Neonicotinoids disrupt aquatic food webs and decrease fishery yields | Hacker News Reader

Neonicotinoids disrupt aquatic food webs and decrease fishery yields

science.sciencemag.org

184 pointsstevenwoo68 comments

Neonicotinoids are one of the best and safest pesticide treatments for termites. You dig a narrow ditch around the building's foundation, you mix in the neonicotinoid with the dirt, and you refill the ditch. Used this way there is absolutely no risk to bees or aquaculture.

Neonicotinoids are one of the best and safest pesticide treatments for flea and ticks on cats and dogs. You apply it to the back of their neck and it lasts 30 days. Used this way there is absolutely no risk to bees or aquaculture.

Neonicotinoids, although effective, are not suitable for use in fruit orchards or golf courses, or where they can enter water systems, yet are used in these contexts.

When you buy a neonicotinoid for termite control the instructions explain that it is illegal to use it for those other things. Yet you can instead buy the exact same neonicotinoid for fruit trees where the instructions explain that it is legal for that use. This makes little sense.

Losing neonicotinoids for termite, tick and flea control would be a grave mistake and loss and give no advantage.

Modifying neonicotinoid instructions to ban usages that are obviously causing problems is reasonable.

you mix in the neonicotinoid with the dirt, and you refill the ditch. Used this way there is absolutely no risk to bees or aquaculture

Does this mean it's not possible that e.g. it starts raining, the neonicotinoid mixes with the water which then eventually makes it into a nearby stream? I.e. just like your thrid paragraph describes?

The trench is about 4 inches wide. It's under the eaves. You can also do it on the inside of the building if you have a crawl space. Dig 10 ft of trench. Pour 5 gallons water in trench mixed with something like 1 oz neonicotinoid. Then backfill the trench. The neonicotinoid bonds with the soil and remains active for about a decade, stopping termites from entering the building. Any house meeting building codes is going to have a roof and eaves that prevent large amounts of rain from entering this area. The area has non-neonicotonoid soil on top of it so there's no casual run off. You'd have to have leeching through the soil to whatever watershed you have. This is impossible because the neonicotonoids bond with the soil and do not move once set.

With fruit trees it also has long lasting action, bonding with the very bark of the tree and remaining for many years. This is a problem since honey bees come to the tree and get microdoses which appear to mess with their navigation. But the interesting part is other pollinators don't show these effects. Which is perhaps because honey bees have the food they store (honey) harvested by their "keepers" and are then given commercial corn syrup mix (grown with pesticides and including residue) as their only food. The simplistic nutrition of this substance compared to real honey weakens these fellows, compounding the disorienting effects of the neonicotonoids.

In OP's Japanese study they are mass applying neonicotonoids directly to the surface of a watershed, which resulted in huge problems to the down stream aquaculture. This use of neonicotonoids is a terrible idea and the adverse effects were not surprising. I'm quite surprised that mass application of neonicotonoids to a watershed isn't considered a criminal act.

> stopping termites from entering the building.

Do the termites in your location not fly? In Fiji we have termite swarms once a year. Millions of them will show up at every light they can get to in the evenings. Everyone is advised to turn off their lights for a few hours and light a fire outside so as to get the termites to kamikazi. These are the Asian Subterranean Termites that arrived here via Australia.

Pesticide in a ditch around a house isn't going to stop these buggers.

The idea is the poison kills them if they set up a nest next to the foundation.

Subterranean termites.

Termites only fly when a colony has reached a limit on number, and pairs fly off to start new colonies.

unless they start a new colony inside the barrier, the barrier is still effective.

The barrier is only affective against burrowing, but termites don't start new colonies by burrowing. They swarm (usually once annually)... fly off and build new colonies. If only the method described here actually worked, we'd save billions of dollars a year in damage.

> Modifying neonicotinoid instructions to ban usages that are obviously causing problems is reasonable.

I don't think the bees care very much if that particular use of neonicotinoids was legal or not. If widespread misuse exists, there is a problem.

It seems to me that pet and termite formulations could be delivered in a way that makes it impractical to apply as a broad spectrum insecticide applied by sprayer.

