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Pollinators, Plants, and Pesticides
The Northern Forest
by Bernd Heinrich Professor emeritus in the Department of Biology University of Vermont, author, and artist
Pollination, the sexual reproduction by plants, is a relatively recent innovation of Earth’s life, starting after already billions’ years of prior evolution of ferns, mosses, and horsetails. In recent times, pollination is mainly among flowering plants that appeared about 300 million years ago, with insects and other animals increasingly substituting for wind in pollination. Wind-pollinated trees predominate in the Northern Forest.
Trees are the lungs of the earth, and an estimated 17% of the Amazon forest has been removed for agriculture, forest not available to capture the CO2 out of the air, that then remains to increase Global Warming, that will increase more forest death, as temperatures there are rising predicting its eventual replacement by savannah. The rate of increase of CO2 is increasing even more than it was 47 years ago, when in a physiology class on respiration a professor told us about CO2 and Nitrogen concentrations. I thought they were an unchanging given, but was hugely surprised that even then one of them was changing.
I have now over many springs had an impression that more was changing. I was wondering about something I could feel in my own forest in Maine: where I wondered, were the Blackfly hordes in spring? Where are the Cluster Flies that in fall blackened the window panes in my cabin? Where were the crowds of Bumblebees that clustered on the meadow-sweet bloom in late summer, along with the goldenrod bloom in the fall? Why were the car windshields no longer splattered with insect remains on any long ride? Is there something unseen in the air? What happens to the plastic wrapping of every few bites of food the millions of us buy, then eat? How long does it take for the fumes from an industrial process in the west reach the east, or perhaps to another part of the world? The northern and the southern forest, then, may not be so far apart.
Each flower communicates to pollinators by different signals related to color, scent, and geometric patterns that provide rewards of pollen, nectar, or both to Bees.
The rise of insects’ using Gymnosperms, or seed-producing plants, as food transferred spores from plant to plant. This started the plants’ flower evolution where animals’ attractiveness to, and manipulation of flowers ushered in an animals’ preferences and behavior on flower structure, or morphology, as issues in plants’ reproduction.
Animals’ behaviors became selective agents for the evolving symbiotic plant-animal associations, leading to evolution of flower variety and complexity with no end in sight in shape, color, scent and food or other reward.
Bees and other pollinators are essential parts of all ecosystems on earth and are fundamental for the long term survival of flowering plants. The US Fish and Wildlife Service first listed Hawaiian Yellow-faced Bees on the Endangered Species list in 2016 and the Rusty Patched Bumblebee in 2017. Petitions to list the American Bumblebee, whose populations have decreased by 89% as an endangered species have not been successful as of 2023.
Bee populations are dependent on plants, and humans are dependent on Bees for food. Neonicotinoids (neonics) are pesticides people coat on seeds or spray on soil. Neonics saturate the tissue of plants, eventually showing up in pollen and nectar. Neonics disrupt learning and memory in Bees, and the chemicals impair reproduction resulting in Bee populations being reduced up to 75%.
A June 2022 report issued by the US Environmental Protection Agency noted that,
Widely used neonicotinoid insecticides likely harm roughly three-fourths of all endangered plants and animals, including all 39 species of amphibians protected under the Endangered Species Act… Species found to be harmed by all three of the neonicotinoids include Rusty Patched Bumblebees, Whooping Cranes, Chinook Salmon, Northern Long-eared Bats and Orcas.
The European Union, parts of Canada, and a few states including Maine banned neonicotinoids, but they remain one of the most popular insecticides in the United States.
Butterflies
Livesay Butterfly collections on display at Maine Historical Society, 2023
Natural history museum collections rely on specimens donated by amateurs or purchased from professional collectors. The PSNH sponsored butterfly collection trips where curators purchased preserved Butterflies from “Butterfly hunters” in places like Papua New Guinea, India, and Africa. Similar markets existed for shells, insects, plants, and animals.
