
Neonicotinoids disrupt aquatic food webs and decrease fishery yields - stevenwoo
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6465/620
======
red-indian
Neonicotinoids are one of the best and safest pesticide treatments for
termites. You dig a narrow ditch around the building's foundation, you mix in
the neonicotinoid with the dirt, and you refill the ditch. Used this way there
is absolutely no risk to bees or aquaculture.

Neonicotinoids are one of the best and safest pesticide treatments for flea
and ticks on cats and dogs. You apply it to the back of their neck and it
lasts 30 days. Used this way there is absolutely no risk to bees or
aquaculture.

Neonicotinoids, although effective, are not suitable for use in fruit orchards
or golf courses, or where they can enter water systems, yet are used in these
contexts.

When you buy a neonicotinoid for termite control the instructions explain that
it is illegal to use it for those other things. Yet you can instead buy the
exact same neonicotinoid for fruit trees where the instructions explain that
it is legal for that use. This makes little sense.

Losing neonicotinoids for termite, tick and flea control would be a grave
mistake and loss and give no advantage.

Modifying neonicotinoid instructions to ban usages that are obviously causing
problems is reasonable.

~~~
stinos
_you mix in the neonicotinoid with the dirt, and you refill the ditch. Used
this way there is absolutely no risk to bees or aquaculture_

Does this mean it's not possible that e.g. it starts raining, the
neonicotinoid mixes with the water which then eventually makes it into a
nearby stream? I.e. just like your thrid paragraph describes?

~~~
red-indian
The trench is about 4 inches wide. It's under the eaves. You can also do it on
the inside of the building if you have a crawl space. Dig 10 ft of trench.
Pour 5 gallons water in trench mixed with something like 1 oz neonicotinoid.
Then backfill the trench. The neonicotinoid bonds with the soil and remains
active for about a decade, stopping termites from entering the building. Any
house meeting building codes is going to have a roof and eaves that prevent
large amounts of rain from entering this area. The area has non-neonicotonoid
soil on top of it so there's no casual run off. You'd have to have leeching
through the soil to whatever watershed you have. This is impossible because
the neonicotonoids bond with the soil and do not move once set.

With fruit trees it also has long lasting action, bonding with the very bark
of the tree and remaining for many years. This is a problem since honey bees
come to the tree and get microdoses which appear to mess with their
navigation. But the interesting part is other pollinators don't show these
effects. Which is perhaps because honey bees have the food they store (honey)
harvested by their "keepers" and are then given commercial corn syrup mix
(grown with pesticides and including residue) as their only food. The
simplistic nutrition of this substance compared to real honey weakens these
fellows, compounding the disorienting effects of the neonicotonoids.

In OP's Japanese study they are mass applying neonicotonoids directly to the
surface of a watershed, which resulted in huge problems to the down stream
aquaculture. This use of neonicotonoids is a terrible idea and the adverse
effects were not surprising. I'm quite surprised that mass application of
neonicotonoids to a watershed isn't considered a criminal act.

~~~
markdown
> stopping termites from entering the building.

Do the termites in your location not fly? In Fiji we have termite swarms once
a year. Millions of them will show up at every light they can get to in the
evenings. Everyone is advised to turn off their lights for a few hours and
light a fire outside so as to get the termites to kamikazi. These are the
Asian Subterranean Termites that arrived here via Australia.

Pesticide in a ditch around a house isn't going to stop these buggers.

~~~
basicplus2
Termites only fly when a colony has reached a limit on number, and pairs fly
off to start new colonies.

unless they start a new colony inside the barrier, the barrier is still
effective.

~~~
markdown
The barrier is only affective against burrowing, but termites don't start new
colonies by burrowing. They swarm (usually once annually)... fly off and build
new colonies. If only the method described here actually worked, we'd save
billions of dollars a year in damage.

------
jeffdavis
There's a big enviromental problem with the notion that things are either
approved/acceptable or not; binary.

Neonicotinoids are probably good compared to a lot of alternatives. But by
being one of few approved choices, they are used to such a huge extent that
minor problems become major.

Another example is gasoline. It's very clean, especially with a catalytic
converter. It's so clean that one of the worst things you can say about it is:
if billions of people use gasoline, it upsets the balance of CO2.

If we use a little more variety, even if average "badness" seems worse, we
will be better off. But our policies push us toward homogeneity.

