Where Have All the XXX Gone?

You fill in the blank:

â–º Honeybees
â–º Whippoorwills
â–º Bats
â–º Blister Beetles on Goldenrod
â–º Blue Lobelia
â–º … … … … ?

Some of the changes we note are not unnatural. Some are. It’s hard to tease out one from another, but the global list is long and serious.

The “sixth great extinction” is not random and trivial. And if we pay attention, all of us will see it happening, more or less gradually.

Much of the disappearance will, early on, be at from those tiny creatures in the ocean or the soil that serve key roles in food chains or in altering the chemical and mechanical nature of ecosystems.

When they fail, all of the pyramid of depended plants, fungi, animals and protists that depend on them will fail. And many of those are larger, more colorful, sexy and once familiar.

Sorry. That riff derives from the observation that we’ve seen a ratio of bumblebees to honeybees of a least 100 to 1. This particular one was feeding on Wingstem pollen by the garden–a habitat where at one time, the European Honeybee did much of the work.