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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.
By the way, the science says that the dynamics are NOT in our favour: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...
> 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’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.
(Edit: wondering how you can help, here's what I humbly suggested below in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889023)
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).
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...
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.
I was curious about this and found this YouTube video.
30,000 bees killed by just 30 hornets in an hour or so. The bees just have no defence against them at all.
Brutal.
So they really think the infestation is small enough that it's feasible to find and destroy all the nests by hand?
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.
Truly, the 90s were a simpler time.
Remember when killer bees were the big scare? They were moving north. Everyone was worried.
Whatever happened with that? I haven’t heard about them in years.
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.
"Washington State Department of Agriculture workers, illuminated by red lamps, vacuum a nest of Asian giant hornets from a tree in Blaine"
Interesting. Why do they use red lamps?
Murder hornets are the species that in Japan you don't call an exterminator, you call the police. They're that nasty.
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.
[1] https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqTubMeydDE
His whole channel is also excellent.
I find the bit about affixing a tracking devices to hornets with dental floss part of the amazing bit. Some seriously tiny radios these days.
Dude where can I get one of those awesome suits?
Good. Wasps are A-holes. They do not enrich our lives. All they do is attack.
They brought this on themselves.
How many nests are there in USA? Do they have a number?
Intense pictures from this story.
This really seems like a great opportunity to use a CRISPR gene drive to take these things out.
Kill 'em all!
(I'm a beekeeper)
This should be an Among Us crewmate task.
Who you gonna call? Bee-Busters!
That's some awesome PPE, we should just release murder hornets everywhere.
HOW IS THIS NEWS?
2020. We have cazadores now. Have deathclaws been spotted too? Asking for a friend.