Tag Archives: Science

Butterflies and pesticides – a new study and a smoking gun

Gatekeeper cropped P1010472

Following hot on the trail of the raft of recent papers that I highlighted on the blog last week comes a new study by Andre Gilburn and colleagues entitled “Are neonicotinoid pesticides driving declines of widespread butterflies?“. The paper is open access and published in the journal PeerJ which encourages post-publication comments and review of the work. I see that Tom Oliver of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology has started the ball rolling with a couple of questions, and hopefully more will follow, with responses from the authors.

The paper focuses on the fact that between 2000 and 2009 there was a 58% decline in butterfly abundance on farmed land in the UK despite a doubling of spending on conservation in the UK over the same period, much of it on agri-environmental schemes on that very same farmed land.

Using a statistical modelling approach the authors conclude that the introduction of neonicotinoid pesticides in the mid-1990s is strongly implicated as a likely driver of those declines. My immediate question on reading the paper was: “What were the trends like before the mid-1990s, and did the rate of decline change significantly after that period?”

The authors don’t directly answer the question but it seems to me to be quite an important one to answer because abrupt changes in rates of decline in the abundance and diversity of species can be linked to broader changes in, for example, land management and agricultural practices, as we showed recently for bee and wasp extinctions in Britain.

So I looked for the data that would tell me whether the trend had changed and found what I needed in the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme annual report for 2014. Here’s a screen grab of Figure 3 from the report:

Butterfly abundance indices - November 2015

I’ve marked the point at which neonicotinoid pesticides were starting to be widely used in UK farming with a black line. As you can clearly see this is also roughly the point at which the abundance of the 24 “Species of the wider countryside” begins to trend downwards. In comparison, the 26 “Habitat specialists” show much less of a change, and in fact their initial decline was much earlier (in the 1970s-80s), possibly in response to loss of species rich grassland and ancient woodland.

Of course I’m just eyeballing the data and it needs to be tested statistically to see if there really is a break point in the trend at the mid-1990s, but this ought to be possible for anyone with access to the full data set. Even if this is shown to be the case it’s all correlative (as Gilburn and colleagues acknowledge) and proving causation is difficult. Nonetheless it looks to me like there’s an interesting smoking gun here that deserves further study.

Pollinators seminar at the Houses of Parliament – 2nd December

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Skipper on ragwort - cropped

The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) has organised a “Pollinators Update” afternoon seminar in London on Wednesday 2nd December, to discuss recent developments in pollinator conservation research. I’ve been asked to give a 15 minute presentation on the pollinator extinctions research we published in Science last year.

The full programme will be:

2.30pm Sarah Newton MP, Chair’s Welcome
2.40pm Presentations
Professor Simon Potts (Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) – Reading University
Professor Jeff Ollerton (Professor of Biodiversity) University of Northampton
Dr Claire Carvell – NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
Dr Richard Gill – Imperial College London
3.40pm Discussion
3.55pm Chair’s closing remarks
4.00pm Refreshments

The seminar is free to attend but you need to book a place: see the POST website for details.

Pesticides and pollinators: some new studies and contrasting conclusions

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The question of whether or not neonicotinoid pesticides are negatively impacting agricultural pollinator abundance, diversity and behaviour continues to focus the minds of researchers. It’s an issue that has been almost constantly in the news since the earliest suggestions that these pesticides were harming pollinators. These concerns have led to temporary EU restrictions on the use of these chemicals, a decision that was partially over turned this year in the UK.

The past two months has seen the publication of at least five papers on the topic, two of them this week alone. In this post I want to highlight those papers and provide some commentary.

The first two studies have shown that neonicotinoid pesticides can affect pollinator behaviour, and specifically the memories of both honey bees and bumblebees:

Wright et al. “Low doses of neonicotinoid pesticides in food rewards impair short-term olfactory memory in foraging-age honeybees”

Stanley et al. “Bumblebee learning and memory is impaired by chronic exposure to a neonicotinoid pesticide“.

Subtle behavioural changes such as those documented here are not generally assessed in standard toxicological safety assessments for pesticides, which are mainly focused on whether or not the chemicals kill non-target animals, and at what dosage. But for plant-pollinator interactions (including agricultural pollination) such changes in pollinator behaviour could be crucial to the effectiveness of the pollinators. How crucial? Well up until today we didn’t know; but with the publication of another paper by Stanley and colleagues we now have evidence that the sub-lethal effects on pollinator behaviour can actually translate into an effect on pollination of apple crops:

Stanley et al. “Neonicotinoid pesticide exposure impairs crop pollination services provided by bumblebees“.

The study is the first one to my knowledge that tests the effects of field-relevant doses of pesticides on pollinator performance and subsequent pollination services in a commercial farm crop, and adds some valuable hard data to an already heated debate. The story, embargoed until this evening, has already been picked up by media, including the BBC News website.