But I'm not sure you're right about the termite application presenting no risk to bees. The EU banned neonicitinoids used to protect seeds from insects. On the grounds that the neonics end up in the pollen.

It's not uncommon to have flowering plants next to a foundation.

There's a big enviromental problem with the notion that things are either approved/acceptable or not; binary.

Neonicotinoids are probably good compared to a lot of alternatives. But by being one of few approved choices, they are used to such a huge extent that minor problems become major.

Another example is gasoline. It's very clean, especially with a catalytic converter. It's so clean that one of the worst things you can say about it is: if billions of people use gasoline, it upsets the balance of CO2.

If we use a little more variety, even if average "badness" seems worse, we will be better off. But our policies push us toward homogeneity.

As a beekeeper I can tell you that Neonics are a very bad and serious problem. I’m surprised that people are not much more outraged by poisoning themselves and their children.

Again, the whole point of neonicotinoids is that they're less toxic to mammals than their predecessors (primarily organophosphates) and can be used in smaller amounts. The pollination industry does not appear to be collapsing despite the widespread, longstanding use of neonicotinoids. Who exactly is being poisoned?

Wild insects and birds: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-09-20/birds-collaps...

> The pollination industry does not appear to be collapsing despite the widespread, longstanding use of neonicotinoids

Uhhhh, what? It won't happen overnight, just like smoking won't cause you to die after a few pulls. But regardless, there are reported declines from neonicotinoids.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12459

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/neonicotinoid-pesticide...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/widel...

You are responding to a different argument than I made. Your claim is that neonicotinoids are harmful to colony-forming bees. My argument is that the harm does not appear to be reflected in the pollination industry, which, in the US, is the essential purpose of those bees. Honey bees are livestock, not wildlife.

> Honey bees are livestock, not wildlife.

What's all this livestock doing in my garden?

Honey bees are a nonnative invasive species and American feral honey bee colonies were largely wiped out, not due to neonicotinoids but rather the Varroa mite, decades ago. There's a very good chance that if you're seeing honey bees in your yard, they belong to someone.

Just as likely, you're seeing bees that aren't honey bees but rather solitary native bees.

It's pretty debatable to call the common honey bee 'invasive' but I do still see them around. They might actually belong to someone. I don't know how far from home a bee can get, but several farms outside of town produce local honey. Feral honey bees are still kicking around though and seem to have adapted. There are even people tracking them to try and study how they've managed without treatments. I haven't seen a colony to report though, just one or two flying around from time to time.

This is not in fact debatable.

> "There are many species of honey bees. Apis Mellifera is the bee kept by beekeepers in the United States. It originated in Europe (though a recent archaeological dig may have found apis species that pre-date European colonization of the Americas.) Based on the current information, honey bees are a “non-native” species. They can, and do, escape cultivation and can live in the wild. In order to be considered “invasive” they would need to displace and prevent native insects from thriving. This is hotly debated. Most researchers have found that pollination by bees of different species increases fruit set, the number of seeds and subsequent flowers – thereby increasing forage for all insects. They do not fight with each other and rarely share diseases. Since adequate forage for all bees is on the decline, could honey bees be taking all the nectar and pollen – leaving nothing for native bees? It’s possible but not likely. Honey bees are most often kept in large commercial groups – moved between big orchards for pollination. Hobby beekeepers are fairly spread out. Native bees stay in their own habitat. They do overlap, but not everywhere."

source: https://duffymeadows.com/2019/01/21/are-honey-bees-and-invas...

Some of the issues in question are just how much of an impact they have in forcing out native bees due to competition for resources and how much of a nuance they are as a result of pollinating and thereby assisting in the spread of invasive plants. Answers to those questions vary by both location (with some having more fragile native bee populations to begin with) and depending on if the bees are from feral bee colonies which tend to be fairly small vs bees from giant commercial operations which can suddenly introduce extremely large numbers of bees to an area.

I can certainly see that there are cases where honey bees could cause enough of a problem to be considered invasive, but it does seem a little unfair to pin that on the bee if it's primarily caused by the actions of commercial bee keepers and not the bee's natural behavior in the wild. That is, it says less about the bee and more about the bee keepers.

This also only concerns the common honey bee. I don't think anyone would argue that the africanized honeybee wasn't a problem.

