How would you rebuild a forest? There’s an enormous effort underway to do just that for the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil, now down to only 7% of its original extent. This really short but intriguing SciDevNet piece led me to a fascinating Science article here. About 15,000 trees of 800 different species have been identified as mother trees, “the starting stock for the forest’s regeneration.” There’s a big awareness campaign aimed at local farmers explaining the long-term benefits of devoting some of their land to forest. And lots of different approaches to the actual reforestation are being tried. Sounds like this project is going to be a testing ground and model for years to come. How is it that there’s been so little news about it? Or do I just move in the wrong circles? Perhaps I just subscribe to the wrong RSS feeds.
Bees in trouble
This short piece from EurekAlert describes research in Spain which compared lots of different honeys and showed that the best for antioxidants is that which bees make from honeydew, the exudate produced by plants when they’ve been attacked by sap-sucking bugs. So let’s all go out and eat more honeydew honey, right? Well, we better be quick about it. Unfortunately, according to this other piece coincidentally also published today, life for European bees is set to get considerably more difficult, due to the incursion of Chinese wasps. It is already pretty bad for American bees in 22 states due to something nasty called Colony Collapse Disorder, according to this. Which completes today’s trifecta.
Batty
This story is not particularly agricultural, but I couldn’t resist it. Brazilian researchers extracted the essential oils from a Piper sp commonly eaten by bats and then smeared the stuff on plastic fruits, which they then distributed in areas of damaged rainforest. The bats were attracted to the fake fruits, though they wouldn’t normally fly in degraded forest. Why go to all this trouble? Because the bats spread lots of seeds via their faeces, and could thus be used to restore the vegetation.
Bee shortage looms
Things don’t seem to be getting any easier for the fruit and vegetable farmers of the US, with a continuing shortage of bees. The number of commercial colonies in the US has halved over the past 25 years, according to the report. And that could show up in the price of almonds. I had no idea that the state of California supplies 80% of the world market for almonds.
Bats to the rescue
The other Economist article I wanted to mention deals with bats and how useful they are to agriculture, as pollinators (e.g. Agave) and – the main point of the piece – as predators of agricultural pests. Work in Texas is actually trying to quantify the benefit that bats bring to famers of cotton and other crops as they munch their way through moth populations in their millions. Always good to be able to put $ values on biodiversity.