I had another thread a few days ago about a mass bee die off which I heard about from the BBC, but from no other source. I also heard about another, more local abnormal die-off on the BBC today, though this one doesn't strike me as quite as severe. I don't know if these really belong in the D&D (what is there to debate?) but I try to put anything dealing with religion, politics, or other contentious subjects (like the environment) here. source [rquoter] Texas dolphin die-off puzzles scientists DALLAS (Reuters) - The stranding deaths of about 60 bottlenose dolphins on Texas beaches over the past three weeks has puzzled researchers and is a cause for concern during the calving season, a senior scientist said on Monday. "This is the calving season so we often have strandings at this time of the year. It's tough to be an air-breather born in the water," said Dr. Daniel F. Cowan, professor of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and director of the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network. "But over the last few weeks we have had about 3 to 4 times the usual mortality," he told Reuters. Most of the carcasses were in an advanced state of decomposition, suggesting that they were carried to Texas beaches from areas further off or up the shore. Suspected causes include parasites, an outbreak of infectious diseases or red tide, an algal bloom prompted by fertilizers or other excess nutrients. Most of the dolphins have been too decomposed for a necropsy -- the animal version of an autopsy -- and so volunteers have been burying them on the beaches. Several of the dolphins which have washed up on shore have been young with umbilical cords still attached. © Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved. [/rquoter] If there is a whole extensive string of these abnormal die-offs, like 15 or 20 in a row, that would probably a pretty good leading indicator that there is something seriously wrong with the environment, be it global warming, or whatever. I know if the sea temprature gets higher, it is supposed to create conditions for diatom blooms, or red tides which can do stuff like this, and on a wide enough basis could potentially kill whole marine ecosystems. I'm not saying that this is the case here, but this combined with the other story about bees is enough to make me raise an eyebrow.
I never saw your bee die-off thread, but my guess to that would be residual carbamate insecticides, particularly Aldicarb which is known to be supertoxic to bees. But almost any organochlorine still in the environment is a possible contributor as well.
I had heard about the bees on NPR -- if it is the story about colonies disappearing. In the story, they said it probably was not insecticides, because that usually leaves lots of dead bees near the colony. In this case, the bees were nowhere to be found. They were suggesting it was a virus of some kind. In any case, I'd be surprised if the bee die-off and the dolphin die-off were symptoms of the same cause. So, it doesn't cause me much alarm about a great monolithic environmental threat. Instead it makes me worried about the legions of small threats we always face.
Howabout: We shouldn't sacrifice economic development just because Flipper goes Jim Jones on us. Seriously though very troubling as Dolphins being predators higher up on the food chain their die offs might signal even more severe problems with the oceans.
