Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature' | Environment | The Guardian

Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature' | Environment | The Guardian:

“The main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification,” Sánchez-Bayo said. “That means the elimination of all trees and shrubs that normally surround the fields, so there are plain, bare fields that are treated with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.” He said the demise of insects appears to have started at the dawn of the 20th century, accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s and reached “alarming proportions” over the last two decades.

He thinks new classes of insecticides introduced in the last 20 years, including neonicotinoids and fipronil, have been particularly damaging as they are used routinely and persist in the environment: “They sterilise the soil, killing all the grubs.” This has effects even in nature reserves nearby; the 75% insect losses recorded in Germany were in protected areas.

... organic farms had more insects and that occasional pesticide use in the past did not cause the level of decline seen in recent decades. “Industrial-scale, intensive agriculture is the one that is killing the ecosystems,” he said.

“When you consider 80% of biomass of insects has disappeared in 25-30 years, it is a big concern.”

Health and diet and (multi-)multimodal distributions

I knew it! 😁 The Effects of White vs. Whole-wheat Bread May Vary Greatly Between Individuals | Big Think:

...the glycemic response to each type of bread and the way it was metabolized was person-specific and could be predicted solely based on the microbiome makeup of that person, collected prior to the study. The microbiome itself was resilient to the intervention and did not change in individuals as a result of the study.  The findings suggest that making blanket statements about a particular type of diet may not be appropriate and understanding dietary effects requires taking into account person-specific factors.

Squatting Owls Eavesdrop On Prairie Dogs | LiveScience

The part that caught my eye actually had little to do with the owls:

Squatting Owls Eavesdrop On Prairie Dogs

...prairie dogs have the most sophisticated language yet decoded among non-humans. Recent studies have shown that they have nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, which they can use to indicate the size, shape, color, and speed of an intruder. The social rodents even have different calls for a tall human in a blue shirt and a short human in a grey shirt.

“In the past, people shied away from the word language, because we didn’t have enough information. But it’s really clear now that’s what it is,” said Con Slobodchikoff, an animal behaviorist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, who studies prairie dog calls.

Growing up, my parents frequently opined that animals of other species were as intelligent, if in sometimes specialized ways, as humans. I bet they'll be pleased by the final paragraph:

“We have for a long time underestimated the ability of animals. We thought they were running on programs of instinct, like little robots,” said Slobodchikoff. “But in reality, they’re far more advanced and far smarter than we give them credit for, and with that acknowledgement we need to give animals more respect than we have been."

As a first step maybe we could stop trying to exterminate prairie dogs...

Fibers for fuel

And now for something completely incoherent: a ramble about pikas, horned lizards, ruminants, biofuels and genetic sequencing.

Pikas

I recently posted a video about pikas. Like their fellow lagomorphs, rabbits and hares, pikas can live on indigestible grasses thanks to the bacteria in their caecal pouches. A big part of their body mass is devoted to digestive systems, yet unlike ruminants lagomorphs can't pump their food backward and forward to take advantage of the work done by the gut bacteria. So they have to eat their food more than once.

Horned Lizards

Horned lizards also have proportionally large digestive systems, because they eat ants. And that need for a big digestive system is believed to be one reason horned lizard bodies are so spiky. As DigiMorph explains it:

"Ants are small and contain much indigestible chitin, so large numbers of them must be consumed. Hence an ant specialist must possess a large stomach for its body size to process a lot of material. [...] the stomach occupies a considerably larger fraction of the animal's overall body mass [...] than do stomachs of all other sympatric desert lizard species. Possession of such a large gut necessitates a tank-like body form, reducing speed and decreasing the horned lizard's ability to escape from predators by flight."

The full article is well worth reading. It has a lot more interesting info on horned lizards, including the fact that some of them give live birth. I have read elsewhere that the live-bearing species tend to live at higher altitudes, where it would be difficult to keep eggs sufficiently warm.


Ruminants

Ruminants such as cattle can live on grasses. Their food goes back and forward through several stomach chambers while bacteria break down plant fibers.


Biofuels


Cosmos Magazine reports on genetic sequencing of cow gut bacteria aimed at discovering how to break down cell fibers more efficiently. The techniques of the researchers were somewhat gruesome: they inserted nylon sacks of switchgrass through holes in cows' skin directly into their stomachs. The method was considered necessary because the bacteria of interest could not be cultured.

Once they had enough bacteria they removed the nylon sacks and analyzed the bacterial DNA, looking for genes whose products aid in the breakdown of cellulose.

"It is hoped that this research can speed up the process of breaking down switchgrass into sugars including glucose and xylose to be fermented into ethanol."