A court ruled this week that the California Endangered Species Act (CESA) can apply to invertebrates, including insects.
This means legal protections will be in place for four native, endangered bumblebee species in California.
The decision marks the end of a court battle between conservation groups and a consortium of large-scale industrial agricultural interests.
An estimated 28% of all bumblebees in North America are at risk of extinction, with consequences for ecosystems and crops, as one-third of food production depends on pollinators.
A California court has ruled that state legislation on endangered species can apply to invertebrates. The decision this week by the Third District Court of Appeal means insects, including four endangered native Californian bumblebee species and the monarch butterfly, will receive much-needed protection under the California Endangered Species Act.
“We are celebrating today’s decision that insects and other invertebrates are eligible for protection under CESA,” Sarina Jepsen, director of endangered species at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, said in a press release. “The Court’s decision allows California to protect some of its most endangered pollinators, a step which will contribute to the resilience of the state’s native ecosystems and farms.”
In 2018, the Xerces Society, the Center for Food Safety (CFS), and Defenders of Wildlife petitioned the state of California to list four species of native bumblebees as endangered under CESA.
The California Fish and Game Commission voted to begin the process of listing these bees as endangered in 2019, but were then sued by a “consortium of California’s large scale industrial agricultural interests,” according to a Xerces Society press release. The trial court sided with the agricultural consortium, and the conservation groups appealed that decision in 2021. The decision this week marks a win for the conservation groups.
The four species are the western bumblebee (Bombus occidentalis), whose relative abundance has declined by 84%; the Suckley cuckoo bumblebee (Bombus suckleyi) which is considered critically endangered on the IUCN Red List and whose range has shrunk by 58%; the Crotch’s bumblebee (Bombus crotchii), now found in just 20% of its historical range; and Franklin’s bumblebee (Bombus franklini) which, despite extensive annual surveys, has not been seen since 2006.
Photo by Jiří Mikoláš
According to California law, protections under the CESA mean that public agencies should not approve projects that would “jeopardize the continued existence” of any endangered or threatened species or adversely modify their habitat. These species are also protected from being removed from the wild or killed.
“It is a great day for California’s bumble bees!” said Pamela Flick, California program director with Defenders of Wildlife.
Sam Joyce, a certified law student with the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic who argued the case in the Third District, said the CESA is an important tool to protect and restore endangered species. He said the court’s ruling “ensures that CESA will fulfill its purpose of conserving ‘any endangered species’ by protecting the full range of California’s biodiversity, including terrestrial invertebrates.”
The IUCN’s Bumble Bee Specialist Group reports that 28% of all bumblebees in North America are at risk of extinction. Alarming on its own, this decline may also have consequences for ecosystems and crops, as one-third of food production depends on pollinators like bees.
“With one out of every three bites of food we eat coming from a crop pollinated by bees, this court decision is critical to protecting our food supply,” said Rebecca Spector, West Coast director at the Center for Food Safety. “The decision clarifies that insects such as bees qualify for protections under CESA, which are necessary to ensure that populations of endangered species can survive and thrive.”
A first-of-its-kind experimental study has found that climate change reduces the abundance of wildflowers and causes them to produce less nectar and fewer and lighter seeds.
These changes also impact pollinating insects visiting the flowers: they have to visit more flowers, more frequently, to gather the required food.
Fewer flowers imply reduced reproductive fitness in plants, as well as fewer food resources for invertebrates that rely on these plants for food, habitat and shelter.
Overall, climate change may disturb the composition of wildflower species and their pollinators, impacting agricultural crop yields, researchers say.
Think of climate change, and you’ll probably picture devastating floods, raging wildfires, or parched earth. For the environmentally savvy, coral bleaching or masses of refugees may also make it to the list. Not many of us would think of the vibrant wildflowers in nearby meadows as victims of climate change. But the future of these pretty blooms could be gloomy in the face of a warming planet, suggests a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.
This first-of-its-kind study, conducted in the U.K., found that wildflowers across Northern Europe would likely see a steep decline in abundance — up to 40%. In the experimental study, the researchers simulated the warmer, wetter conditions predicted for the region due to climate change. Under this new scenario, some species of plants produced flowers with 60% less nectar and fewer or lighter seeds. Due to these changes, pollinating insects had to visit more flowers to gather the needed pollen and nectar, and visited each flower more frequently.
“Our results demonstrate that climate warming could have severe consequences for some species of wildflowers and their pollinators in agricultural systems, and shows that their community composition is likely to change in the future,” said lead author Ellen D. Moss, a research associate at Newcastle University in the U.K.
