Latest news with #Pasquali
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
A quiet island experiment reveals a battle of the bees
Since 2018, honeybees have feasted on wildflowers across a remote Italian island called Giannutri every spring. But for the last four years, Lorenzo Pasquali had the unusual task of shutting the honeybee hives down and watching wild bees as they scrambled to claim the flowers, racing for every drop of nectar in the absence of their domesticated rivals. Managed honeybees, often used in agriculture, and native bees feast on the same floral nectars and pollens. Ecologists have long suspected that honeybees may be pushing wild bees to the margins, but carrying out experiments in these wild insects has turned out to be tricky. Pasquali, an ecologist now at the University of Bialystok, Poland, and his colleagues turned the islet—just over half the size of New York's Central Park—into a living laboratory to test honeybees' impact. The results, recently published in the journal Current Biology, suggest that wild bee numbers alarmingly dropped. With the temporary removal of honeybees, nectar and pollen levels surged, allowing wild bees to forage more and feed on nectar longer and altering their daily routines. 'It is surprising and a nice experiment,' says Alfredo Valido, an entomologist at the Instituto de Productos Naturales y Agrobiología in Spain, who was not involved in the research. The researchers designed a very clear experiment relating honeybees, flowers and wild bees, he adds. (Native bees that pollinate many of our favorite foods.) Beekeepers first brought honeybee queens to Giannutri to raise them in isolation. The island is part of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park, and in 2021, authorities asked Pasquali's advisor, entomologist Leonardo Dapporto of the University of Florence to investigate whether managed honeybees that were recently brought to the island might have an unexpected ecological fallout. Hiking the island with another colleague, Alessandro Cini of the University of Pisa, they noticed plenty of honeybees buzzing around, but just a few wild bees. 'What if tomorrow there are no honeybees on the island?' Dapporto wondered. 'How [would] the behavior of wild bees change?' The team decided to use the island as a natural experiment. Every other morning, Pasquali would seal off the entrances to all 18 honeybee hives on alternating mornings, making sure the honeybees couldn't leave. Then, he and fellow researchers would observe the island's wild pollinators. The bees were kept inside until late afternoon—just long enough for researchers to observe how wild bees behaved in their absence. 'It was a unique experience. Never boring,' Pasquali says. 'I still remember every plant and rock on the island.' For Pasquali and his teammates, identifying native wild bees was easy. The wild bees are bigger and darker with bright colors. The wild bees also fly with a distinct buzzing sound compared to the honeybees. The researchers tracked how often wild bees entered or exited plots of land, tracking how often they visited flowers, and how long they spent drinking nectar. Using delicate tubes, they also measured the volume of nectar available for the wild bees in presence or absence of honeybees. The team found that when honeybees were locked in their hives, nectar volume increased by over 50 percent in some plants, while pollen level spiked by nearly 30 percent. Subsequently, the researchers found an increased level of searching behavior in wild bees and they also sucked in nectar for a longer time. Over four years, as the team carried out surveys on the island to monitor wild bee populations, they found that Anthophora dispar, a solitary native bee species, and Bombus terrestris, a type of bumblebee, fell by nearly 80 percent compared to their population level at the start of the study in 2021. While in the beginning of the experiment researchers expected to see some impacts to the wild bees, 'we didn't imagine that the impact was this strong,' Dapporto says. The dataset is still a correlation, he adds, but the fact that the wild bee population declined so significantly after the introduction of honeybees puts them on the prime focus compared to other factors. (There are thousands of species of wild bee species—and many are disappearing.) 'We are not against beekeeping practice,' Dapporto adds. But when honeybees are introduced into protected areas, especially those home to rare, endangered, or native wild bee species, park authorities should exercise great caution and ecological assessment. Wild bees on bigger islands and even in sensitive protected areas in mainland regions might be facing similar fates, if honeybees have been introduced without proper assessment, the team says. Wild bees face a range of threats, from habitat loss and climate change to pesticide exposure. But unlike many of these pressures, competition from honeybees is something humans can actively manage. As soon as Dapporto's team informed the national park about the results, the park immediately took action, halting the practice of beekeeping starting this year. That makes the results even more impressive, Valido says, commending the quick action. 'It's not logical to introduce [managed species] in an area where you want to preserve the flora and fauna,' he adds. In addition to beekeeping, 'sometimes conservation areas have a variety of land uses for things like pasture cattle and sheep,' says Victoria Wojcik, Science Director at the Pollinator Partnership Canada, a non-profit dedicated for the conservation of pollinators. Even in these cases, conservationists should look at the ecosystem resources to avoid overstocking. But for an area designated as a critical habitat for an invertebrate species, specifically a bee, 'I would be really confused as to why someone would consider permitting honeybee keeping in that landscape,' she adds. As for Dapporto and his team, they are continuing to track whether the native wild bees would change their behavior and bounce back in number as the honeybees are removed from the island. The team has already collected some data this year and is planning to continue observation for coming years. 'Then we could see if a longer absence of honeybees will produce a [major] effect on the behavior of wild bees,' he adds.