To summarise the study: using artificial bumblebee colonies and caged apple trees Stanley and colleagues implemented an experiment in which they tested the effect of two different levels of exposure to a neonicotinoid pesticide on pollinator behaviour and subsequent pollination services to the fruit trees. They found a clear effect of exposure to the higher level of pesticide, resulting in a change in bee behaviour and a subsequent reduction in apple quality.

By way of a contrast, another study this week has focused on the lethal effects of these pesticides. Henry et al. “Reconciling laboratory and field assessments of neonicotinoid toxicity to honeybees” has shown that although the chemicals are lethal to individual honey bees, the overall impact of the loss of the bees is buffered by the fact that the colonies can simply produce more worker bees to compensate for the losses. This is interesting but needs to be judged in the context of the fact that honey bees are very unusual and atypical compared to most other pollinators, and indeed most other bees. They produce very, very large colonies with a unique social structure, and so this compensation might be expected. These caveats were echoed by some of the scientists asked to comment on the study in media stories such as the one on the BBC News website.

Finally, Godfray et al. have updated their earlier review of the environmental effects of these pesticides with “A restatement of recent advances in the natural science evidence base concerning neonicotinoid insecticides and insect pollinators“. Given the rate at which new studies are coming out, it won’t be long before a second restatement is required!

Where does this leave the whole debate around pesticides? Still with firmly entrenched views on both sides I would have imagined. No doubt the debate will run and run.

Meanwhile, important as it is, the focus on pesticides is in danger of over-shadowing other really interesting studies that might affect how we manage our agro-ecosystems in the UK. For example, I’d completely missed a paper from the end of September by Pywell et al. entitled “Wildlife-friendly farming increases crop yield: evidence for ecological intensification“. As far as I can judge from the Altmetric information for the paper, so too had the media: it received no coverage on any of the usual outlets. But this is important stuff that deserves wider publicity: it’s going to take more than a ban on pesticides to recover some of the biodiversity (at both a species and a habitat level) that we’ve lost due to intensive farming over the last 100 years or so.

Pollination syndromes: a brief update on recent developments, and news that Stefan Vogel has passed away

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In a recent post I discussed the current debates about “pollination syndromes”, which I described as “sets of flower characteristics that have repeatedly evolved in different plant families due to the convergent selection pressures applied by some groups of pollinators”.

The authors of the Ecology Letters paper that I discussed (Rosas-Guerrero et al. 2014) have now replied to our original critique of their approach and you can read that reply (Aguilar et al. 2015) in Journal of Pollination Ecology by following this link. Readers can make up their own minds as to whether the authors have responded adequately to our concerns, but I just briefly wanted to raise three points.

The first is that much of these authors’ response is focused on an earlier paper of ours (Ollerton et al. 2009) rather than on our critique per se. Nick Waser, Mary Price and myself have therefore written a second response that deals with some of the misunderstandings apparent in that piece; it’s available to download here.

The second point relates to the existing literature on pollination syndromes and pollinator effectiveness used by Rosas-Guerrero et al. (2014); as we demonstrated in our critique this is clearly a biased data set that is skewed towards groups of plants with relatively large flowers, “interesting” pollination systems, and text book examples of classical pollination syndromes such as bird and bat pollination. Researchers who study flowers and their pollinators choose their subjects based on a whole set of criteria, but random selection is not one of them. However as far as we can judge, Aguilar et al. (2015) seem to be arguing that drawing strong, “universal” conclusions about syndromes from this highly biased data set is perfectly acceptable because of the statistical rigour of formal meta-analysis. I’d re-iterate our main point that no amount of statistical rigour and exhaustive literature searching can take into account inherent biases within the primary data (i.e. the literature itself).

Finally, Aguilar et al. (2015) claim that “human disturbance of natural habitats has caused disruptions in patterns of mutualistic interactions that may partly explain the presence of the diverse pollinator assemblages that are frequently found in pollination studies”. It seems to us to be disingenuous to argue that pollination syndromes are universally valid and then to essentially concede that there are lots of wrong visitors (“secondary” pollinators), and to explain that with the idea that everything is disturbed in the Anthropocene. If this is really the case then we probably need to throw out a lot of our understanding of evolutionary ecology as a whole, not just studies of plant-pollinator interactions.

Clearly we don’t accept this argument and in fact it has echoes of arguments that have been going on since the 19th century (Waser et al. 2011): more than 130 years ago the Darwinian biologist Hermann Muller was criticising Federico Delpino (one of the original architects of the idea of pollination syndromes) for ignoring the “wrong” flower visitors. Interestingly, Delpino was a fundamentally a teleologist who saw purpose in nature, expressed through (as he perceived them) the highly ordered relationships between flowers and pollinators.

