take away message: life - both ours and that of insects - is precious

This article is by MIT professor Stephen M. Meyer, whose life is quickly being cut short by cancer. Please see editor's note below regarding the author.

A MISGUIDED ZAP -
MOSQUITOES ARE THE INTENDED TARGET. BUT WOULD YOU CARE IF YOU KILLED THE WORLD'S LAST FIREFLY?

Boston Globe, The (MA)
September 3, 2006
Author: STEPHEN M. MEYER

Two a.m. The night air is cool. Stark blue flashes pierce the blackness with percussive "crack-snap-sizzle." An odor of charred remains floats on thin smoky wisps. Hail my neighbors' bug zappers fighting America's backyard insect war - part of a global conflict that nature has decisively lost.

Over the next century, researchers say, about half the animal and plant species alive today will effectively disappear. Through countless daily choices and actions, you and as individuals are unwittingly driving this massive transformation in biodiversity, handicapping the assemblage of organisms and genetic traits that will define life on Earth for the next several million years. Just look outside.

Bug zappers are ubiquitous in the local war against mosquitoes. Ultraviolet light lures them, and an electrified grid fries them. Sweet! Unfortunately, it's an illusion. One bug zapper will kill more than 10,000 flying insects in a summer, but body counts reveal that fewer than a couple dozen of these will be mosquitoes or other biting insects. Instead, harmless bugs of all kinds, including rare and endangered ones, are fried. Another 10 percent of the fatalities are, ironically, mosquito predators. (Could the drawings of smiling mosquitoes that often adorn bug-zapper ads actually be endorsements?)

For about $3,000, you can quash those mosquito grins by encircling your property with a phalanx of sprayers that pop up once or twice daily to dispense clouds of pyrethroid insecticides, an approach just catching on in Massachusetts. (Government mosquito spraying programs raise many issues that deserve an article of their own.) Pyrethroids are indeed deadly to mosquitoes. But they also kill every other insect that might fl y nearby and are deadly to fish, tadpoles, frogs, toads, and salamanders. Where bug zappers, when properly used, threaten primarily nighttime creatures, this system extends the carnage to bees, butterflies, and other daytime flying insects.

Rounding out the homeowners' campaign are weekend applications of herbicides and pesticides to lawns, gardens, and planting boxes. Unfortunately, much of the deadly residue from these products ends up as stormwater runoff bleeding into streams, wetlands, and ponds. Here, juvenile and mature insects, fish, and amphibians are poisoned. The effects may take decades to become apparent. Sometimes, they even seem natural: Tadpoles lose their instinct to avoid predators after exposure to nonlethal levels of these substances.

What does this have to do with the ongoing biodiversity collapse? As countless millions of harmless insects perish year after year, variations in the genetic codes they carry will vanish - limiting future evolutionary possibilities. Dwindling reproductive opportunities will see many species of bees, butterflies, moths, and aquatic flies disappear. Eagles, protected by law, will be plentiful; fireflies, extinct.

And that's just the beginning. Insects form the foundation of intricate food webs. Spring peepers, perch, and warblers all consume flying insects in abundance. As we shred these food webs, we doom such wonderful animals to a precarious existence, if not extirpation.

Innumerable species of plants depend on bugs for pollination. Without robust flying insect populations, the seed base for future plant generations will wither. Some plant species will lose critical evolutionary options. Some will become rare. Those uniquely dependent on specific pollinators will go locally extinct. Evolution "designed" the exquisite lady-slipper orchid gracing our woodlands to be pollinated by bumblebees.

Then, too, plant seeds and fruits make up essential strands of food webs. Dependent animal populations will decline as these foods become scarce and competition intensifies (unless they learn to eat trash).

Ultimately, with all this happening simultaneously, local ecosystems will become impoverished, and many will stop functioning altogether. The global biodiversity collapse underway is unstoppable. Yet we can influence how it plays out in our own backyards. Obviously we should protect ourselves from insect-borne disease. But our solutions must be effective, and we must thoroughly examine the consequences. This means becoming more aware of the diversity of life sharing space with us and how our individual actions matter. It would be a shame if fireflies, spring peepers, and lady-slippers become mere museum displays to our grandchildren.

Memo: BOSTON UNCOMMON / PERSPECTIVE
Stephen M. Meyer, author of the forthcoming The End of the Wild, is a political science professor at MIT. E-mail comments to magazine@globe.com.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Boston Globe, The (MA)
September 3, 2006
Author: Doug Most

When we asked Stephen M. Meyer, an MIT professor and author of the new book The End of the Wild, if he'd write a "Perspective" for us, he accepted, with one caveat in his e-mail: "I am dying of cancer. I probably have four to eight weeks left, so completing this article quickly is for me a true 'deadline.' "
Assistant editor Susanne Althoff says Meyer's sense of humor and candidness impressed her. In one e-mail, he wrote: "Despite the pain and nausea and other discomforts, you just made this project too exciting not to want to complete." In another: "This will undoubtedly be the last article I ever publish and I'm happy about the message it carries."
Meyer, 54, who has a wife and son and lives in Sudbury, got his colon cancer diagnosis two years ago. "I could load up on painkillers and go to Australia," he told me, "but in the end what does that leave behind?" He wrote his essay using speech-totext software because his hands are paralyzed. We're grateful, and humbled, that he did.
Even though I couldn't bring myself to end our conversation saying what I was thinking, he did it for me. "I just hope I'm around to see it," Meyer said, laughing. So do we.