National Geographic
7 days ago
- Science
- National Geographic
A quiet island experiment reveals a battle of the bees
When beekeepers introduced honeybees to a protected island, wild bees nearly vanished. Could removing the hives reverse the damage? Domestic honeybees (Apis mellifera) help with pollinating crops worldwide, but they also compete with wild bees for nectar resources. Photograph by Ingo Arndt, Nat Geo Image Collection Since 2018, honeybees have feasted on wildflowers across a remote Italian island called Giannutri every spring. But for the last four years, Lorenzo Pasquali had the unusual task of shutting the honeybee hives down and watching wild bees as they scrambled to claim the flowers, racing for every drop of nectar in the absence of their domesticated rivals. Managed honeybees, often used in agriculture, and native bees feast on the same floral nectars and pollens. Ecologists have long suspected that honeybees may be pushing wild bees to the margins, but carrying out experiments in these wild insects has turned out to be tricky. Pasquali, an ecologist now at the University of Bialystok, Poland, and his colleagues turned the islet—just over half the size of New York's Central Park—into a living laboratory to test honeybees' impact. The results, recently published in the journal Current Biology, suggest that wild bee numbers alarmingly dropped. With the temporary removal of honeybees, nectar and pollen levels surged, allowing wild bees to forage more and feed on nectar longer and altering their daily routines. 'It is surprising and a nice experiment,' says Alfredo Valido, an entomologist at the Instituto de Productos Naturales y Agrobiología in Spain, who was not involved in the research. The researchers designed a very clear experiment relating honeybees, flowers and wild bees, he adds. (Native bees that pollinate many of our favorite foods.) A new honeybee (Apis mellifera) emerges from a brood cell to live for six short weeks. It spends that time foraging for food, making honey, and raising the next generation. Composite Photograph by Anand Varma, Nat Geo Image Collection The buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) was one of two wild species that saw a drop in numbers on Giannutri Island after honeybees were introduced. Photograph by Chris Gomersall, 2020VISION/Nature Picture Library Beekeepers first brought honeybee queens to Giannutri to raise them in isolation. The island is part of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park, and in 2021, authorities asked Pasquali's advisor, entomologist Leonardo Dapporto of the University of Florence to investigate whether managed honeybees that were recently brought to the island might have an unexpected ecological fallout. Hiking the island with another colleague, Alessandro Cini of the University of Pisa, they noticed plenty of honeybees buzzing around, but just a few wild bees. From scuba diving to set-jetting 'What if tomorrow there are no honeybees on the island?' Dapporto wondered. 'How [would] the behavior of wild bees change?' The team decided to use the island as a natural experiment. Every other morning, Pasquali would seal off the entrances to all 18 honeybee hives on alternating mornings, making sure the honeybees couldn't leave. Then, he and fellow researchers would observe the island's wild pollinators. The bees were kept inside until late afternoon—just long enough for researchers to observe how wild bees behaved in their absence. 'It was a unique experience. Never boring,' Pasquali says. 'I still remember every plant and rock on the island.' For Pasquali and his teammates, identifying native wild bees was easy. The wild bees are bigger and darker with bright colors. The wild bees also fly with a distinct buzzing sound compared to the honeybees. The researchers tracked how often wild bees entered or exited plots of land, tracking how often they visited flowers, and how long they spent drinking nectar. Using delicate tubes, they also measured the volume of nectar available for the wild bees in presence or absence of honeybees. The team found that when honeybees were locked in their hives, nectar volume increased by over 50 percent in some plants, while pollen level spiked by nearly 30 percent. Subsequently, the researchers found an increased level of searching behavior in wild bees and they also sucked in nectar for a longer time. Over four years, as the team carried out surveys on the island to monitor wild bee populations, they found that Anthophora dispar, a solitary native bee species, and Bombus terrestris, a type of bumblebee, fell by nearly 80 percent compared to their population level at the start of the study in 2021. While in the beginning of the experiment researchers expected to see some impacts