By the side of the River Liffey – ENTO’15 Dublin

This year, the Royal Entomological Society’s biennial symposium was held at Trinity College, Dublin (September 2nd-4th). This was the first time that the Society has held its symposium meeting outside the UK. The symposium theme this year was Insect Ecosystem Services, whilst the Annual Meeting which ran alongside the symposium meeting this year, was divided into nine themes, Biocontrol, Conservation, Decomposition, Insect Diversity and Services, Multiple Ecosystem Services, Outreach, Plant-Insect Interactions, Pollination and just in case anyone was feeling left out, Open.

The meeting convenors, Archie Murchie, Jane Stout, Olaf Schmidt, Stephen Jess, Brian Nelson, and Catherine Bertrand, came from both sides of the border so that the whole of Ireland was represented.

As a number of us were going from Harper Adams University we decided to use the Sail-rail option (any mainline station in the UK to Dublin for £78 return). We were thus able to feel smug on two levels, economically and ecologically 🙂 We set out on the morning of Tuesday 1^st September from Stafford Railway Station, changing at Crewe for the longer journey to Holyhead.

Andy Cherrill, Tom Pope, Joe Roberts, Charlotte Rowley and Fran Sconce look after the luggage.

Just over two hours later we arrived at Holyhead to join the queue for the ferry to Dublin.

In the queue at Holyhead.

Two of my former students were supposed to join us on the ferry but due to a broken down train, only one of them made it in time, Mark Ramsden being the last passenger to board whilst Mike Garratt had to wait for the next ferry.

Tom Pope and Mark Ramsden relaxing on board the ferry.

We arrived at Trinity College in the pouring rain, but still got a feel for some of the impressive architecture on campus.

                           

I never quite worked out what this piece of art was about, although the added extra made me smile.

The bedrooms were very self-contained – the bed was rather neatly built into the storage although it did make me feel like I was sleeping on a shelf.

After settling in we found a pleasant pub and sampled some of the local beverages.

Despite the beverage intake, I was up bright and early on Wednesday morning, in fact so early, that I was not only first at the Registration Desk, but beat the Royal Entomological Society Staff there.

After setting up our stand we were able to enjoy the programme of excellent plenary talks and those in the National Meeting themes. There was a great deal of live tweeting taking place so I thought I would give you a flavour of those rather than describing the talks in detail.  For the full conference experience use Twitter #ento15

Dave Goulson from Sussex University,  was the first of the plenary speakers and lead off with a thought-provoking talk about the global threats to insect pollination services.

I was a bit disappointed that John Pickett, who was chairing the session cut short a possibly lively debate between Lin Field and Dave Goulson about pesticide usage.

The next plenary speaker was Akexandra-Maria Klein from Freiburg speaking about biodiversity and pollination services.

The third plenary speaker was Lynn Dicks from Cambridge asking how much flower-rich habitat is enough for wild pollinators?

I was the fourth plenary speaker, talking about how entomology and entomologist have influenced the world. I deliberately avoided crop protection and pollination services.

I was very pleased that my talk was on the first day as this allowed me to enjoy the rest of the meeting, including the social events to the full.

The following day, Jan Bengtsson from SLU in Sweden spoke about biological ontrol in a landscape context and the pros and cons of valuing ecosystem services.

Jan was followed by Sarina Macfadyne from CSIRO, Australia, who spoke about temporal patterns in plant growth and pest populations across agricultural landscapes and astounded us with the list of pesticides that are still able to be used by farmers in Australia.

The next plenary speaker, Charles Midega – icipe spoke about the use of companion cropping for sustainable pest management in Africa and extolled the virtues of ‘push-pull’ agriculture.

The last plenary of Day Two was Jerry Cross of East Malling Research who enlightened us about the arthropod ecosystem services in apple orchards and their economic benefits. He also highlighted the problems faced by organic growers trying to produce ‘perfect’ fruit for the supermarkets.

