I planted a melon on the 5th floor window of the apartment building in the middle of the concrete jungle where I live. I was in constant angst about how on earth would I pollinate the small flowers. I even bought a small paintbrush, just in case.
And then small, black, solitary bees and other unknown insects started to swarm the yellow flowers. Later on spiders weaved their nets around the flowers, so a small ecosystem started to form. In the end it successfully grew three very tasty melons weighing around 2kg each.
So, it's quite interesting that in the middle of a city, where you rarely even see insects, just by planting an expansive fruit plant, brings in a lot of visitors from the insect world.
As an added plus the family living on the 4th floor started complaining that the plant started to grow around their windows and I should do something with it...
I've seen an amazing variety of bees and wasps since we planted a native wildflower garden. They may not be unknown to science but most are new to me and they seem to change very few weeks, depending on what's blooming.
That's a wonderful thing you did - it's helping the bees and other pollinators and bringing you enjoyment.
To anyone else wanting to do similar - PLEASE be sure to plant only species and varieties native to YOUR area. It's much more beneficial all around than random "wildflowers" that are native to who knows where.
I'm a committee to volunteer looking after a graveyard down the road from me.
We've just gained permission from the city council that we can make adaptions to the landscape including planting floral life that encourage wildlife, Bird boxes and Bat Boxes are allowed too. Sort of excited as this ties in to my life dream of having an animal sanctuary.
The problem is that non-native species, planted with the best of intentions, can become invasive and choke out native populations. See for example the Buddleia, which in the UK was often lauded as 'the butterfly bush' and which is now a massive nuisance across the nations railways and wildlife reserves.
I have Buddleia in my garden (which otherwise has a native focus). It's not at all invasive where I am, in upstate NY, probably due to the cold winters. In a colder winter it dies back to the roots and may not survive at all.
Now, purple loosestrife is still all over, despite the biocontrol. And don't get me started about Phragmites or Alliaria petiolata (garlic mustard).
I figure that native plants give an edge to native pollinators. The explosion of spotted lantern flies shows how non-native plants can make things worse. Also, I'm ignorant when it comes to ecology. So I won't pretend to know how many roles a native plant plays throughout its lifecycle, let alone which non-native plants can fit those roles while looking pretty.
From what I've learned, there are generalist pollinators (i.e. european honeybees) and specialist pollinators (i.e. your local native bees). Generalists can use any plant, but specialists require particular plants to complete their life cycles. So your intuition is basically correct; the honeybees won't care, but the native ones will appreciate a native plant.
When I ask the search engine about native plants in the nearest metropoly, closest I get is someone selling seed packs, without any clear scientific basis for their being native.
Your local university should have a horticulture department with a list. A nursery not attached to a grocery or hardware store will likely have a list as well. Usually they will label the origin of each plant.
My city has a designated group of people focused on ecological restoration of all sorts of public spaces. They’re called the “Parks Service” which doesn’t fully entail their role, but they’re all very experienced and educated regarding local native ecology.
I was surprised we have this, so you might as well. I only discovered it because I volunteer to help restore public spaces and had the good fortune of meeting the city’s team on one occasion. They’re awesome. I wish I’d known sooner. It’s an incredible resource to have.
Is easier than ever to identify a plant with internet, but some time ago people bough handbooks that provided decades of joy and discoveries. Support the writers that provide a better experience showing you the whole picture instead a small piece without context.
Honestly, it's mostly a lost cause and maybe a dubious one, if you walk into any woods or meadow in the northeast you'll find "invasive" species everywhere... and native pollinators all over them. Actively suppressing those non-natives may actually do more harm than good.
My little hobby farm is covered in invasive comfrey, a non-native variety of it ("Russian" comfrey, a wild hybrid.) Anywhere I don't mow, it pops up. It blooms all season, little pink flowers full of nectar. The native bumble bees go crazy for it. (photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/C79PJpdRzuD/)
Native plants are great, but there's a lot to pick apart in the native-vs-invasives narrative. It's really not that black and white.
EDIT: the reverse is also true... European honeybees go completely bonkers for the (very native) goldenrod that is all over the place right now. Makes great photos (https://www.instagram.com/p/C_WAGSmxs0K/?img_index=1)
Many invasives are everywhere, indeed. But I don't think it's necessary to be fatalistic about it.
My point, though, is that if you are actively planting things, you should use ones that are endemic to your area. And why not, you're tipping the scales ever so slightly towards the natives.