to the wild bees, 'we didn't imagine that the impact was this strong,' Dapporto says. The dataset is still a correlation, he adds, but the fact that the wild bee population declined so significantly after the introduction of honeybees puts them on the prime focus compared to other factors. Commercial beekeeping, like this operation on a ranch in California, is extremely important for agriculture, but honeybees may threaten native wild species when they're introduced to protected areas. Photograph by Anand Varma, Nat Geo Image Collection 'We are not against beekeeping practice,' Dapporto adds. But when honeybees are introduced into protected areas, especially those home to rare, endangered, or native wild bee species, park authorities should exercise great caution and ecological assessment. Wild bees on bigger islands and even in sensitive protected areas in mainland regions might be facing similar fates, if honeybees have been introduced without proper assessment, the team says. Wild bees face a range of threats, from habitat loss and climate change to pesticide exposure. But unlike many of these pressures, competition from honeybees is something humans can actively manage. As soon as Dapporto's team informed the national park about the results, the park immediately took action, halting the practice of beekeeping starting this year. That makes the results even more impressive, Valido says, commending the quick action. 'It's not logical to introduce [managed species] in an area where you want to preserve the flora and fauna,' he adds. In addition to beekeeping, 'sometimes conservation areas have a variety of land uses for things like pasture cattle and sheep,' says Victoria Wojcik, Science Director at the Pollinator Partnership Canada, a non-profit dedicated for the conservation of pollinators. Even in these cases, conservationists should look at the ecosystem resources to avoid overstocking. But for an area designated as a critical habitat for an invertebrate species, specifically a bee, 'I would be really confused as to why someone would consider permitting honeybee keeping in that landscape,' she adds. As for Dapporto and his team, they are continuing to track whether the native wild bees would change their behavior and bounce back in number as the honeybees are removed from the island. The team has already collected some data this year and is planning to continue observation for coming years. 'Then we could see if a longer absence of honeybees will produce a [major] effect on the behavior of wild bees,' he adds.
Telegraph
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
I visited every country on earth but meeting suicide bombers at a wedding shocked me
'I was kidnapped by terrorists in Mauritania. They kept us in a tent for three days in the desert. When they realised that we were nobodies they let us go. I still ask myself: 'why?'' Nicolas Pasquali is reflecting on the inevitable perils that come with joining the '193 club', an exclusive coterie of people who have travelled to every UN-recognised country. The Argentinian recently reached the goal by visiting North Korea when it reopened to foreign tourists in February. 'It was like a school trip,' he says, speaking over WhatsApp from Argentina. 'They put you on a bus, show you what they want you to see. There's all this propaganda everywhere, about how North Korea is the best, how they are going to smash the world. But we had a wonderful time. The people were curious about us.' Despite being chaperoned and fed constant propaganda, North Korea was a holiday compared to Mauritania, where Pasquali and his hired driver were held against their will under canvas by militants who had posed as hitch-hikers. 'They wanted to know what we were doing there and made us pray with them, but they shared their food and treated us pretty well, actually,' he says. Then there was Iraq, where he spent two nights behind bars after being arrested at a checkpoint. '[The police] didn't believe that I was a tourist; they thought I was a spy,' he says. 'They were just doing their job. And it is suspicious, right? But they were friendly. They gave me chicken, we drank tea, they showed me pictures of their kids. Then they put me in a car and drove me to Baghdad and said that if I had a problem, I should call them.' Having brown skin probably helped Pasquali in such situations, he admits. It certainly did in Afghanistan where he hung out with the Taliban. 'I met a guy who made weapons for the Taliban, and he wrote me this letter. It said that I was a great Muslim and a friend of his and so to look after me,' he says. 'I showed the letter at checkpoints, and it opened a lot of doors. People received me, they didn't let me pay for anything. 