Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t The Register – A study published in Science claims that global warming is shortening the tongues of Bumble Bees, which may impact the ability of their tongues to reach the bottom of deep tube flowers.
The abstract of the study;
Functional mismatch in a bumble bee pollination mutualism under climate change
Ecological partnerships, or mutualisms, are globally widespread, sustaining agriculture and biodiversity. Mutualisms evolve through the matching of functional traits between partners, such as tongue length of pollinators and flower tube depth of plants. Long-tongued pollinators specialize on flowers with deep corolla tubes, whereas shorter-tongued pollinators generalize across tube lengths. Losses of functional guilds because of shifts in global climate may disrupt mutualisms and threaten partner species. We found that in two alpine bumble bee species, decreases in tongue length have evolved over 40 years. Co-occurring flowers have not become shallower, nor are small-flowered plants more prolific. We argue that declining floral resources because of warmer summers have favored generalist foraging, leading to a mismatch between shorter-tongued bees and the longer-tubed plants they once pollinated.
Read more: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6255/1541.abstract
The full study suggests that Theoretical and empirical studies alike suggest that with lower floral resources, fitness advantages of long-tongued specialist phenotypes have diminished, potentially driving the rapid evolution of shorter-tongued bees.
Even if we accept the premise of the study, that harsher conditions are strongly selecting for bees with shorter tongues, it seems curious that the alleged shortage of bees with long tongues, and the implicit inability of available bees to satisfactorily pollinate deep tube flowers, doesn’t seem to be forcing deep tube flowers to evolve shorter tubes.
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What global warming would that be?
It’s getting to be a 3-ring circus, with global warming clowns performing in all three.
This’ll all be over after November. Really reachin’ aren’t they?
Perhaps it will also shorten the tongues of certain lying scientists. We can always hope. GK
Dang, beat me to it !!! LOL…
They can still type, unfortunately.
It will lengthen their noses.
Shorter tongues? What about their sex lives?
The study is a two pronged effort, looking at the birds i addition to the bees.
The analysis of wood peckers is coming out next week.
asybot, we can only hope the shorter tongues will inhibit there sex lives we certainty don’t want the stupid reproduce.
I thought size didn’t matter?
The bees’ tongues are shrinking but the warmists’ noses keep on growing longer and longer.
“Spatial and temporal discrepancies with food plants, habitat destruction, and pressure from invasive competitors have been implicated (3–6), but the details of these declines and their causes remain unresolved.”
So we’re going to blame global warmi….errrr….global climate chan…..errrr…..global climate disruption.
They also say in the full paper:
Flowers fight back!
This just in: Belief in manmade global warming causes massive IQ drop.
How do they knew it’s not environmental issue causing their potential tongue size problems, such as newer pesticides?
Good point, John.
This is so goofy, it has got to be a spoof.
When people look back on the AGW alarmism episode from 200 years in the future, then they will probably say exactly that about the entire episode. Especially since, for example, a prediction that the arctic sea-ice would have disappeared by 2015 will look even more stupid in 2215, when it is still there.
With 215 years of satellite measurements behind them, then some clear overall patterns should be revealed. Hopefully by then they will have noticed that the temperature is either trending up or trending down during any one particular period.
And that there is no need to panic about that!!!
This will all go down in history as a cautionary tale about endowing “science” with the imprimatur of “religion.” A reminder of the RULES of the legitimate scientific method.
Actuality I expect 200 years of satellite data to revel no patterns at all, just noise with times of warming and times of cooling. That what the historical reproduction reveal.
When someone publishes research which suggests climate change shortens penis length, 1/2 the world may then wake-up.
Do you mean wake up to the raft of goofy correlations that are being touted as science or that the catastrophic climate change driven by carbon dioxide is no longer a tenable position to take?
Gee, that would only leave climate change believers with half an inch!
…wait for it, a Onion article may prompt the gubmint agenda machine to adjust their package and take a looksee…
A subset of TSA fondlers would be delegated to keep measurements.
+100
which half would that be?