We hike a lot, usually twice a weekend, and whenever we can, we pull an invasive tansy which is hepatoxic to deer and other native animals. Since we started this practice a couple years ago, there seems to be a noticeable reduction of tansy along our more frequented trails.
Another non-native around here is a European beachgrass which early settlers planted to "stabilize" the sand dunes along beaches. It has done that for sure but has also taken over and become a monoculture and destroyed the dune dynamics and crowded out all the native plants. It's extremely hard to remove and require either a lot of hand digging or herbicide application. Over many years of work, the situation is improving though.
Also, "invasive" has gained the connotation of "bad" for some reason, as though regions and their flora/fauna do not change and have not changed over time. Species invade. Such is the ecosystem.
Definitely. Obviously the rate of change is crazy higher than anything pre-anthropocene but... but it's more broadly just part of biology.
imho there's a kind of unfortunate essentialist philosophy which runs rampant among some "ecologists" and which has seeped into the public sphere... which believes that "nature" is a self-balancing system, and it is only our interference (as something "outside" nature) that breaks this. And this gets tied into the "natives" vs "invasives" dialog, as well. I think this is profoundly wrong. Nature is chaos. (Said in Werner Herzog voice, or something).
Consider that the ice age only ended just over 10,000 years ago -- which is an extremely short time ago in geological and evolutionary terms -- and every forest, meadow or natural space you see in (temperate North America and Europe at least) is very new and was "invaded" after the glaciers melted and as the climate warmed. In some cases quite recently.
As you point out, the problem is that the rate of change is crazy higher than what almost all multi-celled life is used to.
I'm on board with your view that we are a part of nature, not separate, but when I think of previous speed-ups in rate of change (i.e. sexual selection to allow more rapid gene reshuffling, or epigenetic modification which allows more flexibility from the same genes) these have been spread across multiple species.
The acceleration we are currently seeing is basically due to the industrial revolution, which is due to people finding an net energy positive fuel source and leveraging this.
Nature is a chaotic system, yes, but chaotic systems have balance and tend to have semi-regular orbits.
By so drastically changing the rate of change past what any other living thing can match, we are on course to push the system into a new regime. Which is unlikely to be as pleasant as the one we currently enjoy.
I mean, see my point above about rate of change following the end of the ice ages. The part of North America I'm in, it's actually really young in evolutionary terms. And was really in constant intense flux even prior to European settlement.
And the locals here (Anishinaabe and Iriquois) also intervened heavily with fire and planting for thousands of years, too.
More broadly we're committing ecocide in much more terrible ways.
All that said, I tend to plant natives because they're usually (but not always) better adapted. Apples, I had to spray the crap out of and cut all of mine down. Pawpaws? Took care of themselves. Inter-specific "hybrid" grapes (with North American vitis ancestry) require almost no spraying, while v. vinifera is weak and requires constant intervention (I also do my own grape breeding). I had dwarf sour cherries bred in western Canada, and they can't handle the heat and humidity here. Native black cherry grows fantastic (I've thought about trying to breed with it).
However here's the thing. Among native plant advocates there's this kind of schizo thing. On one hand we're supposed to plant natives because they're better adapted for our environment. On the other hand we're supposed to root out the invasives because they're out-competing the natives and pushing them out. Huh? Which is it? Adapted for this place, or too weak to thrive in this place?
Not quite. Upper great lakes (southern Ontario). Right at the edge (like literally within a few miles) of where these "southern" species (pawpaw, sassafras, etc.) can survive.
Figs can't survive the winter here without protection, unfortunately.
> However here's the thing. Among native plant advocates there's this kind of schizo thing. On one hand we're supposed to plant natives because they're better adapted for our environment. On the other hand we're supposed to root out the invasives because they're out-competing the natives and pushing them out. Huh? Which is it? Adapted for this place, or too weak to thrive in this place?
Have you actually ever heard someone make the first argument? I haven't, because it would indeed be a very stupid argument. Natives are preferred because other species are adapted to having them around. Lose a particular tree, and you might lose habitat for many others - birds, insects, fungi... this can be a cascading effect and contribute to ecosystem collapse.
Yeah. It's a strawman argument (especially equating non-native with invasive). I'd much rather have "schizos" dogmatically enforcing the native flora/fauna rule than someone creating an ecological dead zone by planting invasive bamboo in their backyard.
If we can recognize monoculture is bad, we can also recognize why invasive species are bad. To your point about cascading effects and to be topical - this is the exact problem with honeybees: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266651582...