The third day of the conference plenaries was kicked off by Michael Ulyshen from the USDA Forest Service – who reviewed the role of insects in wood decomposition and nutrient cycling. My take-home image form his talk was the picture of how a box of woodchips was converted to soil by a stage beetle larvae completing its life cycle.

The last plenary of the morning was Craig Macadam from BugLife who explained to us that aquatic insects are much than just fish food and play cultural role as well as an ecological one.

The afternoon session of the last day was Sarah Beynon, the Queen of Dung Beetles who enthralled us with her stories of research and outreach . It was a testament to the interest people had in what Sarah had to say, that the audience was till well over a hundred, despite it being the last afternoon.

The final plenary lecture, and last lecture of the conference, was given by Tom Bolger from the other university in Dublin, UCD. Hi subject was soil organisms and their role in agricultural productivity.

I know that I have only given you a minimal survey of the plenary lectures, but you can access the written text of all the talks in the special issue of Ecological Entomology for free.

I did of course attend a number of the other talks, and had to miss many that I wanted to see but which clashed with the ones that I did see.

Eugenie Regan gave a great talk on her dream of setting up a Global Butterfly Index.

One of my PhD students, Joe Roberts, gave an excellent talk on his first year of research into developing an artificial diet for predatory mites.

Katie Murray, a fomer MREs student of mine, now doing a PhD at the University of Stirling, gave a lively talk on Harlequin ladybirds and the problems they may be having with STDs.

Rudi Verspoor, yet another former MRes student gave us an overview of a project that he and Laura Riggi, have developed on entomophagy in Benin.

Peter Smithers from Plymouth University gave an amusing and revelatory talk the ways in which Insects are perceived and portrayed. Some excellent material for my planned book on influential entomology 😉

Chris Jeffs, yet another former MRes student gave an excellent presentation about climate warming and host-parasitoid interactions.

My colleague (and former MSc student) Tom Pope bravely volunteered to step into a gap in the programme and gave an excellent talk about how understanding vine weevil behaviour can help improve biological control programmes.

Jasmine Parkinson from the University of Sussex, and incidentally a student of a former student of mine, gave an excellent and well-timed talk about mealybugs and their symbionts.

Charlotte Rowley from Harper Adams gave an excellent talk about saddle-gall midge pheromones.

Another former student, Mike Garratt, now at Reading University, gave an overview of his work on hedgerows and their dual roles as habitats for pollinators and natural enemies.

There were also excellent talks by Jessica Scrivens on niche partitioning in cryptic bumblebees, Relena Ribbons on ants and their roles as ecological indicators, Rosalind Shaw on biodiversity and multiple services in farmland from David George on how to convince farmers and growers that field margins are a worthwhile investment. My apologies to all those whose talks I missed, I wanted to see them but parallel sessions got in the way.

Richard Comont, whose talk I missed, very recognisable from the back 😉

 

I leave you with a selection of photographs from the social parts of the programme including our last morning in Dublin before catching the ferry home on Saturday morning.

 

The Conference Dinner – former and current students gathering.

Tom Pope signs the Obligations Book – his signature now joins those of Darwin and Wallace.

Archie Murchie with RES Librarian Val McAtear.

The youngest delegate and his father; I hope to see him at Harper Adams learning entomology in the near future.

Entomologists learning how to dance a ceilidh.

Moving much too fast for my camera to capture them.

Academic toilets – note the shelf on which books can be placed whilst hands are otherwise occupied.

On site history.

Impressive doorway in the Museum café.

The Natural History Museum was very vertebrate biased.

They certainly didn’t way know the best way to mount aphids.

I was, however, pleased to see a historical Pooter.

 

On our final day the sun actually made an appearance so our farewell to Ireland was stunning.

And finally, many thanks to the conference organizers and the Royal Entomological Society for giving us such a good experience.  A lot to live up to for ENTO’16 which will be at Harper Adams University.  We hope to see you there.

Postscript

As a result of being tourists on Saturday morning we were exposed to a lot of gift shops and in one I impulsively bought a souvenir 😉

A world without Pandas – would it make a difference? OR Conservation versus eradication – do some species deserve to die?

