for Yellowstone’s Grizzly bears:

Researchers say warmer temperatures in the last ten to fifteen years have been messing with the ecology in Yellowstone National Park.

In the fall, the grizzly bears eat pine cone nuts from white bark pine trees. It gives them a lot of nutrition before they curl up for the winter. But those trees are dying.

Mountain pine beetles are killing them. The beetle populations usually get knocked back by cold weather. But it hasn’t been getting as cold. So, there are more beetles killing more trees.

Doug Peacock lives near Yellowstone and has written several books on grizzlies.

“The white bark pine trees, this is the most important grizzly food of all in Yellowstone, they are gone. And we will not see them come back in our lifetime.”

And when the trees are gone, the bears get hungry – they go looking for food – and they run into people.

48 grizzlies out of the 600 in the region were killed last year.

Some environmental groups are suing the government to get the bear back on the endangered species list.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Company Fined Over Pesticide Death

State legislatures and Congress could consider new laws to deal with pesticide regulations. That’s after an Oregon pest management company received what some consider to be a slap on the wrist by the Environmental Protection Agency. A bug killer sprayed in a home led to the death of an elderly woman. Angela Kellner reports:

Transcript

State legislatures and Congress could consider new laws to deal with pesticide regulations. That’s after an Oregon pest management company received what some consider to be a slap on the wrist by the Environmental Protection Agency. A bug killer sprayed in a home led to the death of an elderly woman. Angela Kellner reports:

76-year-old Florence Kolbeck died of cardiac arrest a few hours returning home, where Swanson’s pest management had fumigated. Her husband was hospitalized for respiratory distress. Six others who entered the home, including emergency responders, also became ill.

The EPA investigated and fined the company $4,550 for misusing the pesticides.

Chad Schulze with the EPA says that was the maximum fine allowed under the law.

“That does not take into account the seriousness of the results of the violations. It’s just the statutory max.”

The person who applied the pesticides had failed his licensing exam seven times.

The company denies liability and disagrees with the EPA’s decision.

For The Environment Report, I’m Angela Kellner.

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Insecticide Chemical Is a Powerful Greenhouse Gas

  • Sulfuryl flouride, a chemical used to fumigate termite-infested buildings, is a potent greenhouse gas (Source: Esculapio at Wikimedia Commons)

The federal government is going to take some significant steps to reduce global warming gases. Carbon dioxide is the main target, but there are other types of greenhouse gases. Lester Graham spoke with one researcher who found a potent greenhouse gas lingers in the atmosphere much longer than previously thought:

Transcript

We hear a lot about carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. But there are other chemicals that trap heat and contribute to global warming. One of them is an insecticide used to fumigate termite-infested buildings. It’s called Sulfuryl fluoride. That insecticide is four-thousand times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. It’s been estimated that Sulfuryl flouride hangs around in the atmosphere for five years or so… but new research shows that it lasts a lot longer than that:

Mads Sulbaek Anderson is working with other researchers at the University of California-Irvine published a study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

He’s with us now… first, how is this termite insecticide used?

“Well, it’s used in a number of applications. What the fumigators do is, they basically cover the house in a giant tent. And then you fill up the house with this compound, and over the span of a few days, one or two days, this compound acts like a pesticide- it kills all of these bugs. After that time span, you remove the tent, and make sure that all of this compound evaporates and dissipates.”

What did you discover about how long this insecticide actually stays in the atmosphere?

“The usual routes by which pollution is removed from the atmosphere has to do with reactions, and there’s something called an OH radical, a hydroxyl radical in the atmosphere. That’s the usual cleaner of the atmosphere. In this case, this radical didn’t react at all with the compound – we couldn’t detect anything.”

Is this a significant contributor to global warming, or greenhouse gases?

“It’s still a question of how much is actually present in the atmosphere right now. But, we know how much is used every year of this compound. And so this compound, right, it’s 4,000 times more efficient in trapping the heat compared to carbon dioxide. But of course, there’s not much of it out in the atmosphere yet. But it’s more a precautionary tale, because other compounds are being phased out for other reasons and so sulfuryl fluoride could take over for those applications, if we don’t think twice about this. And it stays around for at least a few decades. So, it’s not an enormous problem by itself- we have to focus on the real problem, which of course is due to emissions from burning fossil fuels. But this compound too contributes to the warming of the atmosphere, or could potentially do it.”

Mads Sulbaek Anderson is a researcher at the University of California-Irvine. Thank you.

“You are very much welcome.”

