What happens without pollinators? Animals, including us, would lose most food —vegetables, fruits and seeds. Seventy-five percent of human food depends on pollinators. Without them, our meals will center on wind-pollinated crops like grains. No tequila, either, since blue agave is bat-pollinated. We’d even lose foods eaten as leaves (spinach, lettuces), stems (asparagus, celery), tubers (potato, yam), and roots (carrot, beet) because seeds to grow them require pollination. No more chocolate, vanilla, and coffee. We’d lose trees and shrubs that have pollinator partners. Forty percent of invertebrate pollinators and 16.5 percent of vertebrates are facing extinction right now.
We wouldn't see insects, birds and bats flying around, landing on flowers, building nests, roosting in old buildings, and perched on power lines. Imagine a world without bees buzzing, butterflies flaunting glorious colors, night’s insect chorus that begins in spring and lasts through summer until the first hard frost.1 And it’s not just humans who will be affected, any animal who requires non-grassy foods will starve. Ungulates (cows, elk, deer) who eat grasses might make it if enough trees survive to provide shade, along with some aquatic life that doesn’t need higher plants for food, habitat regulation, or shelter. The consequences of plants we lose will reverberate through earth’s ecosystems and touch us all.
For years, scientists have documented threats to pollinators and announced how alarming the situation truly is. You’ve probably heard about some of the reports listed at the end of this article. The biggest is a two-year-long United Nations study2 by over 70 experts. They reviewed the most up-to-date global pollinator science, as well as local and indigenous knowledge, to produce the first global assessment of pollinator health. The full report was released in late February and approved by a congress of 124 nations. One conclusion of the UN study sums up most other research.
The variety and multiplicity of threats to pollinators and pollination generate risks to people and livelihoods. These risks are largely driven by changes in land cover and agricultural management systems, including pesticide use.
habitat changes and pesticides
Research points out either habitat change, pesticides, or both as significant causes of pollinator declines. The monarch butterfly’s eastern subpopulation in North America may be facing extinction within two decades.3 Two primary threats to the monarch’s survival are loss of host and nectar plants, and pesticide use. In the U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains, we lose 6,000 acres of monarch habitat per day. Enough milkweed host plants to sustain the eastern monarchs means 1.4 billion stems of milkweed must be planted to restore 20 million acres or more.4 Enough milkweed used to grow there.
development and conversion to agriculture
Development (buildings and infrastructure like highways) reduces forest and agricultural land.5 In 1982, data indicated that half an acre of farmland or natural habitat is eliminated for every new person added to the U.S. population. The population was 231.66 million in 1982 and 321.89 in 2015. Thus, about 1.6 million acres of natural or agricultural land per year has been developed in the past 25 years. Before intensive use of glyphosate (Roundup) and crops designed to withstand heavy application of the herbicide, croplands included host and nectar plants for pollinators. Now, ag land tends to be inhospitable to these plants and their pollinators.6
Habitat changes not due to buildings and infrastructure are primarily conversions to agriculture, especially in the center part of the eastern monarch’s range where livestock feed crops (e.g., soybeans and corn) are grown. In the western monarch population’s range (west of the Rocky Mountains), increased land has been converted from grassland pastures that included host and nectar plants to orchards and vegetable cultivation. These crops could support pollinators, in fact honeybees are brought in when orchard crops bloom. But use of some pesticides is harming their habitats and both native and introduced pollinators.7
USDA explores companion planting
In response to habitat losses due to our agricultural systems, programs that return some old practices to modern agriculture are being designed and supported by government agencies8 and conservation groups. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is funding a five year program to promote wildflowers in croplands and study the consequences. The integrated Crop Pollination Project (ICP) is an $8.6 million dollar project based on companion planting principals. This method clusters together certain plants that promote each other’s growth, add nutrient support, control pests, offer shade, and promote pollination. For example, bees know where to go for nectar and communicate with each other. Butterflies are opportunistic wanderers looking for something attractive. Nectar and host plant distributions must accommodate use styles of all pollinators including vertebrates like birds and bats.
The ICP will plant wildflower buffer zones around crops to attract wild bees and study the results. The increase in native bees and other pollinators (insect, birds and bats primarily) can supplement or replace using honeybees. This practice moves away from widespread use of the herbicide glyphosate that kills every plant not genetically designed to withstand it. Companion planting can reduce pesticide needs and requires that any insecticides used are those that don’t kill or disrupt the pollinators, which means avoiding neonictinoids (neonics).2, 7
neonictinoids
Two beekeepers in Minnesota recently set an environmental law precedent in a suit seeking compensation for hives damaged last spring by toxic neonic dust that drifted off a cornfield.9
Investigators from the state Department of Agriculture confirmed, in effect, what beekeepers have been saying for years: Even when used according to law, the most widely used class of insecticides in the world [neonictinoids] are acutely toxic to honeybees under routine circumstances. […]
The insecticide in question, clothianidin, is used as a coating on most of the corn and soybean seeds used in American agriculture. Farmers use it as a preventive to protect seedlings from insects in the soil. As the plant grows, the toxin grows with it, making the entire plant poisonous. […]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is also reviewing compounds, and … one of them, imidacloprid, showed clear damage to hives and honey production even when used appropriately on some crops. Its review of clothianidin is expected to be complete by the end of this year.