While theoretical studies have predicted that climate change could accelerate pollinator losses and wildflower declines, Moss’s study marks the first time scientists have put the theory to the test in an experimental setting. And previous climate change studies have focused on a small number of either plants or pollinating insects in a particular region, and not looked at the effects at a community level.
“This study adds to the weight of evidence that pollinators are at risk from multiple stressors,” said ecologist Jane Stout from Trinity College Dublin, who was not involved in the study. “They are losing places to feed and breed, and they are stressed by pesticides, disease and changes in climate.”
To do this, the researchers sowed spring wheat and a few native wildflowers, which grow on wheat farms, in small agricultural plots in a North Yorkshire farm. They then heated some of these plots with infrared heaters to increase the soil temperature by 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) and they increased the water supply by 40% to mimic the predicted wetter conditions from future climate change for Northern Europe. The non-heated plots acted as a control in their experiments to compare their results with.
For two flowering seasons, 2014 and 2015, the researchers tracked the different plant species that grew in these plots, the number of flowers they produced, the volume of nectar in them, and the weight of the dried seeds resulting from the flowers. They also collected information about visiting insect pollinators, including their visiting patterns to both the experimental and untouched plots.
The study reported 25 plant species and 80 insect species in 2014, and 19 plant and 69 insect species in 2015. Higher temperatures and more precipitation didn’t change what species were found in the plots, with the most abundant wildflowers being corn marigold (Glebionis segetum), cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), common field-speedwell (Veronica persica), shepherd’s purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris), chickweed (Stellaria media) and red dead-nettle (Lamium purpureum).
Not only did wildlife abundance plunge by up to 40% in the heated plots, most of the plants in these plots also had fewer seeds in the seed heads, and the seeds weighed much less than those in non-heated plots. The only exception was the generalist weed known as common field-speedwell. While it produced more and heavier seeds in the heated plots, its flowers secreted 65% less nectar, making it a less popular flower with pollinators.
“A key finding [of the study] is that not all wild plant species respond to experimental manipulation in the same way, and so the implications for plant communities, and their interactions with pollinators, are complex to predict,” Stout said. Nevertheless, the general decrease in both the abundance and the number of seeds produced is of concern, she added, “because loss of floral resources in the landscape is already a major driver of pollinator decline.”
The study also found marked changes in the feeding behavior of pollinators in the heated plots. Hoverflies, honeybees and bumblebees, which were the most abundant insects, visited more flowers, and increased the frequency of their visits to the same flower to collect the nectar and pollen they needed.
“Fewer flowers and less nectar mean less food for pollinators,” Moss said, adding that such conditions may drive competition between pollinators and force them to choose less optimal flowers. “This could reduce their fitness and survival.”
Veronica persica (also known as field-speedwell) is a flowering plant in the plantain family Plantaginaceae. Source: AnRo0002, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A gloomy future for the blooms
Worldwide, two in five plants, including wildflowers, are threatened with extinction due to land use change for agriculture, housing and construction. In California, which is experiencing increasingly hotter and drier winters due to climate change, studies have recorded a decline of wildflower species by 15% in 15 years. In the U.K., human activities have destroyed about 97% of wildflower meadows since the 1930s, threatening once commonly seen plants like wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca), harebell (Campanula rotundifolia), and ragged robin (Silene flos-cuculi).
The loss of wildflowers also has a knock-on effect on thousands of insect species, including pollinators like bees and herbivores like aphids, grasshoppers and caterpillars. It also hits populations of natural pest controllers like spiders, ladybirds and lacewings that take shelter in the meadows. Studies show that, worldwide, a quarter of known bee species have not been seen since the 1990s, and loss of habitat is one of the primary reasons for the decline.
“[Climate change] risks crop pollination and our own food supply, but perhaps of more concern is the risk to wild plant pollination and our ecosystems and all the other benefits we get from them,” Stout said.
Tackling climate change by rapidly decreasing emissions would save at least some of the blooms, but in the meantime, there are other steps that could prevent a catastrophic future for wildflowers.
“The main things that will improve ecosystem resilience in the context of wildflowers and pollinators is to improve habitat quantity, quality and connectivity,” Moss said. “We need to leave more wild spaces for native plants and insects and try to connect these areas up so that these patches of high-quality habitat are not too small or too far apart.”
Citations:
Moss, E. D., & Evans, D. M. (2022). Experimental climate warming reduces floral resources and alters insect visitation and wildflower seed set in a cereal agro-ecosystem. Frontiers in Plant Science. doi:10.3389/fpls.2022.826205
(2020). State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2020. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. doi:10.34885/172
Harrison, S. P., Gornish, E. S., & Copeland, S. (2015). Climate-driven diversity loss in a grassland community. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8672-8677. doi:10.1073/pnas.1502074112
Zattara, E. E., & Aizen, M. A. (2021). Worldwide occurrence records suggest a global decline in bee species richness. One Earth, 4(1), 114-123. doi:10.1016/j.oneear.2020.12.005
E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success. By the time I met Edward O. Wilson in 1982, he had already made at least five such contributions to science.