From a paper which falls on the invasive side of the argument but calls out the debate explicitly:

> Yet the extent to which this introduced species alters native communities remains controversial, reflecting ongoing debate over the importance of resource competition in regulating pollinator populations.

source: https://doi.org/10.1890/02-0626

Another commenter on this thread says that European honey bees were in fact a problem for their farm, outcompeting and suppressing native pollinators. I don't so much care. My interest in this branch of the discussion is simply in establishing that honey bees aren't wildlife, but rather livestock.

It's actually the pollination industry that's the root of the problem as I see it, and there's a lot of evidence to support it. There has been a major shift in the past couple of decades and now pollination services account for as much income for keepers as the honey itself. So just out of wintering, when they're at their weakest, they get all the hives together to pollinate the almond crops, and of course to trade the latest parasites and diseases. Once they've got all caught up to date on those, they load them back on the trucks and do a nice tour around the country, spreading the joy.

My parents kept up to 100 hives for almost two decades in northern Manitoba, where it gets down to -40C, and we rarely ever had overwintering losses. Farmers and keepers should treat their livestock well, feed them over the winter, give them a bit of shelter, and they'll do fine. Bees can survive almost any cold if they've got the fuel to burn to keep the hive warm.

That's super interesting, and glad to get a sanity check from someone with direct experience; I'm just an interested bystander.

Many European countries have banned the use of neonicotinoids, but in the U.S. the EPA has ignored the evidence and has turned a blind eye to the science. As a result the environmental damages in the United States continue to grow each year.

Here's an interesting study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Actually, here's the real story behind how the ban came about. The guidelines were manipulated so that all the realistic field studies had to be discounted. The lab studies basically amounted to "We fed insecticide to bees and it killed them."

https://risk-monger.com/issues/agriculture/beegate/

As for that Plos One study, take a look at who the authors are and where they work. They're all members of the pesticides action network and the last author on the paper is also a staff scientist for Friends of the Earth, another environmental NGO. Unsurprisingly, she had an article all lined up with The Guardian on the day the paper was released. The paper itself is nothing but a cludge of unrealistic assumptions and bad math.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/07/americ...

And also bear in mind that Neonics are relatively new: 25 years IIRC. They can last for years and minute doses over time will lead to death as surely as larger acute doses. So, our pollinators and we are being poisoned slowly and constantly.

We've seen around a 75% drop in insect population, and its continuing to drop at around 2.5% per year. They are some pretty scary figures

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/02/why-insec...

The article you're citing does not attribute a 75% drop in insect population to neonicotinoids.

Not collapsing, but keeping bees healthy is a challenge and their death rate is much higher than it used to be (40% up from 15% according to https://pro.bloombergenvironment.com/business-of-bees-podcas...)

There is a big decrease in the overall mass of flying insects and with it of the number of birds.

I grow a lot of crops that require pollination, vegetables for market, and I have several small fruit orchards. After European bee colony collapse in my area the european honey bees disappeared. Within one season they were replaced with native pollinators, including literally dozens of species of bees I'd never seen before (because the alien european bees were starving them out), as well as a panoply of wasp species which I hadn't realized were major pollinators. Some of the wasps that moved in have done things like eliminate the Japanese Beetles that were ruining my grape and berry crops. Losing the european honey bees was the best thing ever to happen to me. And these other bees don't seem to get mixed up in the problems with the neonicotinoids. I use neonicotinoids myself for my dogs and cats and for termite control and they are the least toxic solutions for both of these uses. I do not support the use of neonicotinoids as applied directly to flowering crops or lawns with clover etc and consider such use to be highly misguided if not fairly insane.

Loss of European honey bees means expensive honey. It doesn't mean a loss of pollinators despite various misguided claims to the contrary that have been promoted for years, some making completely hysterical and unfounded claims of global starvation and the end of humanity. To the contrary in my experience the result is greater pollination and yields following the loss of the alien bee species.

Does the use of neonicotinoids not also affect the native pollinators? I was under the impression that the issue is not solely honey bees but all insects. (Honey bees being a useful public face on the problem)

It's naive and misinformed to think that only European honey bees suffer from it. Many European countries have banned the Neonics, but in the US there's a significant resistance to it.

