Birds and bees

Just when environmentalists were wondering if the only way future generations would be able to see frogs would be in natural history museums, comes the disturbing news that entire colonies of bees are on the missing list in the US.

Parents may wonder how they will bring up the subject of the birds and the bees, but jokes aside, this is serious cause for worry. Bee-keepers in more than 20 states have reported entire colonies missing; the combs are intact and loaded with honey and larvae, but there are no live bees. No dead bodies, nothing with which to start investigation.

The worry is not just about honey stocks diminishing, but about the fate of crops, of all the fruits and flowers that the bees help pollinate, and of the natural ecological
balance.

Shocking, also, is the discovery that no records of demographics and movement patterns of pollinating bees, either in the wild or those from kept hives, have been maintained. It’s a mystery that has baffled the experts.

If that is the state in the world’s most advanced country, is it surprising that the disappearance of entire species from parts of the Indian subcontinent goes unnoticed and unlamented?

Since they started disappearing in the 1950s, almost 120 species of frogs, an amphibian with a 125 million year-old history, have disappeared. The Western Ghats have the dubious honour of joining Costa Rica and Australia among others, which have lost many of their frog species to pesticides, traffic, pollution and general changes in habitat that strike at their immune system and predispose them to infections. Frogs are a wonderful indicator of the health of the ecosystem around their habitat, so their disappearance is another cause for concern. Many of the world’s butterflies are extinct too.

The situation in Mumbai is grave. Microwave-emitting towers, and a growing crow population are supposedly responsible for the diminishing numbers of sparrows and mynahs, and the sound of a raucous parrot might soon be a cause for celebration among those who care.

Can we afford to be sanguine? Only if we realise these species are important. Nature links each living being to another and creates a chain that can be broken only with risk to all. “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet. There is an ominous ring about those lines today. It’s an alarming situation that the authorities need to study and, if possible, reverse before it is too late.