From Guardian (UK):
“The snake pipefish, virtually unknown around the UK in 2002, has undergone a massive, baffling and dangerous expansion since then, scientists have discovered…. Since 2000 sea birds have not been able to find sufficient food either to sustain their chicks or give them the energy to breed, a problem that is blamed on the dwindling populations of small fish and sand eels that sea birds eat, a phenomenon scientists have been unable to explain…. Now parent guillemots, terns and puffins are scooping pipefish from the sea for their chicks as substitutes for their normal fish food. But the pipefish body is rigid and bony and extremely hard for chicks to eat. Biologists have found dozens left uneaten in single nests while chicks have choked to death on their bodies.”

The seabirds are starving, because their normal food is disappearing, for reasons uncertain and no doubt complicated — warming waters, changes in phytoplankton, changes in currents, changes in other fish populations, toxins in the waters — and so the birds turn to what’s available: a bony, almost fatless relative of the seahorse.

The seabird populations are collapsing:

Sea bird numbers have been hit by a series of consecutive breeding failures in recent years, affecting skuas, guillemots, shags and others. The problem is starvation.

Why care about sea birds? Well, because they’re another canary in the coalmine, another example of koyaaniskatsi, life out of balance. “Sea birds breed fairly slowly and a number of bad years could have a long-term devastating impact,” said a professor studying the problem.

Bats, bees, amphibians, sea birds, turtles, tuna, right whales, sharks…. the list goes on.

We may be eating pipefish ourselves, all too soon.

Don’t forget to chew.

We’ve been watching this the last week. The bat syndrome continues.

Please remember, the evidence indicates this is hibernation interruption, not “white nose syndrome,” fungal infection, pneumonia, or other specific malady, in terms of the active agent. Those are symptoms (and/not) cause.

The bats are waking up hungry, literally starving, way too early. They also probably went to sleep, way too late. Now the emaciated-bat syndrome is being seen even more regionally.

From Republican-American (CT):
A mysterious disease has killed hibernating bats in New York and Vermont, is spreading into Massachusetts, and may already be in Connecticut…. Biologists have now identified sick bats in Chester, Mass., 40 miles north of Connecticut’s Barkhamsted Reservoir, and will be looking for them here in March.

Looking for them “here” in March??

We need to understand this now, not in a week. Mobilize! We need to know what this means, ASAP.

Something about the bat die-offs is really freaking me out. It’s the “90-97%” death rate, in colonies of thousands. It’s happening in caves in NY and Vermont. First noticed last winter in an isolated instance, it’s being found with increasing frequency in caves in the Northeast.

Why is this affecting me so much? Perhaps because I fell in love with bats years ago, working on a reference work on mammals — the many faces of bats are so astonishing. Perhaps it’s because they eat half their weight in insects every night, an amazing feat of evening echolocation that keeps farmers’ fields free from certain moths and thus their voracious larvae, removes a thousand mosquitos a night per bat. Or it’s that the cause of death is starvation, because their hibernation systems aren’t working right, and they’re agitatedly using up their fat stores too fast; they’re found as gaunt sacks of bones, outside the caves, as well as inside.

Or it’s because they’re such a joy to watch in the twilight sky, and I’ll miss them.

But in the end I’m freaked mostly by what I was thinking on the way into work: the fungal growth around the bats’ noses are indicative of weak immune systems, as well as lack of colonial grooming. What would make an entire colony’s immune systems weak? Well, perhaps some of the biome-breach realities that we’ve been seeing, where chemicals move up the food chain, disrupt endocrine systems, and cause strange immune system responses.

Picture this: some delectable insect that apple growers (let’s say) keep at bay with chemicals — a fly, a moth, or something like that — has evolved a resistance to that chemical. That means that the fly doesn’t drop to the ground dead (like it used to do), but rather flies around, perhaps ill, but not dead. It becomes ideal bat-food — a slow-moving prey without its wits about it.

Now, the top predator of the winged areas is ingesting thousands of these insects, nightly. Like swordfish, and tuna, and killer whales in the ocean, the chemicals concentrate in the predator (or scavenger). This may have been going on for the last couple years, and just now has built up to toxic levels.

Or, the late winter (as one bat-watcher noted) in the region resulted in the bats flying too late in the year, after the insects had disappeared; they went to bed hungry, and are waking up too early, hungry, emaciated, and ill.

I dearly hope that there’s a specific cause that can be identified, rather than remain the mystery that the bee colony collapse disorder is currently.

I fear we are reaching tipping points of toxicity in our biospheres, and it scares the hell out of me.