The first sentence in this comment seems to have nothing to do with the second.

The European Honey Bee is a species of bee which has been transplanted around the world. I don't believe the parent poster was referring specifically to bees who happen to be in Europe.

They seem bad because they are everywhere and neither you nor the bees can escape.

If we employed more variety, then some areas would be good for bees and bad for owls, other areas would be good for owls and bad for bees, and things could sort themselves out a bit.

Stamets et. al have been doing amazing work saving bees with fungal remedies https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32194-8

Really? I find that hard to believe seeing as not one in fifty beekeepers blame pesticides for their losses. Would you prefer the reintroduction of pesticides that actually do for certain kill bees? It's the mites and the diseases they carry.

Saw a documentary banned in France for certain use as bee population decreases massively e.g. used for corn. Problem goes into the ground kill every life in the ground and get into every plant around the crop and also bird population decreases. Documentary showed that Bayer tried to sabotage the investigation. I think the risks massively exceeds the benefits.

I'm not sure I understand this comment. Perhaps someone could rephrase it?

Why is there no rush to phase out the use of these chemicals? My understanding is that they are a relatively recent invention and that we used different, less toxic, pesticides before. It should be a simple task to outlaw the neonicotinoids and return to the old pesticides. Sure, yields might drop a little, but that's better than an existential threat to our whole food chain, no?

Where did you get the idea that the pesticides commonly used before the common use of neonicotinoids were less toxic?

(They might be less toxic to bees and the zooplankton mentioned in the OP, but they were more toxic to, e.g., human agricultural workers.)

Because the fish were alive.

No, organophosphates were killing the fish, even at very low exposures.

source? I can’t see that in the article. The article states that when neonicotiniods were used, fish stocks collapsed.

From this, there are only two valid conclusions;

Pesticides was not previously being used, or the previous pesticide was less dangerous.

Or there is some other factor they didn't control for.

I'm sorry, let me make sure I understand what you're asking. Are you seriously asking for a source to back up the claim that organophosphate pesticides can be toxic to fish?

I cannot see in the article that organophosphates were used around Lake Shinji before the introduction of neonicotinoids.

I certainly can’t see in the article that more fish died before the introduction of neonicotinoids.

The whole point of neonicotinoids is that they're less toxic to mammals than organophosphates, and can be used in smaller amounts for the same effect.

Because Bayer, formerly Monsanto, has waged an incredibly effective and successful lobbying/PR campaign.

EDIT: Am I being downvoted for the truth? Or because of a very successful and incredibly effective PR campaign?

You are being downvoted because the claim is ridiculous and unsubstantiated. Scientists don't need to be lobbied or prodded into tearing shitty research papers to shreds. It's what they do. Science is an adversarial sport, that's why it works. Scientists aren't exactly paid like bankers, and the one coin they do trade on is their reputations.

Except it’s the science that shows neonicotinoids to be harmful, like the thread you’re commenting on, and the publicly registered lobbyists working for Bayer and previously Monsanto who have successfully politically lobbied for laws that benefit their product, often citing their own paid-for ghost written research, which lobbied public policy makers can often be influenced into accepting as valid.

So yeah, if only the politicians would actually listen to the scientists instead of the lobbyists then neonicotinoids, like Roundup, would be banned, but unfortunately companies like Bayer, and formerly Monsanto, have staged an incredibly effective and successful lobbying / PR campaign.

Modern agricultural systems are built on the mass usage of systemic insecticide treatments (whether necessary or not). Neonicotinoids are almost certainly better than what came before them, although they have a limited useful life as insects inevitably develop resistance.

Phasing these chemicals out requires a new sustainable approach to pest management - more buy-in from farmers for IPM approaches that don't involve routine use of toxic chemicals. Assistance and training programs need to be put in place to achieve this before regulatory restrictions should be applied.

Neonicotinoids replaced much more toxic pesticides. Not sure we want to go back to the old ones.

Most definitely not. This is what happens. Article also contains a good summary of how the science was manipulate to get the ban in place.

https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2019/01/09/with-the-bee-c...

Interesting article. It supports my statement that prior pesticides were more toxic (read paragraph on organophosphates).