As we discuss in the Waser et al. (2011) paper, Stefan Vogel was another prominent pollination biologist, and advocate of the importance of pollination syndromes, who was also fundamentally teleological in his thinking. I was sad to learn that Stefan passed away very recently, in what I believe is his 90th year. I was fortunate enough to meet Stefan at a symposium in honour of his 80th birthday at the International Botanical Congress in Vienna in 2005. He graciously signed my copy of The Role of Scent Glands in Pollination and said, with a twinkle in his eye, “you and I have probably got a lot to discuss”. Unfortunately we never got the opportunity, but later I dedicated our 2009 paper on Ceropegia pollination to him “in honour of his pioneering work on pollination” in the genus. Stefan’s legacy of research, particularly in the tropical regions of South America, is a fitting tribute to his memory.

Pollination syndromes clearly continue to attract much interest in the scientific literature, and just this week I was intrigued to see a paper by John Benning showing that a species of Ericaceae that looks as though it “should” be pollinated by bees is actually moth pollinated. No doubt the discussion of the evolutionary extent and predictability of pollination syndromes will continue for some time to come.

SCAPE day 3 – science on a Sunday

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Last night I added a new edible plant family to my life list – Cornaceae – courtesy of the ever-hospitable Marcin Zych and his home-made fruit liqueurs. The one he opened after dinner was made from the fruit of edible dogwood (Cornus mas) and had been maturing for five years. It was sour but delicious, and very, very strong. That’s my first new addition to the list since my Brazil trip back in in November 2013. One day I will post an annotated list of the biodiversity of plant families I’ve consumed….but not tonight, it’s the end of a tiring final day of the SCAPE conference.

To end the meeting this morning there was a short session of three talks from Klaus Lunau’s sensory ecology group. Klaus started the proceedings with a talk about the role of UV-absorbent dark central “bull’s eyes” in the middle of flowers and compound inflorescences. He concluded that, despite their near mythological status, UV patterns were perhaps no more important than patterns absorbing at other wavelengths and presented some interesting experimental data to support the argument. Over breakfast Klaus and I had discussed the absence of difficult questions at the conference; he felt people were being a little too polite. So I asked him a hard one – whether his findings held up for male bees which don’t collect pollen. He confessed that he’d not tested them and agreed that it would be worth doing: hope he does, will be an interesting test.

Klaus was followed by Saskia Wilmsen who showed us the results of some elegant experiments using artificial “flowers” with different shaped epidermal cells (flat, conical, etc.) These different surfaces have distinctive optical properties in different light conditions, and bees behave in slightly different ways, accordingly. A very cool reminder that as we move to ever finer scales in pollination ecology, from macro biogeographical and community questions, to micro surveys, the layers of complexity just go on increasing.

This latter point was reinforced by the final presentation of the meeting, which was Sebastien Kothe discussing the functional role of the spines possessed by pollen in some plant families, especially Malvaceae. He presented compelling evidence that these spines have evolved in order to reduce their attractiveness to pollen collecting bees. The spines render the pollen hydrophobic meaning that the bees have to use much more nectar to bind it into the pollen baskets. It would be interesting to track the evolution of this echinaceous pollen through the fossil record and to assess whether its appearance coincides with the evolution of particular bee groups.

And with that, the 29th SCAPE meeting was finished except for the usual hugs and goodbyes and promises to meet up again in 12 months time, probably inside the Arctic Circle: it looks as though the 30th meeting will be held at the field station at Abisko.

The rest of Sunday was spent visiting the botanic garden and the art museum in Aarhus, both to be recommended if you have a chance to visit. It’s now 8.15pm and I’m sat at Billund Airport with a large glass of Carlsberg, my first of the trip. It’s been a great meeting and I look forward to repeating it next year, and interacting with such a passionate group of scientists. Over and out from SCAPE.

SCAPE conference 2015 – day 2 – probably the best pollination ecology meeting in the world

SCAPE conference 2015 – day 1 – welcome to the sanatorium

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The first day of the 29^th SCAPE conference drew to a close and as I started to draft this post I could hear around me some intense discussions of Amy Parachnowitsch’s “crazy idea” (her words!) that flowers may be able to “eavesdrop” on one another via their floral scents. It was a very thought provoking way to end a stimulating day. And I look forward to reading the discussion paper on which the talk was based, in Trends in Plant Sciences.

What else did I learn on the first day? Here’s a few things I noted, with a link to the programme, but certainly not an exhaustive list:

Paul CaraDonna told us about the way that interactions between plants and pollinators have a faster turnover early in the season than later in the season. We discussed this afterwards and it could be because of newly emerged, naïve individual pollinators encountering and exploring flowers they’ve not previously seen.

