Darwin's Experiment on Ascension Island
A lonely island in the middle of the South Atlantic conceals Charles Darwin's best-kept secret. Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice. Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical "cloud forest". What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11137903
Colony Collapse Disorder
Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter. The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers. "Interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure, and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis of the US Agricultural Research Service's bee research laboratory. The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. A third of everything we eat depends on honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some EUR 30bn to the global economy. Bernard Vallat, director general the World Organisation for Animal Health, warned: "Bees contribute to global food security, and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster."
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