Thanks for the link. I found the article to be pretty convincing until I decided to check out the WaPo article the author references in this paragraph:

> Pyrethroid insecticides are supposedly low in toxicity to mammals and birds, but as the Washington Post has reported, it turns out they are highly toxic to most insects, including beneficial insects like honeybees; in fact they are considered far more harmful to bees than any neonic.

In the linked WaPo article, though, the only mention of "Pyrethroid" is this:

> Since the E.U. moratorium went into effect in 2014, farmers in England have struggled with increased pest pressure, Carreck said. Many have turned to pyrethroid pesticides, which have unknown consequences on bees and other beneficial insects. Pywell emphasized that if the E.U. continues the moratorium, we need to investigate what alternative pesticides are doing to bees.

"It is now well known that neonicotinoids negatively affect pollinators"

Do they?: https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2019/11/01/global-consens...

"Using data on zooplankton, water quality, and annual fishery yields of eel and smelt, we show that neonicotinoid application to watersheds since 1993 coincided with an 83% decrease in average zooplankton biomass in spring, causing the smelt harvest to collapse from 240 to 22 tons in Lake Shinji, Shimane Prefecture, Japan"

Isn't this mistaking correlation with causation? I find this assertion dubious mainly because the mode by which neonicotinoids are applied is by seed coating rather than spraying so how are they getting into water? I don't have access to the full study - did they actually measure water levels of the pesticides and how did they rule out other factors?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Entine#Genetics

> Entine is the founding director of the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP), operating as the Science Literacy Project, which is the umbrella organization for the GLP, Genetic Expert News Service (GENeS) and the Epigenetics Literacy Project. GLP focuses on the intersection of media, policy and genetics, both human and agricultural.

> Entine has written three books on genetics and two on chemicals. Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics is Undermining the Genetic Revolution examines the controversy over genetic modification in agriculture.[20]

> In 2007, Entine published Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People which examined the shared ancestry of Jews, Christians and Muslims, and addressed the question "Who is a Jew?" as seen through the prism of DNA.[21]

> Entine's first book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It was inspired by the documentary on black athletes written with Brokaw in 1989.[22] It was favorably reviewed by The New York Times[23] but criticized by others[who?] who said that the subject could encourage a racist view of human relations.[24]

> Entine supports the production of GMO foods, and has criticized writer Caitlin Shetterly after she wrote an article in Elle magazine saying that GMO corn had made her ill.[25][26][27]

Does any of this contradict the facts stated in the article? Is there something specifically false that you can point to?

this is the silent killer. climate change gets all the attention but pesticides can kill everything

It's more like switching from fossil fuels gets all the attention. That's because there is big money to be made. Not so much money to be made by reversing deforestation, not sending garbage (dubious recycling) to 3rd world countries, not releasing toxic substances into the environment, etc.

So if we stopped using pesticides tomorrow things would recover very quickly. Pesticides are destroyed by exposure to UV radiation and weathering very quickly, that is why farmers have to keep applying them over and over. They don't generally persist in the environment or in living things for more than a few days or weeks, with the exception of biological reservoirs where the few types that can accumulate in living things might last for months (and these types are not common, this is why DDT was banned in the first place). If we stop dumping massive amounts of CO2 into the air tomorrow the Earth will continue to warm for hundreds of years.

It's clearly much, much more important to deal with CO2.

Every day, hundreds of living species are disappearing forever, mostly due to human direct actions on the environment and particularly industrial farming. I personally find this much more important (and sad) than climate change.

"Every day {bad thing} happens due to {list of things that aren't pesticide use} therefore pesticides should be banned."

This is embarrassing. It's like arguing against wind power because wind turbines are held down by cement, and making cement releases CO2.

If people didn't use pesticides, yields would go way, way, way down, and more land would have to be used for intensive farming to produce the same amount of food. So you are basically arguing for pesticide use in your argument against pesticides.

Are neonics known/suspected as a cause as to why mosquito and insect populations are down so much in the US?

We need to move to vertical industrial farming.

Sigh. Why doesn’t EPA hold auctions like FCC on dangerous pesticide use? Market will apply them where they are most needed, govt gets revenue, environment is saved.

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