Emmeline Hale
Speech Story
4/24/14
"You will never see any of these again
because they're now extinct," said Dr. James W. Porter as he passed around
display cases of butterflies in his annual climate change lecture on April
23.
Dr. Porter, a Josiah Meigs distinguished
ecology professor at the University of Georgia, had a lecture hall at the Miller
Learning Center full of faculty and students infatuated with his recent
discoveries for the full 90 minutes.
Dr. Porter grabbed the audience's
attention from the start.
“Nothing you’re going to see tonight I’ve
shown to anybody before. This is going to be off the wall!”
The display of butterflies Porter passed
around was from a trip to California after college that made him realize he
wanted to dedicate his life to ecology.
Forty years ago, these species were alive and
thriving, but now there is not a live one to be found. If trends
continue in the next 20 years, the well-known and beloved monarch butterfly
will likely be extinct as well.
Ecosystems in the earth are suffering due to
humans destroying them, leading to the population bomb, decline of species and pollination
crisis.
“Pollination’s value is often ignored, but it
shouldn’t be.”
Seventy-five percent of flowering plants
require pollination and one-third of all bites of human food rely on
pollination services.
The pollinators of the plants that produce
nuts, veggies, fruits and seeds are partaking in free labor that produces
natural food worth nearly half a trillion dollars.
“We are more and more dependent on the
natural world we are so good at beating up,” Porter said.
So what happens to that money and everything
humans depend on when the pollinators become extinct like the butterflies?
Honeybees are known for taking over the
pollination of gardens during the annual spring season, but in recent years
they have become harder to find. This year, the frightening low bee count has
been compared to a natural disaster caused by pesticides.
Contrary to most people’s beliefs, “Wild
insects pollinate fifty-percent of all crops; more efficient than bees. Bees
are actually the least efficient of all pollinator groups.”
Now more than 50 other pollinators in
addition to honey bees are threatened as well, including the most important
pollinator out there – the moth.
“The natural history of your backyard is a
special thing,” said Porter, who has collected and studied moths in his
backyard for almost two years.
By turning on a light, observing their habits and catching the moths, Porter
has experienced their strong sense of color, internal reference system and
flight patterns first-hand.
According to Porter, their ability to detect motion is incredibly distinct,
causing them to "jam" with the ultrasonic sounds of monitors instead
of just hearing them and choosing not to respond.
“Moths
have us beat. They’re miracles!”
Even with their incredible senses, the
survival of the moth species is unsteady with the current unsettling trends of
the world.
The temperature is increasing to closely
match global warming predictions, proving anthropogenic climate change. Because
insect emergence is determined by temperature and the seasons are getting
warmer, the pollinators such as bees and moths are emerging earlier.
Porter stressed the importance of the decline
in biodiversity everywhere in the northern developed nations, and especially in
Athens.
“I’ve seen data at UGA. Right here!"
As of now, there is nothing humans can do to
change the angle of the sun and the earth’s rotation around it, but ninety-nine
percent of all climate scientists believe humans are to blame.
Global warming, decline in pollinator
species, changing of the seasons and the growing dependence humans have on the
declining natural world are issues that everyone in the world should be worried
about.
Porter presented a fictitious, but simple fix
in plants were humans. “We need to send every plant to college to teach them
how to set their clocks back for pollinator services.”
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