Insect Year in Review 2021

Observing the diversity of life that coexists in one place is one of the rewards of visiting the same natural area over a long period of time. My garden not only offers myself and passersby such an observatory. It's also a laboratory in which I can research how insects engage with their environment - both biotic and abiotic - and imagine, design, and create habitat to better provide for their needs.

I use iNaturalist to document the diversity of life in my garden. Although I only posted my first iNaturalist Observation in 2017, my garden Observations now span more than a decade. As of this year, I've documented over 400 insect species making use of my garden.

This biodiversity, and my documentation of it, is intentional. And although all of this is by design, all I can do is uncover the latent urban biodiversity in and around my garden. Each new species I find is a surprise to me.

City Nature Challenge 2018

The "weedy" remnants of my front lawn, where Viola sororia, common blue violet, has taken charge. Easily overlooked, it seeds itself readily without any help from me (or any other gardener). Yet this species is native to New York City. It's one of my iNaturalist observations from my garden for this year's City Nature Challenge.

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Today, Sunday, April 29th, is day 3 of the global City Nature Challenge, which continues into tomorrow. Building on the explosive popularity of iNaturalist as a platform for observations, this gamified bioblitz pits cities against each other, to see which can identify more taxa of living species in a 96-hour period.

NYC is currently is 6th place globally, and 4th nationally. There are still plenty of opportunities to join special events organized for New York City, with events in 4 of our 5 boroughs today, and more tomorrow.

I wasn't able to take part in yesterday's festivities. This weekend, I have to get my garden ready for this season's garden tours. Armed with only my phone, I kept an eye out for anything I might see, uncover, or unearth. I was rewarded.

Hempstead Plains, Long Island's Remnant Prairie

Updated 2013-09-05: CORRECTION - The white-flowering plant is Eupatorium hyssopifolium, Hyssop-leaf Throughwort, not E. perfoliatum, Common Boneset, as I misidentified it.

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At a glance - say, highway speed - this may appear to be yet another old-field meadow, biding its time before it transitions into shrubland and eventually forest. This is Hempstead Plains, one of several mature grasslands on Long Island, and the only true prairie east of the Appalachian Mountains.


Hempstead Plains on the grounds of Nassau Community College in East Garden City, Nassau County, NY. The white-flowering plants are Eupatorium hyssopifolium, Hyssop-leaf Throughwort.

On Sunday, August 25, I joined three other native plant lovers for a whirlwind tour of Hempstead Plains. We had only an hour; I could have spent several hours there. For me, this was a pilgrimage. I spent most of my childhood on Long Island.

News: IUCN Releases 2007 Red List of Endangered Species

Blog Widow John has a hard time watching any nature shows. We go "awwww" for the first 45 minutes at cute furry, feathery, scaly critters. Then they bring you down with "But time is running out ..."

I hope he doesn't read this.

Gland, Switzerland, 12 September, 2007, World Conservation Union (IUCN) – Life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken, according to the 2007 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
- IUCN Press Release, September 12: Extinction Crisis Escalates

One in four mammals, one in eight birds, one third of all amphibians and 70% of the world’s assessed plants on the 2007 IUCN Red List are in jeopardy.

There are now 41,415 species on the IUCN Red List and 16,306 of them are threatened with extinction, up from 16,118 last year. The total number of extinct species has reached 785 and a further 65 are only found in captivity or in cultivation.

o The number of threatened species is increasing across almost all the major taxonomic groups.
o Most threatened birds, mammals and amphibians are located on the tropical continents – the regions that contain the tropical broadleaf forests which are believed to harbour the majority of the Earth’s terrestrial and freshwater species.
o Of the countries assessed, Australia, Brazil, China and Mexico hold particularly large numbers of threatened species.
o Estimates vary greatly, but current extinction rates are at least 100-1,000 times higher than natural background rates.
o The vast majority of extinctions since 1500 AD have occurred on oceanic islands, but over the last 20 years, continental extinctions have become as common as island extinctions.

