New study blames bumblebee deaths on global warming
Bumblebees are vanishing across large regions of North America and Europe and a new study says global warming is to blame.
Science published Thursday an article stating that while habitat destruction and potent pesticides known as neonicotinoids have destroyed some bumblebee populations, researchers concluded climate change has played the greatest role in the mass disappearance of bumblebee species.
“This is a huge loss and it has happened very quickly,” study author Jeremy Kerr, a biology professor at the University of Ottawa, said in a call with reporters. “These species are at serious and immediate risk from rapid, human-induced climate change.”
“These are very clear and striking trends,” bumblebee study co-author Paul Galpern, a landscape ecologist and assistant professor at the University of Calgary, said during the call.
photo Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel via Flickr
Other insect species, such as butterflies, which evolved in tropical climates, possess the “biochemical machinery” to more easily migrate and adapt to warmer temperatures, co-author Alana Pindar, of York University in Toronto, described.
Bumblebees emerged in cool to temperate environments; therefore, have failed to expand to cooler temperatures farther north, even as their numbers have collapsed amid more extreme heat. Instead, they’ve retracted from the south at a pace as fast as 9 kilometers a year, the study found.
Bumblebees started vanishing even before farmers began employing neonicotinoids, the researchers said.
Of the 111 bumblebee species in North America and Europe, between a quarter and a third are at risk of extinction, Kerr tells U.S. News.
“We are not seeing bumblebees kind of effectively fleeing to the north and consequently becoming more dense in northern areas,” he said during the call. “We are simply losing the southern populations.”
“The details of the variation in these responses are important because they can provide substantial insight to which species might face even greater challenges in the face of a warming world than others,” Sacha Vignieri, an associate editor at Science, said. .