~~~
yawz
As a beekeeper I can tell you that Neonics are a very bad and serious problem.
I’m surprised that people are not much more outraged by poisoning themselves
and their children.

~~~
tptacek
Again, the whole point of neonicotinoids is that they're less toxic to mammals
than their predecessors (primarily organophosphates) and can be used in
smaller amounts. The pollination industry does not appear to be collapsing
despite the widespread, longstanding use of neonicotinoids. Who exactly is
being poisoned?

~~~
hanniabu
> The pollination industry does not appear to be collapsing despite the
> widespread, longstanding use of neonicotinoids

Uhhhh, what? It won't happen overnight, just like smoking won't cause you to
die after a few pulls. But regardless, there are reported declines from
neonicotinoids.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12459](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12459)

[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/neonicotinoid-
pesticide...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/neonicotinoid-pesticides-
slowly-killing-bees)

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/widel...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/widely-
used-pesticide-makes-birds-lose-weight/)

~~~
tptacek
You are responding to a different argument than I made. Your claim is that
neonicotinoids are harmful to colony-forming bees. My argument is that the
harm does not appear to be reflected in the pollination industry, which, in
the US, is the essential purpose of those bees. Honey bees are livestock, not
wildlife.

~~~
AtomicNixon
It's actually the pollination industry that's the root of the problem as I see
it, and there's a lot of evidence to support it. There has been a major shift
in the past couple of decades and now pollination services account for as much
income for keepers as the honey itself. So just out of wintering, when they're
at their weakest, they get all the hives together to pollinate the almond
crops, and of course to trade the latest parasites and diseases. Once they've
got all caught up to date on those, they load them back on the trucks and do a
nice tour around the country, spreading the joy.

My parents kept up to 100 hives for almost two decades in northern Manitoba,
where it gets down to -40C, and we rarely ever had overwintering losses.
Farmers and keepers should treat their livestock well, feed them over the
winter, give them a bit of shelter, and they'll do fine. Bees can survive
almost any cold if they've got the fuel to burn to keep the hive warm.

~~~
tptacek
That's super interesting, and glad to get a sanity check from someone with
direct experience; I'm just an interested bystander.

------
dalex00
Saw a documentary banned in France for certain use as bee population decreases
massively e.g. used for corn. Problem goes into the ground kill every life in
the ground and get into every plant around the crop and also bird population
decreases. Documentary showed that Bayer tried to sabotage the investigation.
I think the risks massively exceeds the benefits.

~~~
pirocks
I'm not sure I understand this comment. Perhaps someone could rephrase it?

------
JanSolo
Why is there no rush to phase out the use of these chemicals? My understanding
is that they are a relatively recent invention and that we used different,
less toxic, pesticides before. It should be a simple task to outlaw the
neonicotinoids and return to the old pesticides. Sure, yields might drop a
little, but that's better than an existential threat to our whole food chain,
no?

~~~
hollerith
Where did you get the idea that the pesticides commonly used before the common
use of neonicotinoids were less toxic?

(They might be less toxic to bees and the zooplankton mentioned in the OP, but
they were more toxic to, e.g., human agricultural workers.)

~~~
epanchin
Because the fish were alive.

~~~
tptacek
No, organophosphates were killing the fish, even at very low exposures.

~~~
epanchin
source? I can’t see that in the article. The article states that when
neonicotiniods were used, fish stocks collapsed.

From this, there are only two valid conclusions;

Pesticides was not previously being used, or the previous pesticide was less
dangerous.

~~~
tptacek
I'm sorry, let me make sure I understand what you're asking. Are you seriously
asking for a source to back up the claim that organophosphate pesticides can
be toxic to fish?

~~~
epanchin
I cannot see in the article that organophosphates were used around Lake Shinji
before the introduction of neonicotinoids.