It's all fun and games until the honeybees get sick, the native bee population is catastrophically depleted (due in part to the honeybees), and there is no one left to pollinate.
i think its more about having no natural enemies that hinder plants at going totally crazy.
for exampley if a tiger is put in the zebra cage the zebras have a problem and nothing will hinder the tiger to kill them all or reduce his killing to a natural balance where zebras have the chance to be population stable.
i have friends working in biology and they have no problem with new species in new regions if the adapt well and are prepared for the future or in other words make the ecology more stable.
but I get your point. many people are viewing it as black and white and have extrem opinions
Yes… but that delicate balance they describe in the article? The symbiotic relationship between one specific bee that only pollinates one specific flower? That delicate balance is interrupted when we introduce non-native plants. It’s not guaranteed to be a problem, nor a catastrophic one. But sometimes it is. It’s simply better to select local plants when possible because we don’t yet understand all the relationships that make established ecosystems humm.
I’m not nazi about it, there are plenty of nonnative species in my garden, but we have the awesome tiny bees that visit one specific tiny purple flower. I’d hate to crowd them out by accident so I try to plant local varieties when I can. And the bees we get are fantastic. I can’t wait to start identifying them.
"Quantifying Threats to Imperiled Species in the United States: Assessing the relative importance of habitat destruction, alien species, pollution, overexploitation, and disease"
exactly. climate change for example demands a change of fauna in certain regions.
i live in europe and I had to find out that many trees that I thought where endemic are not.
oranges or apples are a good example. or mullberry.
Yeah, I actually think humans have an important role to play in helping build resilience in natural areas during this extremely rapid change. In identifying species that thrive in the new margins and changed areas.
It seems we can't (actually, won't) stop our idiocy. Some of us are going to have to act as bigger-picture gardeners.
Blind adherence to "this isn't native" isn't going to help. We may have to reach to things that are native in areas adjacent (or not even) but warmer/dryer/wetter/etc and encourage them.
There is a large body of peer-reviewed research showing the enormous damage that invasives species to do ecosystems. Pollinators will use non-native species if they don't have anything else available, but pollinator diversity and abundance is always less than what you'd find in a native-dominated plant assemblage.
Yep, I have a huge native plant garden and some non-native basil I've let flower and the native garden might as well not exist to the bees. There's 10-15 bees on the basil from sunup to sundown.
Aside: I planted a "columnar" basil this year I got from a local grower. Not sure of species, etc but small little leaves, seems way more drought and heat tolerant (I've completely neglected it) and one thing that's great about it is that it seems to just.. not... go to seed and flower.
I always end up with too much basil and it goes bonkers all over the garden. Pine nuts and parmesan are way too expensive to make pesto at any quantity to keep up with the basil.
- You can make some tasty pesto-like dishes with other nuts. Walnut is nice with a little less cheese and more lemon. Pistachio is good too, and you can cut the parmesan with 50% extra-sharp white cheddar to reduce costs. None of those sorts of alternatives are the same, but they're good and can be used similarly.
- Basil is just another mint and works well with similar pairings. A basil-watermelon salad, or basil-cucumber infused water are nice summery treats.
- If you ever make cocktails for your friends, you can preserve an awful lot of basil in a homemade simple syrup. It pairs nicely with lemon, and an easy thing to get started with would be a lemon basil vodka martini.
- Pizza dough is much easier and cheaper to make than people give it credit for (and it's better as it ferments longer, just throw it in the fridge when you're done, and it'll be ready for 3-10 days when you need it, cutting down the latency between starting cooking and finishing dinner). Garlic powder and fresh herbs take it up a notch.
- You can cook up a ton of basil with some shallots, hot red peppers, and a few other things to make a thick, herby, sweet, spicy sauce to serve with rice (basil in this preparation will be whole leaves and is the star of the dish).
And so on. I think you'd struggle to use more than 10-20 leaves per day in a family of 2-4, so preservation techniques (canned sauces, frozen cubes of basil, ...) might still be important, but there are tons of options.
A nice grana padano is something like $0.45 for typical pesto servings (1/4 cup of grated cheese). The other ingredients are less. It's like $2 total, counting the pine nuts, for a full multi-person serving.
That's not nothing, but 2.5k calories of rice and beans is also O(dollars). Is adding the luxury of some pesto _really_ that expensive, especially if you only have it once every 2-3 days?
> squirrels eating them first
Most people are opposed to this, but squirrels are delicious (comment if you want recipes, downvote otherwise (or any other action that seems reasonable)), and when they start dying they don't like to lounge around your hazelnut tree anymore.