'They were extremely generous. I got invited to weddings and was introduced to [would-be] suicide bombers. They showed me their weapons. Maybe they're not around any more. I don't know. It's insane to think about.' Pasquali, who is not Muslim, brushes off such dicey dealings as 'part of the game'. It takes a special kind of person to visit every country, he reckons. 'You don't know if you're going to make it,' he says. 'You have to be determined; you have to be a problem solver. I think that's what we all have in common.' Only 370 people alive today are confirmed to have visited all 193 UN-recognised nations, according to NomadMania, which verifies people's claims and does not count airport layovers as legitimate trips (there are a further 66 claims that it could not verify). The site keeps an online league table of the 'most travelled people on Earth', with founder Harry Mitsidis leading the pack. Mitsidis has visited every nation twice because 'if I stay in one place for too long, I feel caged', he tells me over WhatsApp from a 'middle of nowhere' village in Nepal. Ironically, Mitsidis has been caged a number of times on his travels – as many flag collectors have – including in Yemen where he spent a night in a cell with some cockroaches. 'It was miserable,' he says. 'But I deserved it because I was travelling without a visa. It's the only time I have entered a country illegally.' Half-British, half-Greek, Mitsidis grew up between cultures which he credits with sparking his wanderlust. He lives in Kent but spent only 40 days at home last year. His favourite places to hang out are the Silk Road – 'it's the link between east and west, truly fascinating' – and Latin America, where 'there are no rules but some sense of organisation – a winning combination'. 'I also love Romania,' he adds, 'but I can't rationally explain that.' To begin with, Mitsidis' mission to visit every country was, he admits, a bit of a 'box ticking exercise', a restless quest for bragging rights. Nowadays he goes 'much deeper' and tries to immerse himself in cultures. 'I like to think that the movement has evolved like I have evolved,' he says. 'We're not just tickers any more.' The every-country club is a tight-knit community and a broad church. 'Some people are very wealthy, others are washing dishes and saving for their next adventure,' says Mitsidis. 'We've got members from all over the world, and it really varies in terms of age. It does tend to be more masculine, though – about 75 per cent are men – but I see more women entering the space.' Riza Rasco, a Filipino scientist, is one of them, having also just ticked off North Korea, her final country. She took on the challenge of visiting every nation after her mother died in 2013. 'My world was different after,' she says. 'I was in my early 40s, depressed and no longer wanted to be in the US, where I was working.' So she signed up to a nine-month overland trip around Africa, travelling in the back of an old military truck. 'It was very basic,' she says. When her marriage fell apart in 2019, Rasco took to travelling full-time at a cost of around $50,000 (£39,000) per year, funded by renting out property. 'I stay in cheap accommodation,' she says. 'Once in a while I'll treat myself to a three-star hotel.' Rasco goes deeper into destinations than most. 'I like spending time with tribes,' she says. 'I went into the Amazon to be with the matsés – the jaguar people – who have decorative whiskers. I like to dress up like the [native] women and learn what they do, so I went into the forest and gathered. But matsés women only wear skirts woven from leaves, so I was topless.' Rasco, however, declined the local custom of imbibing hallucinogenic frog toxic. 'I was scared how my body would react,' she says. 'I was far from a hospital.' Invariably, she's had brushes with danger, notably in Yemen. 'The rebels were firing bazookas around us on our way to the airport,' she says. 'The ground was shaking. It was scary.' Despite such experiences, she believes that '99 per cent of people are good' and the world is safer than we're led to believe. Completing the task of visiting every nation begs an obvious question: what next? 'I'm writing a book about how places changed me,' says Rasco, who resettled in the Philippines where she leads projects to improve life in poor communities. 'The more I travelled, the more I wanted to belong. And where I belong is the Philippines.' Pasquali has also settled in his native Argentina where he works in finance. 'My new purpose is to have a family,' he says. 'But first I need to find a girl.' Mitsidis, meanwhile, keeps moving. Through NomadMania he has divided the world into 1,301 'distinct' regions and aims to visit them all. 'It's a good challenge without being absurd,' he says. 'I need constant change.'