By my own experience, winter to summer it actually increases by 1″.
What CAN one say about this alleged “scientific paper?” There are no words…
I’ll proffer one: riffraff. (The emphasis on “F” is intentional.)
“There are no words…”
Don’t tell me climate change got to you, too!
Oh, come on. It’s a profound exercise in the existential. Perfectly summed up in the phrase “To Bee or not to Bee”
Pretty catchy, eh?
So, let me get this straight. “Global Warming” or whatever that might be, is preferentially selecting for a gene that causes the organism to be unable to eat correctly and thus die off. I wonder if these folks ever read Darwin?
It’s called “Natural De-selection,” part of a recurring cycle. We can see it occurring in politics. Global warming has resulted in shrinking intellects.
I would not want to be the grad student who had the job of collecting the raw data for this study.
Hope whoever it was isn’t allergic to bees.
Global Climate Change has caused a marked decrease in the average IQ of published scientists. says P.G.Sharrow N.D.D. of the PGTruspace research institute. 😉 pg
Now why couldn’t that have been all the lying liberal tongues that disappeared ????
CO2 is causing certain tongues to become more forked. To be clear I could have suggested a word very close phonetically but I shall keep it at Forked.
After much huffing and puffing and lots of lovely grant money they conclude: “In remote mountain habitats—largely isolated from habitat destruction, toxins, and pathogens – evolution is helping wild bees keep pace with climate change.”
No problem then.
Now if those researchers had claimed that warmer summers has caused a decrease in the nutritional value of the nectar being produced by said “longer-tubed plants” ….. has resulted in two alpine bumble bee species evolving shorter tongue lengths over the past 40 years ….. then I might be more inclined to believe their argument.
Evolution does not “weed-out”, …. via natural selection, ….. an appendage that is necessary for “survival of the species”.
Again, this is how the scaremongering works (my emphasis in CAPITALS):
1) Headline: “Climate change shrinking bees’ tongues, scientists say”
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/09/24/climate-change-shrinking-bees-tongues-scientists-say.html
2) Actual article: “scientists say that climate change is causing SOME bees’ tongues to shrink”, “researchers BELIEVE”, “POTENTIALLY disrupting “, ““The not-so-silver lining is the effect that this MIGHT”, ” IF the bees are visiting…the plants COULD decline”,”It will be REALLY HARD TO PREDICT what a seemingly small change like this will have on the larger community”, “it’s IMPOSSIBLE to say how much more stress they can handle”. Etc.
3) Actual science: “ONE species of bumblebeE…saw their mean tongue length drop to six millimetres from eight millimetres in ONE mountain-range population. Another species…saw a drop to just under four millimetres from just over five millimetres.”
All this, and no word that I can find as to how large the collection of specimen is, or if there is any data on when they were collected. All this shrinkage could have occurred over any sub-set of time over the entire collection.
But seriously, someone gets paid to re-hydrate bee tongues…
Ah, but when the grant money flows like … er … milk and honey, then there is plenty to spread around. You can pay graduate students to spend all day re-hydrating and measuring bees’ tongues. Heck, you can pay them to count the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. The honey train seems endless … for now.
You stand corrected. You can only pay grad students to count the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin if it can somehow be associated with global warming.
Yep.
“A nearly ten-year-long series of investigations into a pair of plant physiologists who received millions in funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation has resulted in debarments of less than two years for each of the researchers.”
http://retractionwatch.com/2015/09/02/nsf-investigation-of-high-profile-plant-retractions-ends-in-two-debarments/
Of course, climate science is WAY more settled than dumb ol’ plant physiology, and if anyone should be investigated, jailed and their ideas erased from history it should be CAGW skeptics…
Were any bees harmed in producing this study?
“Were any bees harmed in producing this study?”
No, but it took them a while to figure out how to say “Stick out your tongue, and go AAAAHHH”, in beespeak.