Each of his seminal contributions fundamentally changed the way scientists approached these disciplines, and explained why E.O.—as he was fondly known—was an academic god for many young scientists like me. This astonishing record of achievement may have been due to his phenomenal ability to piece together new ideas using information garnered from disparate fields of study.
Big insights from small subjects
In 1982 I cautiously sat down next to the great man during a break at a small conference on social insects. He turned, extended his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.” Then we talked until it was time to get back to business.
Three hours later I approached him again, this time without trepidation because surely now we were the best of friends. He turned, extended his hand, and said “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
Wilson forgetting me, but remaining kind and interested anyway, showed that beneath his many layers of brilliance was a real person and a compassionate one. I was fresh out of graduate school, and doubt that another person at that conference knew less than I — something I’m sure Wilson discovered as soon as I opened my mouth. Yet he didn’t hesitate to extend himself to me, not once but twice.
Thirty-two years later, in 2014, we met again. I had been invited to speak in a ceremony honoring his receipt of the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal for Earth and Environmental Science. The award honored Wilson’s lifetime achievements in science, but particularly his many efforts to save life on Earth.
My work studying native plants and insects, and how crucial they are to food webs, was inspired by Wilson’s eloquent descriptions of biodiversity and how the myriad interactions among species create the conditions that enable the very existence of such species.
I spent the first decades of my career studying the evolution of insect parental care, and Wilson’s early writings provided a number of testable hypotheses that guided that research. But his 1992 book, “The Diversity of Life,” resonated deeply with me and became the basis for an eventual turn in my career path.
Though I am an entomologist, I did not realize that insects were “the little things that run the world” until Wilson explained why this is so in 1987. Like nearly all scientists and nonscientists alike, my understanding of how biodiversity sustains humans was embarrassingly cursory. Fortunately, Wilson opened our eyes.
Throughout his career Wilson flatly rejected the notion held by many scholars that natural history—the study of the natural world through observation rather than experimentation—was unimportant. He proudly labeled himself a naturalist, and communicated the urgent need to study and preserve the natural world. Decades before it was in vogue, he recognized that our refusal to acknowledge the Earth’s limits, coupled with the unsustainability of perpetual economic growth, had set humans well on their way to ecological oblivion.
Wilson understood that humans’ reckless treatment of the ecosystems that support us was not only a recipe for our own demise. It was forcing the biodiversity he so cherished into the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first one caused by an animal: us.
Upper Guinean Forest change from 1975 to 2013. Source: USGS.
E.O. Wilson long advocated conserving the world’s biodiversity hot spots—zones with high numbers of native species where habitats are most endangered. This image shows deforestation from 1975 to 2013 in one such area, West Africa’s Upper Guinean Forest. USGS
A broad vision for conservation
And so, to his lifelong fascination with ants, E. O. Wilson added a second passion: guiding humanity toward a more sustainable existence. To do that, he knew he had to reach beyond the towers of academia and write for the public, and that one book would not suffice. Learning requires repeated exposure, and that is what Wilson delivered in “The Diversity of Life,” “Biophilia,” “The Future of Life,” “The Creation” and his final plea in 2016, “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.”
As Wilson aged, desperation and urgency replaced political correctness in his writings. He boldly exposed ecological destruction caused by fundamentalist religions and unrestricted population growth, and challenged the central dogma of conservation biology, demonstrating that conservation could not succeed if restricted to tiny, isolated habitat patches.
“Conservation is a discipline with a deadline.”
—Edward O. Wilson
In “Half Earth,” he distilled a lifetime of ecological knowledge into one simple tenet: Life as we know it can be sustained only if we preserve functioning ecosystems on at least half of planet Earth.
But is this possible? Nearly half of the planet is used for some form of agriculture, and 7.9 billion people and their vast network of infrastructure occupy the other half.
As I see it, the only way to realize E.O.’s lifelong wish is learn to coexist with nature, in the same place, at the same time. It is essential to bury forever the notion that humans are here and nature is someplace else. Providing a blueprint for this radical cultural transformation has been my goal for the last 20 years, and I am honored that it melds with E.O. Wilson’s dream.
There is no time to waste in this effort. Wilson himself once said, “Conservation is a discipline with a deadline.” Whether humans have the wisdom to meet that deadline remains to be seen.
Doug Tallamy is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has authored 103 research publications and has taught insect related courses for 40 years.