When the PSNH closed in 1970, it offered its worldwide collections for sale, and lifelong Butterfly collector, E. Christopher Livesay purchased them. In the late 1900s, people interested in Butterflies, called lepidopterists, started “Butterflying,” where they identify and photograph the insects rather than capture them for physical study. However, collecting Butterflies is still important to gain scientific information. The largest threats to Butterfly populations are related to habit loss from climate change and destruction, for example being hit by vehicles on roads.
Maine Entomological Society by Charlene Donahue
How do we understand how ecosystems work if we do not know what lives in them? How do we know we are not damaging parts of the ecosystem cycles? To start answering these and many other questions, the Maine Entomological Society (MES) has partnered with various entities from Universities, State and Federal agencies, parks and land trusts to be the boots on the ground looking for insects and cataloging their presence. Over the past 25 years the MES has participated in dozens of surveys, collecting and identifying—or sending to specialists to identify—tens of thousands of insects to help answer basic questions about our world.
In one study in Baxter State Park, two MES members spent thousands of hours as volunteers going through the insect by-catch that would have been thrown out, from a study looking at how a forest recovers from a tornado. They discovered 54 species of Beetles that had never been found in Maine and two of these were new to the country! Most of these Beetles are less than 1/4 inch (6.4mm) in size—hard to identify when you did not even know they were in Maine.
The MES partnered with Acadia National Park for 14 years running 24-hour “bioblitzes” to get a snapshot of what lives in the park. The first nine years garnered 525 new park and 199 new State records of insect species. We learned what invasives have come in from overseas, what may no longer be here, what is moving in from the south or north, what people have brought in with them. We are respectful of the lives of insects that we take and try to ensure that it is for a higher purpose.
Flat branched Tree Clubmoss, Poland, Maine, 1893
Item Contributed by
Hodgdon Herbarium Department of Biological Sciences University of New Hampshire
Herbarium
When the PSNH closed in 1970, their preserved plant specimen herbarium contained over 30,000 sheets. PSNH Director Richard Anderson delivered 20,000 specimens to the University of New Hampshire (UNH), including many important “type” plants that serve as a reference point when a species is first named. The remainder of worldwide herbarium specimens went to the University of Maine, Presque Isle.
Renowned botanist Kate Furbish collected specimens for many organizations, and sent them to institutions such as the New England Botanical Club and the Asa Gray Herbarium at Harvard University.
Kate Furbish, Botanist
Kate Furbish (1834-1931) of Brunswick was an accomplished artist and scientist. Like other botanists, Furbish was self-taught since degrees in botany were not available in the 1880s.
Furbish explored widely, often alone in remote locations in Maine, noting,
I have wandered alone for the most part, on the highways and in the hedges, on foot, in hayracks, on country mail-stages, on improvised rafts, in rowboats, on logs, crawling on hands and knees on the surface of bogs, and backing out, when I dared not walk, in order to procure a coveted treasure. Called ‘crazy,’ a ‘fool’ – and this is the way that my work has been done, the flowers being my only society, and the manuals the only literature for months altogether.
Furbish collected and preserved more than 8,000 Maine plants. One of them was a snapdragon Harvard botanists recognized as a new species, and persuaded Furbish to name it Pedicularis furbishiae, or Furbish’s Lousewort. She initially declined, but reconsidered saying, “As a new species is rarely found in New England and few plants are named for women, it pleases me.”
Furbish’s Lousewort is only found in the Wolastoq/Saint John River region of New Brunswick and Maine. By the 1940s, it was listed as extinct. In 1965, the US Government proposed the Dickey-Lincoln dam hydroelectric project to answer growing energy needs. The proposed plan needed to flood 88,000 acres, including several communities. Dam developers deauthorized the plan after the University of Maine’s Professor Charles Richards found Furbish’s Lousewort thriving on the proposed site in 1976.
