Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [117]
Return to text.
*127The word scabies comes from the Latin scabere,“to scratch.”
Return to text.
*128These include apples, pears, blueberries, almonds, pumpkins, and squash.
Return to text.
*129The malnutrition hypothesis posits that bees forced to pollinate large monoculture farms are missing something in their diets in much the same way that a dog fed nothing but bread would experience physical harm from such a diet and eventually starve to death. On a related note, weather (e.g., drought) can also negatively affect pollen-producing plants, resulting in pollen that is deficient in the nutrients the bees require.
Return to text.
*130Researchers have identified both of these viruses in nearly all hives with CCD but not in control hives.
Return to text.
*131In a development eerily similar to CCD, White Nose Syndrome has been killing thousands of hibernating bats in upstate New York and Vermont. The most obvious symptom is a white fungus around the nose of stricken and dead bats. Experts suspect that the fungus may be a secondary problem and that something else is killing the animals. In a press release from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, bat specialist Alan Hicks said, “What we’ve seen so far is unprecedented. Most bat researchers would agree that this is the gravest threat to bats they have ever seen. We have bat researchers, laboratories, and caving groups across the country working to understand the cause of the problem and ways to contain it. Until we know more, we are asking people to stay away from known bat caves.” The DEC statement went on to say that, “Bat populations are particularly vulnerable during hibernation, as they congregate in large numbers in caves—in clusters of 300 per square foot in some locations—making them susceptible to disturbance or disease.” Adding to the problem, most of the bats known to hibernate in New York do so in just five caves and mines. “We have lost more than 90 percent of the animals at the two sites for which we have good survey data,” Hicks told me. “The problem is also expanding into new sites and now involves hibernacula harboring over 200,000 animals.” Bat biologist John Hermanson was also deeply concerned about what was taking place. “We’ve got caves with eight bats in them. There used to be thousands.”
Return to text.
*132Fleas are blood-feeding insects belonging to the order Siphonaptera (which numbers around 2,100 species). Like the chiggers that normally prey on rodents, but transmitted pathogenic bacteria to troops in Asia and the Pacific, fleas preying on rats transmitted the Black Plague to fourteenth-century Europeans. Following trade routes and the humans that plied them, black rats (Rattus rattus) spread across the world. As rat populations exploded, the fleas they carried began to encounter (and bite) humans on a regular basis. The plague struck with wavelike regularity throughout the Dark Ages, spreading inland from major ports, where it devastated cities and erased the inhabitants of entire towns. With no cure, the Black Death wiped out a significant portion of the human race (with estimates running as high as seventy-five million people killed). What saved civilization, apparently, according to one hypothesis, was that black rats were eventually replaced by another species, the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), whose fleas were less likely to bite humans.
Return to text.
*133Tick and chigger researchers actually collect their specimens by attaching a piece of rough fabric (like fleece or flannel) to a rodlike handle. These “flags,”“drags,” or “drag cloths” are then passed across the tops of tall grass or other low-lying vegetation in the hope that questing parasites will latch on.
Return to text.
*134Unlike insect respiratory systems, ticks have only two spiracular openings. Additionally, many ticks have a gill-like structure called a plastron that extracts oxygen from water, thus