For about the last year an odd crisis has been popping up in the science headlines. Honeybees are disappearing. Hives will very quickly go from healthy to empty. A variety of theorieshave been put forward. About 6 months ago I read an article that confidently claimed that signals from cell phone towers was disrupting the bees sense of direction and they just got lost and died. More recently I read about a type of virus that has begun to be found that came off of bees that were imported from abroad (Australia?) though i forget exactly where. I am not particuarly found of bees. I have been stung as have most people. As kids we panic when they fly near (and some adults too) and scare them into defending themselves. Wether I like to have one near by or not, I do rely on them, as do we all. For honey of course, as a direct product., but more importantly as a pollen carrier. Bees are the largest part of the polination process between plants and flowers. It can be done by hand in a very tedious fashion, and also happens to some extent through air transferral, but bees do it much more efficiently. They are vital to agriculture.

A couple days ago, I heard for the first time about another major enviromental concern. Bat colonies are dying in the appalachian mountains. Again... several theroies were put forward, from changing climate altering there hibernation habits, to a fungus being found in their caves and on their bodies. Given the expansion pattern of the affected area, I could very readily believe in the gradual expansion and transmission of a new variety of fungus. And again... not really fond of bats, but we rely on them almost as much as bees in the eco-system. Bats are the primary predator of flying insects and as such help control the insect population and protect crops and people.

In both cases the causes could be both natural and/or manmade, and often really can't be determined or fixed. There are many people investigating both of these things and hundreds of other events like them and they will do what they can to find solutions. The one thing that I take from this is that the eco-system is strained. Large complex systems overlap in unseen places, and one change can cause seemingly unrelated things to react, and perhaps to fail. What we do know is that if a complex system begins to fail, it usually does so in an extremely fast and spectacular fashion. One area that fails strains dozens more and causes a new failure, and so on, creating a domino or cascade effect that destroy the whole system. And afterwards, new systems grow where the old once were. It is the time inbetween that is the problem.