Furbish’s Lousewort
Furbish’s Lousewort has thin stems that grow up to three feet high with tiny yellow flower blooms. Kate Furbish first discovered the plant in 1880 in Van Buren, Maine along the Wolastoq (Maliseet-Passamaquoddy) or the Saint John River. It is the only place in the world where this plant grows.
People considered Furbish’s Lousewort extinct just a few decades after Kate Furbish found it growing along the Wolastoq in 1880. In 1976, rediscovery of Furbish’s Lousewort halted the construction of the Dickey-Lincoln dam. Public forums showed disregard for endangered species. During a 1977 congressional hearing, an Indiana congressman noted, “A thousand years from now we may have a nation of louseworts and nothing else. As far as anyone knows, they’re not good for anything.”
Furbish’s Lousewort was one of the first plants added to the Endangered Species list in 1978, and is still listed as Endangered, encompassing less than 1,000 plants. Climate change and rising water levels threaten the plant’s habitat.
What’s in a name?
People refer to plants and animals by their English and scientific Latin names. Who decides on a name, and why are scientific systems so entrenched in the Latin naming structure? How is this tied to colonialism?
The plants and animals in what is today called Maine have original names in the four distinct languages spoken by Wabanaki peoples—for example: wikpiyik, Penobscot word for Brown ash; welimahaskil, Maliseet-Passamaquoddy word for sweetgrass; masgwi, Mi’kmaq for the White Birch tree; and wigbimizi, the Abenaki word for Basswood. Living for over 13,000 years in this region, Wabanaki peoples have accumulated and refined knowledge of the region’s land, waters, rocks, animals, and plants, through care-taking the environment and sourcing items for food, medicine, tools, and artwork.
When colonial Europeans or Americans first encountered local plants and animals, they assigned the species English and scientific Latin names. In Western culture, Latin scientific names help categorize species by subtle differences, while they English names are more broad. The person who “discovered” the plant or animal assigned the names, a system which overlooks thousands of years Indigenous knowledge and first identifications.
What does it mean to discover?
Just as Christopher Columbus did not “discover” the Americas, American naturalists did not “discover” plants and animals, instead they were the first in Western culture to encounter a species, like Kate Furbish’s Lousewort (Pedicularis furbishiae). By reframing what it means to “discover” we can better understand a human’s place in the natural world and learn from both Indigenous and Western science for positive change.
Rachel Carson, 1944
Collections of the US Fish and Wildlife Service
"Great Auk, Murre, Cormorant, Loon, and Puffin eggs," Weld, ca. 2014
Item Contributed by
Maine Historical Society
Silent Spring
Marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book Silent Spring advanced the global environmental movement and exposed how commonly used pesticides were poisoning wildlife, including songbirds and America’s iconic Bald Eagles. She was a summer resident of Southport Island.
Carson was a blend of scientist and writer, making complex biological theories understandable to the general public. She worked for the US Bureau of Fisheries and the US Fish and Wildlife Services, where she was often the only woman in professional capacities.
Silent Spring awakened Americans to learn about our responsibilities to all forms of life on the planet. Carson documented the effects of harmful pesticides like DDT, or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane on living beings on the land and in the water. Silent Spring inspired then President John F. Kennedy to launch an investigation into the public health effects of pesticides that resulted in laws governing the regulation of pesticides like DDT, and the eventual establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. The EPA banned DDT in 1972.
Carson died from cancer in 1964. In 1969, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson’s employer for many years, named one of its refuges spanning Maine’s York and Cumberland Counties, the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, to honor her memory.
Birds are uniquely affected by the chemical DDT because it alters calcium metabolism, resulting in thin eggshells and decreased reproductive rates. DDT is also highly toxic to aquatic or water animals.
DDT was a common pesticide for insect control in agriculture, and the US Government used it to mitigate malaria outbreaks during the 1940s. In addition to disrupting bird reproduction, DDT is persistent in the environment, lasting up to 15 years on land and 150 years in water.
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