thinkevolution.net

My friends from college and I have a reunion vacation every year in a cabin in the Adirondacks, and there is this turtle that lives in the pond on the property that keeps joining us. It is a massive snapping turtle. It looks just like the picture and it is terrifying.

Two years ago we tried to catch it. The reptile specialist in my department recommended a reinforced cardboard box and some sort of lasso on a very long stick. The advice was imparted reluctantly; he actually recommended staying away from it altogether and showed incredulity when I explained about the skinny dipping. As a somewhat fearsome individual himself, this was a shock, and it justified the alarmist attitude that was already preventing the boys from lounging in the inner tubes. Some impatient internet research had convinced me that snappers, while vicious and aggressive and sure to snap off your digits if you disturb them on land, are of a diffident and temperate personality underwater. Our empirical evidence only partially supported this claim: it did bite one of us on the foot; the foot, like the turtle, was in the water; the leg and all the rest was on land. (Amputation was avoided, and no one died of Salmonella poisoning.) This was, if I recall correctly, our introduction, and that first impression may have instilled an unreasonable level of antagonism between us.

Anyway the year we brought the relocation equipment, we couldn’t find the turtle. This year, with short memories and fresh enthusiasm for a splash in the lake, we saw it again. It likes hanging around the dock, and provides plenty of opportunity for ogling. So grotesquely prehistoric! I love it, but it scares me. It’s quite the summer thrill.

Have you heard about the honeybee crisis? Sometimes beekeepers discover that their hives have dwindled or gone extinct over the winter. Such events are usually rare, however, and multiple colony collapses are typically local phenomena. But across America, beekeepers are now reporting alarming numbers of hive deaths. A 20% loss over the winter is normal, but beekeepers in California report losses up to 60% and losses have been even higher in Texas and on the east coast.

My dad’s been keeping bees since 1977. He started the hobby when we lived in suburban Maryland, on a half-acre yard cultivated with peach, pear, apple, plum and cherry trees, hedges of blackberries and raspberries, blueberry bushes, a strawberry patch, a full vegetable garden and a perimeter of grapes. The hives were tucked between a neighbor’s evergreen and our chinese chestnut (I associated that region of the yard with painful sharp things) and got lots of sun—a perfect environment, even if the surrounding neighborhood exhibited a far more suburban landscape. In those days, my dad says, he occasionally got honey yields as high as an impressive 110 pounds per hive. But talking with him on the phone yesterday, he declared, “The golden age of beekeeping is over.” In the late 1980s, he began finding mite infestations in his hives. Soon other beekeepers at the Susquehanna Beekeepers’ Association meetings were reporting similar problems, and domestic bee colonies never really recovered. About a decade ago, my parents moved to a rural part of the county. Close by are fields farmed with soybean, corn, oats and sunflowers, but the surrounding woods shade the hives and the microenvironment is just a little too damp. Last year my dad had three hives, but this spring he’s left with just one. Is it the mites? Is it part of the nationwide trend of colony deaths?

(more…)