On why several wrong steps might make for a moody me (you know what happens when I don't get my ristretto)
I'm not saying life's boring here in the Golden Triangle but one of my favourite things to do at parties is to confuse termites, I hope this isn't insulting to my host but I spent a great deal of Four Seasons Tented Camp boss, Michel's, leaving do (he's off to Vail where there won't be so many insects to torment) watching & trying to work out how to count a stream of termites, seven or eight wide, running at several columns a second, as they streamed up a wooden column of the restaurant and into the wooden roof for hour upon hour while the whisky flowed & the karaoke squealed.
Hmmmm.... it was the 'or a few' that got me scared, in a separate piece, we learned that the Thai scientists had tested on 'a few' native bugs and the wasps didn't lay their eggs in the eggs of any of the species tested, but, as outlined above, what if just one of the species as yet untested proves tasty? If you take, for instance, the ants out of the ecosystem described in my first report, you don't get no coffee, if the scientists can't get their coffee, how on earth are they going to be able to concentrate hard enough to solve the problem of the rampant wasps?
As a conformist anarchist working with amusement in a corporate system ants, bees & termites fascinate me with their communication and their role assignment. Tormenting termites being somewhat safer than bothering bees or arresting ants, it is the wood chewers that get my attention most often.
How do they decide who gets which job? There were some slightly larger versions of the same beast, they seemed to be assigned to go against the flow, walking down the middle of the column - I couldn't see their whips but they struck me as the slave drivers keeping everyone moving & beating the slackers - some, looking identical to the rest, stood guard along the sides of the column. None was aggressive so I thought I'd play a little game & see how they handled an emergency. See if I could identify the bosses & the communication methods, were their tasks pre-programmed or were they thinking for themselves? Not being a satirist, of course, I didn't try to identify which department in the corporate organisation each type represented, so it was purely scientific & no laughter was involved.
I used a menu to temporarily block their path, what did they do? Well they didn't change behaviour, they bottled up, those millions tasked with going up and those few tasked with going down, and just sort of milled around, no-one took charge, no-one thought to look around the obstacle. They did seem to have a big meeting, it didn't seem as though any of the down go-ers turned round to go up & report to the boss, nor vice versa. There was no communication back to base & no attempt to solve the problem, once the obstacle was removed most of them just got on with their job of going down or going up or standing still (though several minutes afterwards a few of the up goers were still in their meeting discussing the action plan for the obstacle that no longer existed). ....and yet, with all these seemingly pre-assigned roles great things are managed, eggs & whole nests are moved, food is found & bought back (I once followed a 10m trail of ants stealing rice), who makes the decisions & how?
Fortunately for the ant world (& for my morning cup of organic coffee it seems) there are professional people who use sceintific versions of my menu to answer these questions (or, actually to ask more important questions), as in, what do ants actually do & why? - well, it turns out that they are part of a huge & complex eco-system, in the particular coffee orchard the entomologists studied, it turned out that if there were too few ants, no coffee, too many ants, no coffee.
So a warning to my staff, if you don't want me all grumpy & grouchy, if you want me to have my morning coffee you don't pay attention to ants, you just let them be (along with a fungus, some bugs called scale and a few other things) & they'll keep the coffee coming for you. The actual situation is far more complex than this, & for those of you with brains the size of a small planet & time on your hands I suggest you have a read here, if you have a blackboard it might be fun to try & draw a schematic.
My point is not this particular study, after all it took place in Brazil where there are different species & different pests to the Thai ecosystem, but on reading the piece I wasn't surprised to find that everything, even the bits that no-one really notices (except me with my menu & my decidedly odd ways), has it's place and when we try to take out one piece of the puzzle - because they annoy us or we think they cause us damage - we really have no idea of the consequences of our actions.
Recently, to great fanfare, a foreign wasp was released in Thailand, to combat a foreign bug that was eating a foreign plant that has been deemed useful to us humans. The scientists (for it was they) that released the wasps said they had run tests on the wasp and discovered that they the 'Anagyrus lopezi wasp, attack only one or a few species'.
If our wasp releasing friends needed a demonstration of just how much influence these little, organised-who-knows-how, acid spraying beasties can have on an environment & how dangerous it could be if their flying cure-all took a liking to our ants, one came to light in Africa just a couple of days ago, when it was revealed that scientists (for, once again, it was they - though a different bunch this time) asked themselves a question, why aren't the elephants eating those trees?
A common sense question, it seems, as the elephants were turning up their trunks at one species of acacia tree in particular & tearing down the others with great gusto. If you're a tree on the African plain it can be quite useful not to be tasty to elephants (though I read somewhere that one species of acacia can only propagate if it has passed through the stomach of an elephant & the Royal Re-introduction programme here in Thailand have discovered that some graduates of that extensive, inefficient digestive system fare better than those that just dropped to the ground). So, I'll re-phrase, if you're an African plain it is quite useful to have a species of tree that isn't munched by elephants, as well as several that are, if all the trees are gone then you're no longer a plain - a grassland or a desert, I guess? - and if you have too many trees then you're a forest. Both options are a shame for all the plants and animals that are kind of relying on you staying an African plain in order to keep on living.
What, do you think, the scientists figured were responsible for keeping the ele's out of the trees? (...& therefore at least partially for maintaining the plain in it's plain-like state?). Yep, you guessed it, our old friends the ants. After lots of thinking & not a little experimentation with smoke & sticky stuff they determined that the difference was a species of ants encouraged to live on this species of acacia by it's sweet sap or some such, in turn the ants crawl up the noses of hungry elephants, find some sensitive skin up there & sting like crazy.
Remove the ants, as our scientists did, & down go the trees.
So there you have it, never ignore the insignificant (pun entirely un-intended but I'll let it ride) for it may come back to sting you later (that one was intentional).
I hope this will help explain to Michel why it wasn't an insult that I spent most of his party playing with marching termites & why, if you see us walking home through the Anantara garden these rainy evenings, you'll see my wife & I treading very carefully, playing the 'don't squash a snail' game (she's winning with fewer snails but my excuse is larger feet - though a statistician may argue my longer legs & fewer steps nullifies this: damn statisticians), it is not pure, blind compassion for the shelled ones even mixed with our special brand of insanity for who knows how much of our ecosystem they may be saving while we're not looking?
Posted by John Roberts at Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:36:00 GMT 
Categories: General Conservation
Tags: Organic Coffee Farm Complex Interactions Keep Pests Under Control Science Daily Insects Entomology
Categories: General Conservation
Tags: Organic Coffee Farm Complex Interactions Keep Pests Under Control Science Daily Insects Entomology
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