The "nothing on it" problem is hard to do anything about. Squirrels in my neck of the woods have 4-12oz of meat on them (1-3 daily servings of protein). Other parts of the world might have less, probably not much more. It's tightly wrapped around small bones though, so any presentation attempting to avoid waste should probably include the bones. It's commonly served either whole, split into halves, or thirds (hind-quarters, back, front-quarters). If you want to be fully satisfied on just meat, you'll probably need more than one per person. We usually cooked up 20 or so squirrels for every 6-8 people, along with a little cornbread.
Squirrel being tough and sinewy is easier to do something about. Kind of like flank steak, the point isn't to replace a wagyu ribeye or a filet of cod; it's a different texture. You still have to cook it some way that makes it tender enough to eat, but aside from that you have tons of options.
An easy (simplistic) solution for most wild game is marinating it in buttermilk, breading it, and deep-frying it. The buttermilk acts as a mild presevative, breaks down meat tissues, and tamps down certain "gamey" flavors like iron. It also helps the breading you'll add later stick to the meat and improves the thickness and flavor of that breading. The breading being damp lowers the temperature the meat cooks at, letting it cook fairly evenly and making it easier to pull out while it's still tender. It's hard to go wrong with crispy, browned, salty, fried food, and deep-fried squirrel is no exception.
Any other even, fast-cooking method suffices similarly. It won't be tender, but it'll be tasty and tender enough to eat. Broiling with rosemary and butter is fine, as is basting with a butter sage sauce. You just don't want to get too much protein mass too hot and toughen it excessively unless you're going to cook it for ages and break down the collagen. Treat it in one of the many ways you'd treat a steak, and you'll have a tougher, more flavorful steak.
Most other tough cuts you normally see in the kitchen involve some sort of mechanical softening (meat mallet, thin cross-grain slices, ....). Squirrel is less amenable to that because of how much prep work it is to remove from the bone ahead of time. Those recipes all work (you can make a killer squirrel taco for example), but I don't think it's usually worth the effort.
The other classic way to handle tougher cuts of meat is to cook them long enough to chemically break down those fibers. Something like 180F-200F for 6+ hours. That can be braised (red wine + stock like a coq au vin, white wine + dried beans in a sort of cassoulet variant, tomato + stock + orange + bay relicating kind of a beef stew, ...) as an example, but you could also go with smoked or BBQ or any other slow-cooked meat recipe. Squirrel typically has a stronger flavor than beef or bison, stronger than a new zealand lamb, and weaker (and different) from an argentenian lamb. It's all just red meat, but you might need more or less of some ingredients for everything to balance out nicely.
You might be surprised. If it's something you want to pursue, or just for general interest, iNaturalist and its related Seek app are the best places I know to start - if it's common, they'll tell you what it is; if not, there's nowhere better in the world for an entomological layperson to reach those who might be able to say - or who might be very interested in the fact that they can't!
I was astonished when I read "Life on a Little Known Planet: A Biologist's View of Insects and Their World" [1]. The author was an entomologist who was one of the world's foremost experts on parasitic wasps.
He'd put out traps to catch flying insects at his home over the summer in, if I recall correctly, New England, and often find ones that he didn't recognize. He'd even find parasitic wasps he didn't recognize. Upon further checking he'd find that many of these were unknown to science.
I'd always thought that if you wanted to find insects unknown to science you'd have to go to isolated areas that had not been well explored.
There was a good illustration in the book of how little we know. There was some invasive insect that was causing a lot of damage to California orange crops [2]. The invasive insect was native to Florida. In Florida its population was kept under control by a species of parasitic wasps that laid their eggs in its larvae which became wasp food before they could mature and start attacking the orange crop.
A lot of money was spent to import those wasps into California and release them. This kind of biological pest control is attractive because parasites are often very specific about what species they will use as a host, which was the case with these wasps, so this should be safe as far as species other than the invasive one are concerned. The parasites aren't going to switch to some native host.
They were correct in that the parasites didn't go after anything else, so caused no harm. But they also didn't go after the invasive insect. They just didn't lay eggs and died off.
Eventually someone figured out why it hadn't worked. It turned out that what we had thought was a species of invasive insect turned out to be two very closely related species, call them A and B. The parasitic wasp species that laid eggs in their larvae also turnout out to be two species. One of the wasp species laid eggs in A larvae, and only A larvae, and the in B larvae, and only B larvae.