Neonics might be in your garden, too. Nursery plants are treated with these pesticides and neonics are sold for household use, although states are moving towards banning these sales. Maryland has a bill in the state congress to ban household sales of neonics as they contributed to the loss of 60 percent of the honeybees in Maryland last year. A dozen other states are considering similar legislation, as is France.10
possible outcome Of POLLINATOR extinction
What’s the solution to food crop production if we lose pollinators?11 Our meals and much of what wildlife eat are linked to pollinators. Three-quarters of human food crops need pollinators, including raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, orchard fruits and nuts, and most vegetables. Without pollinators, our meals would focus on wind-pollinated crops like rice, wheat, barley and corn. Hand pollination of crops is laborious and time sensitive. Some plants tend to have many flowers ready for pollination simultaneously, while others have flowers opening throughout the summer. Some crops are low to the ground like strawberries, while others are in trees like almonds. China already is facing the need to use human pollinators to replace insects.
A dramatic example of a solution used to counter this problem can be found in south west China, where some farmers have begun painstakingly hand-pollinating their orchards with jars of pollen and paintbrushes, due to the decline of local wild bees.
how you can help
It’s easier to stop killing pollinators due to habitat elimination and certain pesticide use than to hand pollinate millions of acres, or eat cereal grains all the time. Buying organic food and refraining from using neonics will help. We also need to reduce human population growth and to conserve and expand pollinator habitat.
Your food, landscapes, and gardens can either contribute to these problems or be part of the solution. There’s no time left to play “well it’s not fully proven” games; it’s time to act as if what you do matters because it does. Data gaps exist.12 Scientists are identifying where more research is needed to allow comparisons, explore interconnections, and document what is happening in the field. No one denies this, but neither do scientists advise waiting until these gaps are filled in before taking action. They are doing something, and so can you.
Care about how your food is grown and support organic agriculture. Don’t buy nursery plants treated with neonics and don’t use neonics yourself. Garden for pollinators and other wildlife — plant host and nectar plants.13 The Xerces Society gives specific instructions on names of neonics and how to eliminate them from your garden, including not buying pretreated plants and advocating for nurseries to not grow and sell such plants.14 Your balcony, patio or garden can be wildlife habitat, you don’t need acres of meadow or woodland.15
If earth loses pollinators, we lose more than food. We lose the animals who also depend on non-grass plants, who eat leaves, roots, fruits, and seeds. You may not be able to reverse human population explosion nor return a shopping mall to a field of wildflowers. But you have choices in your everyday life that can either benefit pollinators or add to their harm.
The Pollinator Partnership’s mission is to promote the health of pollinators, critical to food and ecosystems, through conservation, education, and research. Signature initiatives include the NAPPC (North American Pollinator Protection Campaign), National Pollinator Week, and the Ecoregional Planting Guides. Their website has guides on many pollinator issues such as bees, hummingbirds, gardens and commercial land uses (e.g., golf courses, mining and utilities).
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Sources and Citations
1. Let’s talk about insects! by SninkyPoo, Daily Kos, July 6, 2015
2. Study Shows Global Threat to Pollinators. Defenders of Wildlife, March 24, 2016
Pollinators Vital to Our Food Supply Under Threat. Press release from the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), February 26, 2016.
Unprecedented scientific report says bees and other pollinators are in dire need of help. Washington Post, February 26, 2016
3. Eastern Monarch Butterflies at Risk of Extinction Unless Numbers Increase. USGS and Scripps Institute, March 21, 2016.
4. Dr. Orley (Chip) Taylor, University of Kansas, Director of Monarch Watch, pers. comm.
5. Vanishing Open Space: Urban Sprawl and Growth In America, April 2014
6. Bee-Mergency: First National Bee Map Shows Farmland in Danger. University of Vermont research reported by The Rainforest Site, February 2016.
Wild bee decline threatens US crop production. Eureka Report, December 21, 2015.
7. 57 different pesticides found in poisoned honeybees. Tomasz Kiljanek et al., Journal of Chromatography A (2016), reported by phys.org, March 10, 2016
8. Agriculture’s Wild Ways, Earth Island Journal, March 3, 2016.
USDA launches new conservation effort to aid monarch butterflies. USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Press Release about new habitat enrichment program, November 12, 2015.
9. In Win for Beekeepers, Minnesota Links Insecticide to Damaged Hives. Organic Consumers Association, March 20, 2016. (Full article from Star Tribune)
10. Maryland’s honeybees are getting massacred, and the weapon might be in your house. Washington Post, March 24, 2016.
France moves toward full ban on pesticides blamed for harming bees. Reuters, March 18, 2016.
11. Bee decline could cause major global food production problems, expert claims. Independent, March 18, 2016.
12. GAO Report: Federal Agencies Failing Bees. reported by Common Dreams, March 11, 2016.
13. Plan your butterfly garden using nature’s design. Bésame, Daily Kos, January 16, 2016
14. Neonictinoids in your garden. The Xerces Society
15. Create a Certified Wildlife Habitat. National Wildlife Federation program provides information and resources to create suitable habitat.
USDA launches new conservation effort to aid monarch butterflies. USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Press Release about new habitat enrichment program, November 12, 2015.