There are now 12,043 plants on the IUCN Red List, with 8,447 listed as threatened. The Woolly-stalked Begonia (Begonia eiromischa) is the only species to have been declared extinct this year. This Malaysian herb is only known from collections made in 1886 and 1898 on Penang Island. Extensive searches of nearby forests have failed to reveal any specimens in the last 100 years.

The Wild Apricot (Armeniaca vulgaris), from central Asia, has been assessed and added to the IUCN Red List for the first time, classified as Endangered. The species is a direct ancestor of plants that are widely cultivated in many countries around the world, but its population is dwindling as it loses habitat to tourist developments and is exploited for wood, food and genetic material.

Links:

IUCN 2007 Red List Home Page
Fact Sheet

Letter to the NY Times, Science section

[Updated 2006.09.14 20:41 EDT: Added Why I Wrote the Letter. Minor corrections.]

I wrote a letter last Wednesday to the New York Times in response to an interview with ornithologist Joseph M. Forshaw, a world expert on parrots, in last week's Science section, “A Passion for Parrots and the Fight to Save Them in the Wild”. They published an edited version of it (under my "real" name") today. Here it is in its entirety:

Monk parrots are now established in 14 states and spreading north in New York. In their native ranges, they are sometimes serious agricultural pests of fruit crops. We will see what economic damage they cause here as their numbers expand. We don’t know how much environmental damage they’ve already caused by competing with and displacing native species.

As the ornithologist Joseph M. Forshaw noted admiringly, “Parrots are such wonderful generalists.” This is a common trait of invasive species, including other generalists that New Yorkers are all too familiar with: starlings, pigeons, rats and roaches. Our admiration of these birds should not blind us to their potential impact.

I'm proud and excited about this. This is only the second time in my life I've had a letter published in a newspaper. (The first was a letter I wrote to Newsday when I was 16 years old in opposition to the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island. I wrote a letter to NPR several weeks ago. They were interested in it, but I don't know if that ever aired.)

I'll be coming back and updating this entry with the back-story about why I wrote the letter, and what I learned about writing letters!

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Why I Wrote the Letter

The article, published in last Tuesday's New York Times, was an interview with ornithologist Joseph M. Forshaw. Forshaw spoke about his experiences with parrots and humans' relationships with them all over the world, and the dangers they face from exploitation and habitat destruction.

The photos accompanying the article showed Monk Parrots from Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery. I already knew why those photos were there. Forshaw had accompanied Steve Baldwin on one of his "Parrot Safaris", and Baldwin had blogged about it on his blog site, Brooklyn Parrots:

I recently had the pleasure of meeting an amazing Australian naturalist ... His name is Dr. Joseph Forshaw and he's widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on parrots. I had the honor of serving as his "guide" when he came to see the wild parrots of Brooklyn. ... The New York Times wrote up a nice story on Dr. Forshaw ... I am glad to say that there are some great shots of the "Brooklyn Boids!"

The problem was, the photos accompanying the article in this way associated an introduced species with the important issue of conserving parrots in the wild in their native habitats. The Times identified the parrots as "feral monk parrots." A caption to one of the photos identified them as "nonnative New Yorkers," but provided no further explanation.

"Feral" is incorrect to describe these populations. Neither the species nor the individuals are domestic parrots "escaped" into the wild: they are breeding and reproducing in the wild. So I wrote the letter hoping to address, and correct, a misleading absence of information about their status here.


[goo.gl]

Related posts

My other posts on Parrots and Invasive species.

Links

The letter as published

Coleomegilla usurps Coccinella as New York State Insect

[Update, 2006.08.15: Corrected the date to 2006 from 2005!]

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News, June 15, 2006, Albany, NY: The New York State Assembly bill A06247 passed and delivered to the Senate:

PURPOSE OR GENERAL IDEA OF BILL : Alters terminology of the state insect.

JUSTIFICATION : To change the official state insect from the Nine-spotted lady beetle (Coccinella novemnotata) species of the lady bug, which is no longer found in New York State, to another species of Lady Bug, the Spotted lady bug (Coleomegilla maculata).