All the invaders in California were from A, and all the wasps they trapped in Florida and sent to California were from the species that lays eggs in B.
Evans is a treasure, and "little-known planet" is right. Too, as phylogenetics continues to overturn the classic understanding of taxonomic relationships, the family often seems to grow about as much more complex as less, of late. It is actually getting clearer, but there are also whole taxa whose existence can be inferred from genomic evidence but not demonstrated because no example has yet been found. By all impressions, it's a wildly exciting field of study in recent decades, if not one seeing the concomitant level of investment.
If you find the subject compels, the next place I'd point you would be Seirian Sumner's quite recent and frankly outstanding Endless Forms, which offers both a worthy successor to Evans' perspective on the hymenopterans, and a view of the astonishing breadth of the field's development since Evans' own day - and no shortage of remarkable anecdotes, either. (Hymenopterology has a habit of furnishing these, I find! Search "Polydnaviriformdae" some time...)
I did the same. Ripped up my grass lawn and replaced with lavender, clover, roses, etc.
Not only does it look better, but it’s less maintenance. I had a variety of bees, butterflies, and Anna’s Hummingbirds visit this year. It was a treat to watch!
Flowers are one thing, but what stops many species from coming back is the lack of free-flowing rivers and the mud they need to dig or build their nests.
We intentionally keep a bunch of decaying logs and sticks in our yard for this purpose.
I also accidentally left out a 2x4s we pulled out of an old wall (thus full of nail holes). Almost every hole, big or small, now has some kind of cap from solitary bees laying their eggs in it.
this may be soapboxy, but this is a subject i feel strongly about
if you haven't already watched Doug Tallamy's talk "Nature's Best Hope", it is a fantastic watch. he has done it many times, for many different associations. you may have to skip some of their long intros.
he also started Homegrown National Park, which is a project to get people excited about replacing some of their grass with native plants, and also reducing the number of invasive plants. if you've watched "Nature's Best Hope", this will make sense
if you're planning on planting anything, please visit https://www.nwf.org/Garden-for-Wildlife/About/Native-Plants/... and try to pick keystone plants. you can find keystone plants by ecoregion there. of course, there are plants that support a small group of specialist bees, and they need love too.
Here in Southern California, its all European Honeybee. So many of them, hives are everywhere, any irrigation box that isn't fully closed will be a new home for the bees. They are constant annoyance at picnics trying to get anything sweet like BBQ sauce/Ketchup or your drink. Remember one trip to Legoland, the garbage cans were filled with honeybees that where feeding on the bbq sauce on discarded plates. Makes me think twice about eating local honey.
Don't see many wild bees though i do see an occasional tarantula hawk who like to grab a drink from the pool. I wonder how much pressure European Honeybee puts on the local wild bee population.
I always get a kick out of anecdotal experiences like this (in a good way).
I can't count how many modelling studies and news articles I've seen over the years claiming that honey bees were going extinct, murder hornets were going to wipe them all out, etc.
Nature just isn't that simple, and attempting to model it and claim specific predictions of the future is insanely difficult if not impossible.
It would be terrible for the entire ecosystem if honey bees disappeared, don't get me wrong. But eventually we have to start taking ecological modelling for what it is, an attempt at boiling the entire planet to a simplified mathematical equation that results in a final answer.
Everyone conflates bees with the honeybee. In California, half the wild bee species have gone extinct or endangered. One bee we don't see any more is the California Bumblebee, i haven't seen one in a couple years. 20 years ago, i would see them all the time in our backyard.
While fascinating, this is the kind of information I wish would have been buried in the article in four-point font, where it can't hurt anyone. Because you know someone will read it and then get starry-eyed about the possibilities of min/maxing the capabilities of a super-bee pollinator via cross-species breeding, gene manipulation, etc.
No one who understands the hymenopterans can make this mistake. No one who could make this mistake understands the hymenopterans. The risk you see isn't present.
> But the first camas meadow that made her dance with joy? That same spot is now an outdoor Rotary fitness park, carpeted not in flowers and bees but in mowed lawn and outdoor rubber flooring.
And then small, black, solitary bees and other unknown insects started to swarm the yellow flowers. Later on spiders weaved their nets around the flowers, so a small ecosystem started to form. In the end it successfully grew three very tasty melons weighing around 2kg each.
So, it's quite interesting that in the middle of a city, where you rarely even see insects, just by planting an expansive fruit plant, brings in a lot of visitors from the insect world.
As an added plus the family living on the 4th floor started complaining that the plant started to grow around their windows and I should do something with it...