Not that this is relevant, but the “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” was actually a sophisticated philosophical debate on the nature of space. The debate was whether there was a physical limit to the number a times an area of space could be sub-divided. In modern language, we would express it as whether space at its most fundamental level is digital in nature or whether you can sub-divide the head of a pin to infinity. We often forget that our immediate ancestors in medieval times were just as smart as us. They thought about the same things we think about. Not really relevant, just couldn’t resist.
More proof that liberals really are insane !!!!
So to summarize: bees, that have been around for millions of years, are being threatened by a 1.5F temperature rise over 150 years, an increase that is far less than year-to-year variability. Oh, and a note to the aspiring entomologists who published this study: on a bee, the tongue is called a proboscis.
An interesting note about bumble bees is that they are known to engage in nectar robbing. This is when a bee uses its mandibles to bite a hole at the base of a long-necked flower, thereby allowing it to easily access the nectar but bypass the long neck. I have personally witnessed this activity on monarda (bee balm) flowers.
Whilst not having seen this directly, I have frequently seen bumble bees disappear behind cranesbill flowers, and the resultant hole in the petals
I was hoping to point this out, but you beat me to it John.
All of my zucchini flowers are nibbled at the base, the bumble bees seem to prefer doing this rather than climb down the flower tube.
It would be far easier to get the public to worry about climate change if scientists could produce a report saying that global warming will shorten men’s penises.
I expect that there are several research teams working on that one already. Stay tuned.
Of course, even if they find that, it wouldn’t have any relevance to the question of whether the earth is warming or not.
I don’t think they’re working Ralph, they’re simply playing with their own, perhaps to stop them atrophying because of all the blood rushing to their heads.
“We found that in two alpine bumble bee species, decreases in tongue length have evolved over 40 years.”
Because of natural selection. It is obviously a survival trait (if true). It gives the short-tongued bees access to more sources of food. The longer-tubed plants are not as numerous as they once were so the bees have decided to develop new partnerships with new plant species. Whoever wrote this crap needs to go back and repeat Evolution 101. Things in nature change. Those who believe every change is a departure from a perfect static norm and a disaster should be defunded for stupidity.
Yes, Chris, I agree. That plus “what climate change?”
They did a lot of work. I wouldn’t get too worked up about the finding. A tongue length change of 2 mm is worth looking at but given they know there is a range of lengths among different populations it is likely simply an adaptation consistent with variable resources. The length may change with different populations depending on the resources available in any given time span. This may be something the bees have been doing for millions of years. It’s warmer, we know that, post little ice age, etc. etc. so why wouldn’t a population of alpine insects have the plasticity to adjust with the prevalence of resources. This type of short term adaptation has already been documented in Darwin’s finches with relatively rapid changes in beak length. It would be interesting to calculate the relationship to short tube blossoms more precisely. I actually liked what I read but certainly this isn’t evidence the world is ending. They didn’t say that but that is the way this work will be used. They would have been much more professional to simply relate the tongue, blossom, and low mean temperature and altitude in different time periods and let other researchers dig deeper. Throwing “global warming” in to the mix is just plain awful and getting to be very tedious. This is a local finding only and any statements implying relevance beyond the Colorado Front Range is not supported by their work.
Love how the media downplays “Pesticides, pathogens and habitat loss”, while putting climate change in the click-baity headline:
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/09/24/climate-change-shrinking-bees-tongues-scientists-say.html
Good thing KISS came out in the 1970s. It wouldn’t work as well if Gene Simmons tongue was shorter.
Speaking of KISS, this is another one of those
Keep It Simply Scary articles.
Greasy hair, plaid jacket and pants, white shoes and belt. The “climate scientists “.
Who has been paying these people to measure bee tongues for 40(!) years?
You mean besides you and I ?
We should have a law that if anyone wastes our tax dollars so blatantly that they are obvious stooges, every tax payer gets to clunk their heads together like we are Moe!
Seems the only way to get a government grant is to blame something on global warming. The added benefit of adding a dubious paper to the publish or die syndrome.
Well. the big [snip] up here is that they assumed shortened probosces would be a problem without any acknowledgment that this maybe by natural needs,. Perhaps there is plenty of food.