A Bit More Detail

• Centauri Dreams looks at signs of advanced technologies detectable by SETI searches.


• D-Brief notes evidence of the domestication of turkeys in eth and 5th century Mexico.


• Dangerous Minds discusses a legendary 1985 concert by Einstürzende Neubauten.


• Joe. My. God. notes the banning of Tila Tequila from Twitter.


• Language Log looks about a Hebrew advertisement that makes use of apostrophes.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money bids farewell to one of its bloggers, Scott Eric Kauffman.


• The LRB Blog notes that Israel is fine with anti-Semites so long as they are Zionists.


• Marginal Revolution notes that Hillary Clinton won the most economically productive areas of the United States.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer suggests anti-sprawl legislation helped lose the recent election.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes Russia's banning of LinkedIn.


• Towleroad notes Ellen Degeneres' winning of a Presidential honor medal.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Trump could be much less easy to handle than the Kremlin thinks, and looks at claims that small northern peoples are conspiring with foreigners.

Franç​ois Simard, creator of Protec-Style, has a contract with Parks Canada to supply national parks with oil-spill kits. The kits come with various sizes of absorbent tubes filled with milkweed fibre.

Simard says milkweed has a unique ability to repel water, which makes it perfect for oil spills on land or water.

"You can leave an absorbent [milkweed] sock in water and it will only absorb the oil. It's very unique in nature to have fibres like that," said Simard in an interview at his factory in Granby, Que.

[. . .]

The white fibres that you can often see floating in the fall breeze are light and hollow and able to absorb four times more oil than polypropylene, the artificial product now used to clean up spills.

Simard has set up a co-operative of 20 farmers in Quebec to grow 325 hectares of milkweed. He says there are another 35 growers on a waiting list.

The tale of the honeybee is a sadly familiar one: a once-thriving species is on the ropes. After brutal bouts with mites and fungi, honeybees are now facing their most dangerous threat yet: a mysterious disease called colony collapse disorder. In the winter of 2010 alone, U.S. beekeepers reported losing 34 percent of their hives to CCD, which may be caused by viruses, pesticides, or some diabolical combination of factors. Researchers are working hard to figure out exactly why the honeybees are dying and how to save them because of their ecological importance. Honeybees pollinate many of the country’s fruit and vegetable crops, and they also carry out the same service for many species of wild plants. In Brazil, honeybees help keep isolated rain forest fragments from dying out by moving their pollen from tree to tree.


Amidst all the concern for the honeybees, it’s easy to forget an important fact about them. They’re not native to the New World.

The earliest records of honeybees in this hemisphere come from English settlers who arrived with hives aboard their ships in the early 1600s. They brought the bees to make honey they could eat and wax they could burn. Over the past four centuries, new stocks of honeybees have arrived at least eight times, from Europe, the Near East, and Africa.

Introduced species can, in some cases, become dangerous invaders, wreaking havoc on their new homes. They may gobble up native species, outcompete them, or just infect them to cause new diseases. Much of modern conservation management is organized around keeping alien species out and killing off the ones that made it in. And yet there are no loud voices calling for the alien honeybees to be wiped out in the New World.

“It’s almost like everyone politely ignores that they’re not native,” says Dov Sax, a conservation biologist at Brown University.

Sax and some of his fellow biologists think that it’s time to give some serious consideration to this paradox. In a paper published in Conservation Biology, Sax and two colleagues argue for recognizing the ecological value of some introduced species. “We predict the proportion of non-native species that are viewed as benign or even desirable will slowly increase over time,” they write.

The fact that a journal like Conservation Biology would publish such a statement is a testament to how seriously some researchers are taking the idea. “It’s considered edgy, but it’s not considered nuts,” says Sax. Not nuts, perhaps — but certainly not innocuous. The new paper is eliciting strong responses from other conservation biologists — ranging from hearty endorsements to fierce protests.

Sax and his co-authors — Julian Olden of the University of Washington and Martin Schlaepfer of State University of New York in Syracuse and INRA in Rennes, France — point to a number of studies that have documented the benefits of introduced species. Some non-native species provide habitat and food for native animals and plants, for example. In the southwestern United States, tamarisk trees have been aggressively spreading along rivers. The trees started drawing up so much water that

Some non-native species provide habitat for native plants and animals and can promote diversity.

conservation biologists feared it might not leave enough for the native plants. If the native plants disappeared, so might the animals that depended on them, such as the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher. The government spent millions of dollars to stop the tamarisk, using bulldozers, herbicides, and even tree-munching beetles. Yet in recent years some researchers have concluded the initial worries about the threat of tamarisks to the water table were exaggerated. At the same time, conservation biologists have found the southwestern willow flycatcher nesting in tamarisk trees. Their fledglings do as well in the introduced trees as they did in the native ones. Getting rid of the tamarisk would mean getting rid of the habitat of an endangered bird.

Introduced species can also help restore native ecosystems on degraded land. In Puerto Rico, for example, much of the native forest was destroyed for farming, and in recent decades conservation biologists have been trying to nurture them back on abandoned farmland. Native trees do a poor job of pioneering this degraded landscape. Alien trees, such as African tulip trees and rose apple, have colonized them instead. These new forests remain dominated by alien trees for their first three or four decades. But the forests are also a habitat in which native trees can begin to thrive again. After 60 to 80 years of growth, Puerto Rican forests become mixes of both alien and native trees.

Introduced species can promote diversity by acting like ecosystem engineers, reworking their new habitat. Off the coast of Chile, for example, a gelatinous invertebrate called Pyura praeputialis forms massive mats, providing nooks and crannies in which other species can thrive. Juan Carlos Castilla of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and his colleagues have found 116 species of invertebrates and algae living in these alien ecosystems, while nearby intertidal rocky shores were home to just 66 species.

Honeybees demonstrate another benefit that introduced species can offer. Other introduced species can pollinate plants as well, while some animals help native plants in other ways. In Hawaii, a bird called the Japanese white eye spreads the seeds of a native vine. These new partnerships between native and non-native species show that they aren’t precisely linked like a lock and key. “In reality, the world is a lot messier,” says Schlaepfer.