A sign of the sad (environmental) times

 

Absolutely excellent article from the Washington Post Magazine on the demise of the mayflies.

The World’s Oldest Winged Insect Is in Trouble. How Frightened Should We Be?

"Mayflies require relatively cool, clean water to live, which makes them among nature’s best ecological sentinels. For those who know how to look, their bodies hold precise clues about the state of the water and land around them. Some scientists call them “biosensors.” Overly warm water, pesticides, silty runoff from development and other pollution will wipe them out or force them to move to cleaner environs.

In other words, these little-known creatures are invaluable narrators of environmental change. They are also, unfortunately, victims of the very trends they can identify — and they are now fading at a disturbing pace from freshwater streams, rivers and lakes around the world."

Only one time in my entire life have I experienced a mayfly hatching.  It was incredible.  They were everywhere.  I was at summer camp (the only time I ever went to a semi-traditional summer camp, this one was a YMCA camp), and one morning, the mayflies arrived.  Even there seemed to be millions, when I told my father about it, he told me that he had seen worse -- so many that the roads became hazardous because the bodies of the mayflies on the road made it slick.   (There's a similar anecdote in this article.)

Like many things that we were once accustomed to, and which we expected, an event like this may not occur anywhere like it used to.  And that's both sad, and bad news.

Two more excerpts:

"In the mid-20th century, at a time when industrial activity sometimes poisoned lakes and rivers where Hexagenia live, their numbers plummeted in the Great Lakes region. Eventually, clean water legislation curbed much of the pollution, spurring a decades-long rebound in Hexagenia populations."

That's right - clean water legislation. The kind of government regulatory legislation that Republican polluter-friendly politicians seriously dislike.

Last one:

"One study in the [International Conference on Ephemeroptera] conference concerned the upland summer mayfly in the United Kingdom. Craig Macadam of Buglife, a conservation nonprofit at the University of Stirling in Scotland, has studied the bug for years. It’s the only Arctic mountain mayfly in the British Isles. A decade ago, he predicted it would be forced to move north because of rising water temperatures. And now it’s happening. Upland summer mayflies are moving to smaller, colder streams higher in the hills. The species no longer inhabits 4 out of 5 sites where Macadam found them in the past. The outlook for them is grim."

Tell that to anyone that tells you climate change isn't happening, or that it isn't important. Nature knows.

(Ephemeroptera is the taxonomic group that mayflies are in.)