Bumblebee species are declining in Asia, Europe, and North America.
A new study from the University of Ottawa found that in the course of a single human generation, the likelihood of a bee population surviving in a given area has dropped an average of more than 30 percent.
“Our results show that we face a future with many less bumblebees and much less diversity, both in the outdoors and on our plates,” study author and PhD student Peter Soroye said in a statement.
No, no one is eating bumblebees. But the insects are important pollinators of wild landscapes and crops like tomato, squash, and berries.
Led by Ottawa professor Jeremy Kerr, Soroye and University College London research fellow Tim Newbold linked the idea of “climate chaos” to decades-old extinctions.
“We’ve known for a while that climate change is related to the growing extinction risk that animals are facing around the world,” Soroye said.
Bumblebees in particular are disappearing at alarming rates.
“We have now entered the world’s sixth mass extinction event: the biggest and most rapid global biodiversity crisis since a meteor ended the age of the dinosaurs,” he warned. “If declines continue at this pace, many of these species could vanish forever within a few decades.”
And it’s all our fault.
The crisis, according to researchers, is “entirely driven by human activities.”
But it could also be stopped by human activities.
Understanding that different species have different tolerances for temperature, the team developed a new way to predict local extinction events.
“[It tells] us, for each species individually, whether climate change is creating temperatures that exceed what the bumblebees can handle,” Newbold explained.
Based on 115 years of data from 66 bumblebee varieties across North America and Europe, scientists were able to see how populations have changed by comparing where bees are now versus where they were historically.
“We found that populations were disappearing in areas where the temperatures had gotten hotter,” Soroye said. “Using our new measurement of climate change, we were able to predict changes both for individual species and for whole communities of bumblebees with a surprisingly high accuracy.”
Their method, which works great for bees, could also be applied to other animals—reptiles, birds, mammals—and, fingers crossed, help stop declines before it’s too late.
“Ultimately, we must address climate change itself and every action we take to reduce emissions will help,” Kerr said. “The sooner the better. It is in all our interests to do so, as well as in the interests of the species with whom we share the world.”
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