PRIOR LEGISLATIVE HISTORY : New Bill.

FISCAL IMPLICATIONS : None.

EFFECTIVE DATE : Immediately.

Here's how the New York Times reported it today, June 23:

The state's official insect, a nine-spotted ladybug, would no longer fly in that role: it is extinct in New York State. So legislators took a break from bickering over health care spending and property taxes in the waning days of the session and found common ground on the issue of designating a new state insect, making it the pink spotted ladybug instead.
- A Few Things Lawmakers Can Agree On [requires subscription for viewing]

I think the correct term would be "extirpated" in New York State. Regardless, the article goes on to quote Nancy Calhoun, Republican, sponsor of the bill:

... "I know it's not earth-shattering," said the assemblywoman, Nancy Calhoun, who represents parts of Orange and Rockland Counties.

Ms. Calhoun says she was just trying to right a wrong. Lawmakers first adopted the state's official bug in 1989, but the nine-spotted ladybug had already become extinct in the state. Ms. Calhoun was alerted to the error by a reporter a couple of years ago and she submitted a bill to rectify the matter.

"Why do we want to get something like this wrong?" Ms. Calhoun said. "It would be like having a dinosaur as our state reptile." ...

It's an interesting question. In fact, New York State has a state fossil, the Sea Scorpion, which is an extinct relative of the Horseshoe Crab, which is not. So intentionally selecting an extinct state symbol is not out of the question. The comparison is not accurate, however. Dinosaurs were extinct before we got onto the scene; C. novemnotata was once common. A better question is: How did New York State get to have a once-native-but-no-longer-resident state insect?

The back-story can be found in the Fall 2003 issue of Wings, the magazine of the Xerces Society:

Web Resource: New York Metropolitan Flora Project (NYMF)

Updated, 2013-08-25: Corrected links.

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Brooklyn Botanic Garden's New York Metropolitan Flora Project (NYMF) documents the distribution of woody plant species among 25 counties in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut within a 50-mile radius around New York City. Tools available online include:

• A plant encyclopedia, organized by family, genus, and species. For example: Adoxaceae, Viburnum, V. dentatum
• Lists of plants by county, linked to the detailed species entries in the encyclopedia. For example: Kings County (Brooklyn)
• A searchable bibliography.

While most of the botanical community concentrates on tracking the threats to biodiversity in the tropics, scientists at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are undertaking the most comprehensive study ever of the plant biodiversity in metropolitan New York. Studying the vegetation changes in highly populated areas is critical to understanding the future of life in our rapidly urbanizing world. ...
Understanding the urban landscape is critical in our rapidly urbanizing world. Findings of BBG's Metropolitan Flora Project serve as vital references for those involved in environmental efforts, from preserving rare plants, to planning parks and greenways, to repairing degraded habitats, to designing home gardens in which native plant communities are preserved or restored.

Links

Brooklyn Botanic Garden: New York Metropolitan Flora Project

Article, Fall 2005: The Changing Flora of the New York Metropolitan Region

The authors compare past distribution data from historical records, and current data from Brooklyn Botanic Garden's New York Metropolitan Flora Project to determine changes in distribution over the past century. They further compare these changes between native and introduced species within the same genus, such as Celastrus scandens, American bittersweet (native) and Celastrus orbiculata (or C. orbiculata), Oriental bittersweet (introduced, and invasive), or Lonicera sempervirens, Trumpet honeysuckle (native) and Lonicera japonica, Japanese honeysuckle (introduced, and invasive).

We statistically analyzed 100 years of herbarium specimen data for woody plants in the New York metropolitan region in order to measure the floristic changes of this area. Change Index values were computed for 224 of the region's 556 woody species to provide a specific measure of whether these species are expanding, contracting, or stable. The results show that, in general, nonnative invasive species are spreading rapidly in the region, while native species are in slight decline.
- The Changing Flora of the New York Metropolitan Region

Links

The Changing Flora of the New York Metropolitan Region, Urban Habitats, Volume 3, Number 1, Fall 2005, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 1000 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11225