I certainly can’t see in the article that more fish died before the
introduction of neonicotinoids.

------
gcheong
"It is now well known that neonicotinoids negatively affect pollinators"

Do they?: [https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2019/11/01/global-
consens...](https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2019/11/01/global-consensus-
finds-neonicotinoids-not-driving-honeybee-health-problems-why-is-europe-so-
determined-to-ban-them/?fbclid=IwAR0AmQuzlKAtTNwAJ40BW-
LTpW-m4A5lUUVAv2Y2HHe1mFKF9ajdsPm1JYI)

"Using data on zooplankton, water quality, and annual fishery yields of eel
and smelt, we show that neonicotinoid application to watersheds since 1993
coincided with an 83% decrease in average zooplankton biomass in spring,
causing the smelt harvest to collapse from 240 to 22 tons in Lake Shinji,
Shimane Prefecture, Japan"

Isn't this mistaking correlation with causation? I find this assertion dubious
mainly because the mode by which neonicotinoids are applied is by seed coating
rather than spraying so how are they getting into water? I don't have access
to the full study - did they actually measure water levels of the pesticides
and how did they rule out other factors?

~~~
carapace
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Entine#Genetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Entine#Genetics)

> Entine is the founding director of the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP),
> operating as the Science Literacy Project, which is the umbrella
> organization for the GLP, Genetic Expert News Service (GENeS) and the
> Epigenetics Literacy Project. GLP focuses on the intersection of media,
> policy and genetics, both human and agricultural.

> Entine has written three books on genetics and two on chemicals. Let Them
> Eat Precaution: How Politics is Undermining the Genetic Revolution examines
> the controversy over genetic modification in agriculture.[20]

> In 2007, Entine published Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of
> the Chosen People which examined the shared ancestry of Jews, Christians and
> Muslims, and addressed the question "Who is a Jew?" as seen through the
> prism of DNA.[21]

> Entine's first book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re
> Afraid to Talk About It was inspired by the documentary on black athletes
> written with Brokaw in 1989.[22] It was favorably reviewed by The New York
> Times[23] but criticized by others[who?] who said that the subject could
> encourage a racist view of human relations.[24]

> Entine supports the production of GMO foods, and has criticized writer
> Caitlin Shetterly after she wrote an article in Elle magazine saying that
> GMO corn had made her ill.[25][26][27]

~~~
gcheong
Does any of this contradict the facts stated in the article? Is there
something specifically false that you can point to?

------
ptah
this is the silent killer. climate change gets all the attention but
pesticides can kill everything

~~~
ltbarcly3
So if we stopped using pesticides tomorrow things would recover very quickly.
Pesticides are destroyed by exposure to UV radiation and weathering very
quickly, that is why farmers have to keep applying them over and over. They
don't generally persist in the environment or in living things for more than a
few days or weeks, with the exception of biological reservoirs where the few
types that can accumulate in living things might last for months (and these
types are not common, this is why DDT was banned in the first place). If we
stop dumping massive amounts of CO2 into the air tomorrow the Earth will
continue to warm for hundreds of years.

It's clearly much, much more important to deal with CO2.

~~~
hydraxis
Every day, hundreds of living species are disappearing forever, mostly due to
human direct actions on the environment and particularly industrial farming. I
personally find this much more important (and sad) than climate change.

~~~
ltbarcly3
"Every day {bad thing} happens due to {list of things that aren't pesticide
use} therefore pesticides should be banned."

This is embarrassing. It's like arguing against wind power because wind
turbines are held down by cement, and making cement releases CO2.

If people didn't use pesticides, yields would go way, way, way down, and more
land would have to be used for intensive farming to produce the same amount of
food. So you are basically arguing for pesticide use in your argument against
pesticides.

------
r00fus
Are neonics known/suspected as a cause as to why mosquito and insect
populations are down so much in the US?

------
AtlasBarfed
We need to move to vertical industrial farming.

------
crb002
Sigh. Why doesn’t EPA hold auctions like FCC on dangerous pesticide use?
Market will apply them where they are most needed, govt gets revenue,
environment is saved.