Before you all get excited and ready to shoot me down in flames, this post is not about pandas 😉 It is about how we, as humans, have a very warped view about the value of the species with whom we share this planet – note I did not say OUR planet.

Imagine this as a newspaper headline; Scientists discover a way to eradicate Siberian tigers or this; Destroy Polar Bear menace say local residents or this, Malawi’s ”Serial Killer” Crocodiles Cause Havoc among the Blind, actually this last one is true http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/33608 😉

Most people on seeing headlines like those would be putting pen to paper, typing tweets, sharing links and generally making a huge fuss. Replace tigers, pandas and crocodiles with mosquitoes, aphids and spiders and the only people making a fuss would be that other endangered species,  entomologists,  as evidenced by this Twitter conversation sparked off by this article http://www.radiolab.org/story/kill-em-all/

I know I said this wasn’t about pandas but bear with me for a minute.

The following sentences are from the WWF site http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/giant_panda/panda/why_we_save_the_giant_panda/

“The giant panda is one of these species threatened to be wiped off the planet. Ironically, it is also one better known and loved species in the world and one of the strongest symbols of nature conservation. That is one of the main reasons why they are so important: by mobilizing people to save the panda, we are actually helping preserve the rich biodiversity, plants, landscapes, other animals that need to be there in order for the pandas to survive.

The region where pandas live, in the Yangtze Basin and its magnificent forests are home to a stunning array of wildlife such as dwarf blue sheep and beautiful multi-coloured pheasants; as well as a number of other endangered species, including the golden monkey, takin and crested ibis. The panda’s habitat is also home for millions of people. This is the geographic and economic heart of China. By making this area more sustainable, we are also helping to increase the quality of life of local populations”
By rewriting this very slightly and using Anopheles gambiae and mosquito instead of panda, you get this somewhat thought-provoking version;

Anopheles gambiae is one of those species threatened to be wiped off the planet by the deliberate action of man (http://synbiobeta.com/oxitec-arming-insects-eliminate/ and http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_10-6-2014-16-5-11).

The region where Anopheles gambiae live, sub-Saharan Africa, and its magnificent forests and savannahs are home to a stunning array of wildlife such as lions, elephants and giraffes; as well as a number of other endangered species, including the cheetah and black rhino.

That is one of the main reasons why they are so important: by mobilizing people to save the mosquito, we are actually helping preserve the rich biodiversity, plants, landscapes, other animals that need to be there in order for the mosquitoes to survive.

The mosquitoes’ habitat is also home for millions of people. This is the geographic and economic heart of Africa. By making this area more sustainable, we are also helping to increase the quality of life of local populations”

 

I know that this is a somewhat extreme example, and I am in NO way whatsoever saying that malaria prevention is a bad thing and that we should allow millions of people to die every year. What I am proposing is that we should look at the ways we can protect people from malaria and other fatal and debilitating diseases and our crops from the depredations of pests and diseases that don’t involve the eradication of other species on the planet.
Conservation biology teaches us that we should preserve species for a number of reasons.  Common textbook examples usually include the following:

Resource values – all species may have an economic or ecological value, some of which we do not yet appreciate e.g. Food, pharmaceuticals, watershed regulation, coastline stabilisation, reefs for fisheries, tourism, education, ecological baselines, habitat reconstruction etc.

Non-resource values – all species should be valued anyway e.g. Religion, moral codes, social/cultural values, existence values, intrinsic value, and aesthetic values

Precautionary principle – all species should be preserved just in case – the rivets and spaceship (aeroplane) theory

This latter theory comes from the preface to Paul Ehrlich’s 1981 book, Extinction, where he imagines a passenger inspecting the ‘plane he is about to fly in. The passenger notices someone popping rivets out of the wings and asks what he is doing. The rivet popper replies that the passenger shouldn’t worry because not all the rivets are necessary. The rivets represent species and the rivet popper represents humanity, and the ‘plane the planet Earth. Ehrlich predicted that continuing to pop the rivets of ecosystems would lead to “a crumbling of post-industrial society” and demanded that the rivet popping be stopped.