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Bugs Getting Confused by Asphalt

  • Dragonflies are one of the insects tricked by false light (Photo courtesy of the EPA)

Bugs are getting confused by the
reflections from manmade structures.
Rebecca Williams reports on a new study:

Transcript

Bugs are getting confused by the
reflections from manmade structures.
Rebecca Williams reports on a new study:

If you’ve ever noticed swarms of insects hovering over your car, there’s a
good chance they’re mistaking it for water.


Smooth, dark surfaces like cars and asphalt reflect polarized light. That’s
what bugs see – and that tricks insects such as dragonflies.


Bruce Robertson is an author of the study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology
and the Environment.


“Asphalt actually reflects polarized light more strongly than water and so it
looks more like water than water! And so these organisms are thinking
they’re finding a place to breed and hunt and lay eggs and mate when in fact
they’re finding a place that’s very dangerous.”


Robertson says these bugs swarm over buildings and roads in huge numbers,
and can die of exhaustion.


But he says it might be possible to stop tricking the bugs. Things like
adding white curtains to dark windows or adding a little bit of gravel to
asphalt to make the surfaces reflect less polarized light.


For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Growing a Garden on Your Garage

  • David Lanfear recently ‘installed’ one on his own garage roof, so his neighbors could see the benefits (Photo by Joyce Kryszak)

When most people put a new roof on
their home they usually use standard asphalt
or tile roofing. But other people are going
for something more natural. They’re planting
grass and flowers on their houses. Joyce
Kryszak talked with one builder in
Western New York who planted a green roof on
his garage to show his neighbors how it works:

Transcript

When most people put a new roof on
their home they usually use standard asphalt
or tile roofing. But other people are going
for something more natural. They’re planting
grass and flowers on their houses. Joyce
Kryszak talked with one builder in
Western New York who planted a green roof on
his garage to show his neighbors how it works:

About 90% of all residential roofs are made out of manufactured
asphalt.

But builder David Lanfear knows that nothing tops mother nature.
He makes roofs out of gardens.

Lanfear recently ‘installed’ one on his own garage roof, so his
neighbors could see the benefits. There are beautiful flowering
plants visible over the edge of the flat roof. Lanfear says they’ve got
the whole birds and bees thing going on.

“We’ve noticed a big increase in insects, butterflies, birds all
sorts of new birds that I haven’t ever seen. They’re up there
eating something. Bugs? But its kind of nice to sit on the deck
and watch this nature in the city thing,” said Lanfear.

But the living roof isn’t a novelty. Lanfear says the roofs are more
eco-friendly. He says a living roof provides a whole cascade of
environmental benefits.

“Especially in a downtown when you get a hard rainfall the water
washes off all at once. There’s nothing to absorb it. If you had
a roof like this it absorbs the water and let’s it off slowly. So, it
not only slows the runoff, it cools the water and it starts to filter
the water. It filters some of the atmospheric crud out.
Otherwise, you get super heated water rushing off into the storm
sewer, and then out into the river or the lake and effecting the
environment there,” said Lanfear.

Once his neighbors understood the concept, they stopped thinking
Lanfear was crazy. A few even offered to give him a hand planting
his roof.

First the roof was reinforced with used lumber. Next are the
waterproof barriers – a rubber membrane, a root barrier made out of
old billboards and some old carpeting. Finally, recycled, crushed
concrete is shoveled on to be used as soil for the plants to grow in.

It’s all sustainable. And the native plants require very little water or
maintenance.

Neighbor Deborah Bach loves to garden. So, she was happy to
pitch in. Bach says the concrete soil needs to be doctored to enrich
it. But they have a reuse idea for that too.

“My son works at Starbucks and they give out free grounds for
gardens. So, we’re going to try doing that to try to balance this
out. You know, using recycled materials and things that have
already been used,” said Bach.

Another neighbor stopped by to help. Alex Sowyrda is a high school
technology teacher who’s interested in the science of green roofs.
He plans to share what he learns with his students.

“I try to bring it into my curriculum at school and, hopefully, the
kids graduating high school now take this knowledge with them
and are able to make responsible choices in the way they build
and the way they design in the future,” said Sowyrda.

The living roof builder David Lanfear says it’s a concept that can grow
on anyone. Even people who grew up with more traditional roofs. He
says to start small – with a garage roof – or maybe even smaller.

“We all have little expanses of roof in front of windows. And in
the summer you might notice that when the window is open the
hot air blows in, a lot of that heat comes from that little bit of
roof. If we could just put sections one square yard of living roof
outside of our windows on the porch roof, that would make a
drastic difference in cooling our house – simple,” said Lanfear.

And pretty cheap. Lanfear says the cost of materials is about the
same as an asphalt roof. But he says there’s savings in the long run
because the green roof can last three times as long.

And he says it’s a whole lot nicer to look at.

For The Environment Report, I’m Joyce Kryszak.

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