Elaine Meinel Supkis
We have been under assault here on my mountain. Every mountain top to the east of us including our own has been taken over by gypsy moths. Over the last two weeks, I watched in horror as they methodically stripped all the leaves off of every tree, moving relentlessly downwards, decimating our precious hardwood forests.
I make money harvesting hardwoods here every ten years. This is a great blow to us because the trees won't add much size this growing year thanks to these pests. If they strip the trees bare for ten years running, I will lose all my trees! This is a catastrophe that is directly connected with careless human activites.
Like the Dutch Elm Disease, these scourge was brought about by humans moving organisms across great distances. This is why understanding ecosystems and how they work is very important and not due to idle curiousity, either, but because it is life and death, literally.
When continents collide or break away from each other as they move about the planet, each of these events cause a ecological cascade. Entire families of species can be rapidly wiped out. The arrival of a pair of mating rats on an island can mean the end of millions of years of evolution of nearly all the birds residing there, for example.
Up until humans came along, these catastrophic events were rare. Ecosystems could run along their happy tracks achieving stability and diversity for millions of years. Humans are now the world-girdling bridge that connects all continents and islands. Because of this, many life forms from various ecosystems can now escape and proliferate in virgin territory. Because they are aliens and are outside their normal constraints, they destroy the balance of any system they enter, often annihilating their host environment.
Only after destroying everything, does a new natural order arise out of the ashes. But thanks to the human continental bridge, there is no serenity whereby a new equilibrium can be established. So the system takes one blow after another as all species end up shifting around the planet, carried by humans.
Lizards brought into America as pets, for example, are now proliferating in various communities, eating the wild birds, destroying other animal and plant habitats. Pythons released into the Florida swamps are now taking over and battling alligators, for example. They eat birds, too, and the bird population is dropping rapidly because birds in America are not atuned to surviving python attacks unlike say, Amazonian birds.
Over 5 million years, a new natural order would evolve in Florida except humans will prevent this by constantly introducing more and more alien species. This constant churning is causing the ecosystem flywheel to spin too fast and we might get an overall species crash.
The predators that keep gypsy moths under control didn't make it over here and if they did, they take many more years to establish populations sufficient to eat the tremendous excess of gypsy moth populations. The trees can't wait 5,000 years. They will dissappear and the entire ecosystem which they are a key part will collapse. For stripped trees produce little or no nuts or seeds! The immature seeds on all the oaks are gone! The bugs ate them!
So the nut foraging animals will now starve during the long winter.
The predators that live off of these creatures will starve, too. I have a hawk family that lives in the woods above. They need to hunt small game all winter. They will starve! I hear the song birds lament the sudden lack of foliage protecting their nests. Now predators can easily spot them and they can't fly through the lower stories of the forest canopy. They are exposed. So the hunting animals will grow fat on them only this means there won't be many nestlings next season.
It is already with great alarm, I am watching world migratory bird populations drop ever lower. I have blue birds and gold finches, humming birds and blue jays on my property. A host of bird species but they are all too few. The forests no longer ring with their songs at sunrise and sunset in summer. They sing but the chorus is depressingly thin.
When humans invaded North and South America, they killed off or made life pretty impossible for the native fauna. The invasion of european dogs and wolves changed the balance of nature. Mastodonts that evolved for eons, from 45 million years ago and onwards, were totally terminated with amazing speed as the invaders crossed over during the low sea level period of the last Ice Age.
Mastodonts might have survived one invader but not the host of hunters, human and animal, that crossed over. When North and South America joined up as South America rotated away from Antarctica, breaking the isthmus connecting them and a new isthmus rose up to connect North and South America, an army of predators from the north stalked south, killing a tremendous number of fauna down there. All, exterminated completely. Then the panthers and such dropped in numbers as they eked out a living on the few remaining prey.
The camel family survived this holocaust by retreating to the high mountains of the Andes which rose during this same time period, giving them some bare shelter.
I haven't been posting much lately because of the gypsy moth invasion. I am desperately trying to save my trees. I came up with a possible solution to keep the pests down slightly. I wrapped my saplings and fruit trees' trunks with plastic wrap and then painted tar on the top of it.
The wrap has to be belled outwards at the bottom to form a trap to those pests climbing the trunk. The few that get past it get stuck on the tar.
Mostly, I pluck them off the leaves. They are everywhere. The few plants I have overlooked have been totally stripped bare, particularily ones like my poor rose bushes. In hours, everything is gone!
So I have to stop posting now, the sun is up. The bugs are out. They have coated the roads here about, millions of them crushed under wheels as they wiggle across the road seeking new trees and bushes to devour.
It is quite disgusting. They are in our hair, our clothes, climbing all over the house. Gah!
Elaine, this is terrible! Heavens, I wish there were something we could do to help. Do focus on your trees. ... House is sold. I will talk to you soon. Take care and much much luck and love.
Posted by: D.F. Facti | May 31, 2006 at 01:28 PM
Good news for you!!!!!
I am so glad.
You would just hate what is going on here. Gah. The roads are slippery with dead bugs.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | May 31, 2006 at 04:17 PM
By doing we learn.
Posted by: Beats by Dre wholesale | February 01, 2012 at 02:28 AM