Michael Soulé, a pioneer conservation biologist and former PhD student of Paul Ehrlich wrote

“untimely extinction of populations and species is bad, conservation biology does not abhor extinction per se. Natural extinction is thought to be either value free or good because it is part of the process of replacing less well-adapted gene pools with better adapted ones. Ultimately, natural extinction, unless it is catastrophic, does not reduce biological diversity, because it is offset by speciation”

Conservation principles have moved from the preservation of single species to an ecosystem point of view as outlines recently by Professor Georgina Mace of University College London,

although the concept of keystone species, a term first coined by Richard Paine in 1969 has, particularly if the keystone species is vertebrate¹ , had a marked influence on where conservation efforts have been directed over the years.

The concept of ecosystem services where species can be assigned an economic value depending on the services they offer to humankind  is not new (e.g. Hooper, 1970; Westman, 1977), but has increasingly and unfortunately allowed politicians and research funders to make decisions about the worth of species from a purely human viewpoint. As a result, when discussing the eradication or otherwise of species there is a definite bias towards the ‘charismatic mega-fauna’ whether they are keystone species or not, and those species that cause us discomfort must argue very hard for their preservation; see for example this extract from Jennifer Fang’s (2010) article.
A stronger argument for keeping mosquitoes might be found if they provide ‘ecosystem services’ — the benefits that humans derive from nature. Evolutionary ecologist Dina Fonseca at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, points as a comparison to the biting midges of the family Ceratopogonidae, sometimes known as no-see-ums. “People being bitten by no-see-ums or being infected through them with viruses, protozoa and filarial worms would love to eradicate them,” she says. But because some ceratopogonids are pollinators of tropical crops such as cacao, “that would result in a world without chocolate”.

“They don’t occupy an unassailable niche in the environment,” says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. “If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over.” 

 

On the plus side sometimes the ecosystem services concept can be used to highlight the benefits of the smaller and often over-looked species, but yet again only if a substantial economic value can be assigned to them http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/05/threatened-species-cannot-afford-to-lose-age-of-extinction

 

Personally, I am a great believer in retaining as many species as we can, so the deliberate eradication of species from their natural environments because we find them a nuisance makes me uneasy. We share this world, we don’t own it, so finding a way to live with ‘nuisance’ species must be a better option than eradicating them.

As a parting thought, consider these words from Ehrlich & Mooney (1980), and also bear in mind the UK Government’s recent Biodiversity Offsetting policy.

“Although there are numerous examples of unsuccessful substitutions, successful ones are hard to identify.

At some point the costs of substitution will almost certainly become unbearable. Therefore, it seems that a conservative approach, emphasizing the careful preservation of ecosystems and thus the populations and species that function within them is absolutely essential.”

 

Some things once broken are very difficult to put back together and might not work in the same way that they did before they were broken

http://100percenttea.blogspot.co.uk/2007/11/how-not-to-repair-broken-teapot.htmle

 

References

Ehrlich, P. R. & Mooney, H.A. (1983) Extinction, substitution, and ecosystem services. BioScience, 33, 248-254

Fang, J. (2010) A World without mosquitoes. Nature, 466, 432-434

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

Hooper, J.F. (1970) Economics, the ecosystem and conservation. Journal of Range Management, 23, 148-150

Mace, G. (2014). Whose conservation? Science, 345, 1558-1560.

Paine, R. T. (1969). A note on trophic complexity and community stability. American Naturalist,  103, 91-93.

Soulé, M. E. (1985). What is conservation biology? Bioscience 35, 727-734.

Westman, W.E. (1977) How much are nature’s services worth? Science, 197, 960-964

 

Post script

¹Somewhat ironically Paine’s 1969 paper in which he coined the term keystone species dealt with two invertebrate species,  starfish.