Just as a neighbor and I began talking seriously about putting up a bat house to attract these amazing mosquito-eating creatures to our mosquito-infested backyards, we learn that, like the honey bee, the bat is in trouble. It may not be for the same reason(s), but it’s disturbing nonetheless:
“This is the worst crisis I’ve ever seen,” says Merlin Tuttle, founder and president of Bat Conservation International. “I think anytime you have animals as ecologically essential, and as distantly related, as bees and bats dying en masse, it should send a canary-in-the-coal-mine signal.”
We look to science for answers, but if you listen to Scott Darling, a biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, science has been asleep at the wheel:
Cracking the mystery is proving particularly challenging because scientists know so little about healthy bats. “We haven’t known much about basic bat biology before this,” Darling says. “That is science’s little secret: We really don’t know a lot of what people think we know, or what people think we should know.”
One might worry that we’re seeing the beginning of a long and ultimately anthropocidal cascade of ecological disasters—ever accelerating species loss with ever expanding and cross-amplifying ripple effects. The overarching question is: Are we screwing up this place, or is all this “nature’s way” and it just looks bad to us because … because … well, because we’re so special?
Addendum 2008.08.02: Another canary in the mineshaft: jellyfish. Not that it means anything, but at the Outer Banks a couple of weeks ago I experienced a stinging sensation on my thigh after I’d come back from the beach. Eventually I discovered a little glob of sticky black goo in the pocket of my trunks. A piece of jellyfish. There were a few days when the kids reported a jellyfish problem, but this has happened just about every year we’re down there, and the jelly-in-the-trunks trick could’ve happened any time. The Times article is worrisome, though:
From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.
But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.
“These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,'” said Dr. Josep-María Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years.
The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.
