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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

#381

Post by Yizahi »

api wrote: post #199
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.

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…

I just hate when people refer to that specific part of his standup as anti-environmentalist. I think he didn't meant it like people are quoting him to approve destroying nature. The planet will be fine (c), sure, this stone rock will be fine. Humans won't be, animals won't be, plants won't be. We probably won't be able to exterminate all living things on Earth, and some plankton and bacteria will evolve into something new again. But again, current snapshot of "nature", the one we are all living in will be lost if it continued to be destroyed.

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

#382

Post by jonplackett »

chrisgd wrote: post #368
jonplackett wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I saw this too - I guess those bees must have evolved with hornets as a predator and have developed that defence. But the bees in the west haven't and so they don't have any behaviour to help them.

European bees being destroyed, Asian bees killing the hornet.

Maybe we’ll have to get some Asian honey bees.

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

#383

Post by wizzwizz4 »

toss1 wrote: post #372
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, with one addition >> It'll still be running some code... until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction

There's no particular reason that small fragments should rebuild. Multicellular organisms (beyond biofilms) were kind of a quirk of nature in the first place. (Not that I think all multicellular organisms are likely to die off – but if they did, why would they re-emerge?)

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

#384

Post by toss1 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #383
toss1 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, with one addition >> It'll still be running some code... until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction

There's no particular reason that small fragments should rebuild. Multicellular organisms (beyond biofilms) were kind of a quirk of nature in the first place. (Not that I think all multicellular organisms are likely to die off – but if they did, why would they re-emerge?)

Indeed!

Yet, while I lack any deep understanding why they would re-emerge, paleontology seems to show a long history of mass extinctions down to very low levels, then re-emergence of more complex forms.

One theory that I read of a few years back posited that life, and higher forms in particular, are more efficient at increasing entropy, i.e., diffusing heat, and so are systemically favored (seen nothing on it in a few years, so no idea of its current state; if anyone recognizes it and can provide a link, thanks in advance!).

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

#385

Post by dmix »

raducu wrote: post #349
dmix wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely from an economic and argicuktural perspective, is there a way for us to simply raise honey bees in more of a ‘bubble’ that is somehow protected from the giant wasps? I’d imagine from what I’ve read that a significant chunk of bees are already artificially produced and distributed for crops. That plus of course combined with a general ongoing attempt at eradication of the hornets. Or at least significant popula…

Hives are already a protective bubble, if the bees could make it more secure, they would. We could make lasers driven by ML to identify the hornets and shoot them down as they approach a hive, but that would be really expensive :)

That's actually a very clever idea. I like that.

It would be an excellent grad CSS project. Identifying the Giant Wasps with 99.9% or whatever accuracy and deploying some defensive mechanism.

The problem like you said would be(e) infinitely expensive to deploy to all of the many thousands of randomly placed hives. But maybe useful for the industrial pollinator companies, which is a big thriving industry.

Anyway, I just like these sort of clever tech solutions.

There has to be plenty of solutions to this (major) problem we haven't thought of yet.

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

#386

Post by Cytobit »

raducu wrote: post #349
dmix wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely from an economic and argicuktural perspective, is there a way for us to simply raise honey bees in more of a ‘bubble’ that is somehow protected from the giant wasps? I’d imagine from what I’ve read that a significant chunk of bees are already artificially produced and distributed for crops. That plus of course combined with a general ongoing attempt at eradication of the hornets. Or at least significant popula…

Hives are already a protective bubble, if the bees could make it more secure, they would. We could make lasers driven by ML to identify the hornets and shoot them down as they approach a hive, but that would be really expensive :)

> if the bees could make it more secure, they would

I don't think the bees really have any input.

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

#387

Post by Cytobit »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #316
divinebovine wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found wild passion fruit growing on my farm in East Texas. It had plenty of fruit growing on it.

Passion fruit isn't native to the US. Are you sure it was indeed passion fruit?

This page from the University of Florida disagrees.

https://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/plants/ornamentals/p...

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

#388

Post by zaphod4prez »

gorgoiler wrote: post #330
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 (…

This is in no way a rebuttal to your points, but merely out of interest: how does pollination by honey bee work in countries where the hornets are endemic?

Japanese bees have developed a strategy to defeat the hornets so they're better able to protect their nests. Bees in the US don't have that strategy.

Pretty cool to watch actually: https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1320152207212253185

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

#389

Post by NateEag »

coliveira wrote: post #194
NateEag wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nzen already responded to this pretty thoroughly.

I'll just add two points:

1) Individual good actions virtually never outweigh large-scale bad actions, but the world is actually worse off if individuals do not take those little positive actions. Little polluter + big polluter yields more pollution than big polluter.

2) Taking the small positive actions is actually a lot of what helps people work on the huge, difficult problems. Humans are more effective when our psychology is a unified self rather than in conflict with itself, and taking small, positive concrete steps helps us keep ourselves in alignment with our big-picture goals and ideals.

I guess both of those fit into the abstract observation that you're bifurcating - people don't have to choose between individual concrete actions and contributing to policy efforts and other high-level approaches.

By all means, if you see someone explicitly saying they choose one at the expense of the other, say something.

When they don't say that, though, don't assume that's what they're doing.

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

#390

Post by notdang »

immmmmm wrote: post #243
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 (…

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.…

is it bad if we go extinct?
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