The Week in Wildlife
A Fossil Worth a Trip & Why We Should Feed Our Flowers to Insects
by Richard Conniff
OPENING IN CHICAGO: LOOK AT THE PRETTY BIRD
This week, the Chicago’s Field Museum has introduced one of the world’s most celebrated fossils to American audiences. Archaeopteryx, now considered the oldest known bird, lived about 150 million years ago. The first very incomplete specimen, discovered in Solnhofen, Germany, arrived on the world stage just after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Archaeopteryx provided stunning new evidence for evolution by natural selection. T.H. Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” was soon arguing that all birds, not just Archaeopteryx, had evolved within the theropod dinosaurs. After a century of heated debate, that idea is settled science. (Indeed, we now know the blue jays and brassy little wrens outside our windows are living dinosaurs.)
The Field Museum’s new specimen is the latest of a dozen Archaeopteryx discovered since the original, and it is a beauty. The museum bought it—more or less blind—from a private collection in an unprepared state. “Unprepared” means that most of the specimen was still hidden by rock, and might well have been just a fragment. “When we X-rayed the fossil slab and saw that the fossil inside was nearly 100% complete, we cheered,” said Jingmai O’Connor, PhD, the Field’s associate curator of fossil reptiles. After that, the museum’s fossil preparators Akiko Shinya and Connie Van Beek went to work with their airbrators and other tools meticulously revealing the details of one of the most precious fossils ever found.
It is a beauty, especially the skull (below). It’s also the first time any major American museum has had an Archaeopteryx on permanent display. Put it at the top of your list of things to see next time you’re in Chicago.
FEEDING OUR FLOWERS TO INSECTS
I’m setting out my tomato plants this week, full of hope for the moment in late July when a visit to the garden will reveal that the luscious and long-awaited tomatoes are finally coming due. The unlovely alternative is also possible: I’ll discover that the stems and branches of the tomato plants have suddenly been stripped bare of leaves. The culprits on those unhappy occasions are caterpillars called tomato hornworms. They are wonderfully camouflaged to blend in on the stems and branches of
the plants. You have to hunt them out and, if you want tomatoes, you have to kill them.
Or do you? The BBC this week published an article under the headline “Why you should let insects eat your plants,” by correspondent Chris Baraniuk. The argument is familiar and compelling:
Over the last few decades, a massive global crisis has affected insect populations, which are declining at a rate of between 1% and 2% every year. This means that practically any intervention that could help these creatures is valuable. More people are "planting for pollinators", with one 2022 survey finding one in three US adults purchase plants to help wildlife, an increase of 26% from 2020. This helps ensure there are lots of native wildflowers to supply bees, hoverflies and butterflies with nectar.
Baraniuk also suggests that sacrificing some of the “perfect garden” mentality can actually make a difference:
Insects face all kinds of threats, and on a gigantic scale. For example, the use of pesticides across vast tracts of agricultural land. It might seem unlikely that diminutive private gardens can make much of a difference to their decline. But [Matthew Shepherd, director of outreach and education at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in the US’ insists that they can: "We're talking about small animals, so small areas do help."
Various studies indicate that simple decisions made by gardeners can affect insect abundance. One 2016 paper examined how the size and features of gardens in California influenced bee numbers, for instance. Having lots of flowers and patches of bare ground, which some bees nest in, were found to influence the insects' numbers positively.
I buy this argument for most of my garden. The idea of risking my family’s health with pesticides for the sake of some pretty flowers has never made any sense to me. In the vegetable garden, my strategy is to skip certain plants that are prone to insect damage, like cabbages and kale. And tomatoes? As it happens, hornworms are the caterpillars of the five-spotted hawkmoth (Manduca quinquemaculata), an admirable creature. So this year I’ll grow moonflowers as an alternative host plant for their caterpillars. And in the small corner of the yard where my tomato plants grow? I will continue to pick off the hornworm caterpillars by hand—and set them out for the birds to eat.
EYEWITNESSES AT THE RISE & FALL OF A HABITAT
I’ve been meaning to profile husband-and-wife ecologists Dan Janzen & Winnie Hallwachs since I heard them talk in early 2023 about how climate change has effectively halted—and maybe reversed—the 53-year-old project to restore Costa Rica’s Guanacaste Conservation Area. It’s a 630-square mile area of former ranchland that conservationists have turned back into thriving habitat. Journalist Justine Calma has gotten to the story ahead of me. She reports that Guanacaste …
is a success story, a powerful example of what can happen when humans help forests heal. It’s part of what’s made Costa Rica a destination for ecotourism and the first tropical country in the world to reverse deforestation. But now, the couple’s beloved forest faces a more insidious threat.
Across the road, the leaves are too perfect. It’s like they’re growing in a greenhouse, Janzen says. There’s an eerie absence among the foliage — although you’d probably also have to be a regular in the forest to notice.
“Every year it seems worse,”
says. “We should have found bugs.”
There should have been bees, wasps, and moths along our walk, she explains. And plenty of caterpillar “houses” — curled up leaves the critters sew together that eventually become shelter for other insects. “The houses were everywhere, now it’s almost exciting when you see one,” Hallwachs says. “This is just weird.”
The bugs play crucial roles in the forest — from pollinating plants to forming the base of the food chain. Their disappearance is a warning. Climate change has come to the ACG, marking a new, troubling chapter in the park’s comeback story.
Check out the whole article, if you have a chance. It captures the dilemma facing all conservationists who work to save some patch of the natural world while recognizing that climate change may soon turn all our patches to dust.