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Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

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Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#191

Post by datameta »

MauranKilom wrote: post #118
datameta wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems most likely that they wanted to avoid killing the hornets. Perhaps to study them and find out which native Japanese population of hornets they came from in order to stem the flow of this invasive species. Could even be simply to preserve life.

The hornets in that tube look very dead to me.

The hornets had been put on ice which lowers their metabolism to a state of stupor but they recover from this as soon as their temperature goes back up. Another common technique for making stinging insects docile during handling is using smoke to calm a beehive's alertness response through inhibiting their ability to detect pheromones that signal danger.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#192

Post by crazygringo »

ip26 wrote: post #186
honkycat wrote: post #156

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 (…

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 Sorry, what? https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/native-bees-often-bette... I haven't got it out for honey bees, but as your comment makes clear, native species are underappreciated.

The article you cite doesn't seem to really agree with you:

> So why the global obsession with the one species that makes honey? For one, honey bees have hives, which makes them easy to keep and transfer en masse. For another, some native bees are picky about which flowers they prefer and where they live. As a result, commercial pollination is almost wholly dependant on honey bees.

> ...The goal of all this work is not to replace honey bees, but to pinpoint which native bees are effective, what they can offer and how to lure them into visiting and pollinating.

From what the article describes, the honey bee is uniquely suited for the niche we need it for, and there is no other species even remotely as well adapted -- though they're trying to figure out if any other species could be made to work in some lesser capacity.

So it doesn't seem that native species are underappreciated -- just that there are very good reasons we use the honeybee instead.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#193

Post by lpolovets »

s3graham wrote: post #173
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 feel like it's indeed very fault tolerant, but we're smashing nodes pretty quickly and all over the place.

The human race is like Netflix's Chaos Monkey but applied to the global ecosystem instead of AWS. And our configuration file is decentralized and hard to enforce.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#194

Post by coliveira »

NateEag wrote: post #185
coliveira wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of typical modern thinking that believes we can solve problems such as global warming and bee extinction by doing individual actions. This is completely nonsense. Either we do this as a public policy or there is no solution.

Your comment is an example of typical programmer thinking that says "only a perfect solution is worth releasing". I have been guilty of that error countless times. An individual's actions will not solve a society's woes, but they don't need to. If they help a little bit where they are, they can be worth doing. Furthermore, individuals trying to help does not preclude larger-scale solutions. The people attempting indi…

I am not advocating for a "perfect solution or nothing". I advocate for solutions based on public policy, even if they're partial. But I object to individual solutions, because they're no solution at all. It doesn't matter how many people do little actions, if there are a few big actors (say multinational corporations) exploiting and polluting the environment, the result is worse than zero! It is just like taking as aspirin to "help cure" a cancer that is destroying the body. And in fact focusing on doing these little things is a net negative, because it distracts from the big actions that need to be taken to fix an urgent problem.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#195

Post by i_cannot_hack »

petertodd wrote: post #65
lostlogin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most beekeepers choose to euthanize more aggressive hives to deliberately breed calmer, safer, bees. I wander why they don’t just requeen?

IIUC workers (or at least worker larvae) can become queens under the right conditions, so it's more likely for the undesirable genes to be removed if the entire hive is euthanized. Also, in the case of that video, IIRC having the still aggressive workers in the locations available to that beekeeper wouldn't be desirable, even if later generations were calmer.

It's not about the queens, it's about the drones (male bees).

The workers only start laying eggs if the hive goes without a queen for several weeks, and either way the eggs they lay are unfertilized and therefore cannot be raised into new queens. So requeening it is certain to work in that regard.

However, unless you euthanize whole hive, the aggressive drones will continue to live for a while and can mate with queens in neighbouring hives and spread the aggressive genes that way. So there is an advantage to euthanizing the whole hive instead of requeening it.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#196

Post by wizzwizz4 »

s3graham wrote: post #173
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 feel like it's indeed very fault tolerant, but we're smashing nodes pretty quickly and all over the place.

It's not fault-tolerant in any way we'd like. It's like a computer that'll just keep on trucking; even if it's overwritten all its memory with garbage, it'll still be running some code.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#197

Post by throwanem »

sethammons wrote: post #119
jessriedel wrote: post #4

So they really think the infestation is small enough that it's feasible to find and destroy all the nests by hand?

Doubt it. I’m two states (about 8 hr drive) in Montana and my wife and I think we saw one. I tried to get a pic but was too slow.

There are a lot of large insects that bear a superficial resemblance to V. mandarinia, especially in the absence of familiarity with hymenopterans. From WSDA's map of citizen sightings, it looks like the most commonly mistaken animals are large sawflies, which are very distant relatives of wasps and hornets and actually serve a significant ecological role by parasitizing the larvae of various tree-boring beetles.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#199

Post by api »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #166
honkycat wrote: post #156

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 (…

> 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.

It is very fault tolerant over evolutionary and geologic time scales. The question is what the very short term effects might be and how it may impact us.

As George Carlin said, we need to stop framing these issues as “saving the Earth.” The Earth will be fine. This is about saving ourselves.

Same goes for climate change. The Earth has been very warm in the past, even ice free. The Earth will be fine. The question is whether the >10 billion humans that may be on it as climate change starts to really manifest will be fine.

Re: Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest

#200

Post by wizzwizz4 »

coliveira wrote: post #170
RyanOD wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition, do what you can to support bees. Here are some simple suggestions from Nat Geo. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/05/150524-bees-...

This is an example of typical modern thinking that believes we can solve problems such as global warming and bee extinction by doing individual actions. This is completely nonsense. Either we do this as a public policy or there is no solution.

Individuals can make the problem get worse more slowly, which can buy time for public policy to come into effect.
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