Jane Stout described the history and future of the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, and how it was driven from bottom-up by two scientists (Jane herself and Una Fitzpatrick) – a salutary tale of what can happen when passionate scientists become advocates for change.

Markus Sydenham discussed his work on power line corridors in Norway and the fact that these linear landscape elements, though artificial, can be good for solitary bees in appropriately managed by cutting and removal of woody vegetation.

A project encouraging organic Danish farmers to assess the quality of their own land for pollinating bees was described by Vibeke Langer. Interesting example of “citizen science” that goes directly to those who might benefit most from larger and more stable pollinator populations.

In Hawaii, Robert Junker and colleagues have found evidence that the flowers of the endemic plant Metrosideros polymorpha have evolved in less than 150 years to be more effectively pollinated by introduced honey bees rather than its native bird pollinators, which have declined substantially. Some individuals of this species seem to be pre-adapted for bee pollination; is this evidence that a larger bee species once existed on Hawaii but is now extinct?

The “complex, messy” ecology behind the co-existence of different Medicago species (facilitated by the interaction of plant genotypic kinship and allelopathic chemicals produced by Thymus species, was the focus of Bodil Ehlers work.

Judith Trunschke showed how ecotype morphology in hawkmoth-pollinated orchid Platanthera bifolia seems to be driven by different pollinators in grassland and woodland habitats. Are we seeing the early stages of the evolution of two new species here?

I had the honour of being the first speaker yesterday morning, talking about the macroecology of wind versus animal pollination, and the University of Northampton was further represented by Kat Harrold, who is working on her PhD as part of the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area project. Kat presented a short over view of her work during the poster session.

There was much more, of course, and all of it stimulating and interesting, but that’s at least a taster. The conference is taking place in a fascinating conference facility that was a former TB sanatorium. It’s a step up from the ex-leper colony that SCAPE used in Finland a few years ago….

BBC Wildlife magazine for October features Northampton harvest mice research

Sex and drugs and the source of the Nile: Sir Richard Francis Burton

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They say that things often come in threes, and so it has appeared recently in relation to an individual I have long admired and been fascinated by: Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. As far as I’m aware there is no significant Burton-related anniversary in 2015 (other than it being 125 years since his death), but nevertheless he’s popped up in a couple of places of late. First of all there was a Radio 4 Great Lives programme about the man; then yesterday there was an article in Nature by Professor Clare Pettitt and on Wednesday night, at a Wildlife Trust event in Cambridge, I found myself chatting to a man whose name badge stated “Richard Burton”.

Clearly the universe was trying to tell me something and it reminded me of a piece of writing that I produced in October 1990 (!) to mark the 100th anniversary of Burton’s death, and never published. To put this in context, I was 25, about a year into my PhD research, and anticipating the birth of my first child in December. Re-reading the piece has been less painful than I thought it would have been. Some of the writing is a little clumsy and there are other aspects that I’d now focus on, but it’s not too bad. Having said that, Karin said it sent her to sleep and that my writing has improved a lot in 25 years, so there’s no pleasing everyone!

Anyway I thought I’d post this piece of writing (very lightly edited) as an indulgent missive from my 25 year old to my 50 year old self. And it’s dedicated to my daughter Ellen in her 25th year.

———————————————————-

Often, simply striving for fame is not enough. No matter how daring your exploits or how much you publish, the contingencies of history conspire to obscure you, consigning your life and works to the realms of the scholar or to that nebulous coterie, the “enthusiasts”. Such has been the fate of one of the most exciting of the many outstanding lives of the Victorian age.

This week marks the one hundredth anniversary of the death of one of our most important, yet underappreciated, scholar-travelers, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Such anniversaries always seem to necessitate a reassessment of the celebratee’s life and work, and this one is no exception; two major new biographies, an extensive “biobibliography” chronicling Burton’s literary output, and a film “Mountains of the Moon“. Yet for all this, Burton is still not a widely known figure; although his adventures far surpass, in daring and in accomplishment, his contemporaries Livingstone and Stanley, still he does not enjoy their household-name status. This is in spite of, between 1890 and 1989, the publication of at least eight biographies, a bibliography, and many articles and essays devoted to the man’s exploits. Add to this Burton’s own vast literary output, none of which is noted for any bashful self-deprecation on the part of the author, and one begins to wonder at the criteria we use to apportion recognition.

Richard Francis Burton was born in 1821, the son of an army officer, Colonel Joseph Burton. His early life was spent travelling Europe with his family, fueled by the incessant wanderlust of his father. This gypsy start to life, as well as being an obviously formative prelude to his later travels, seemed to encourage the rowdier, untamed, hell-raising aspects in the characters of Richard and his brother Edward. The despair of their parents, the pair were soon packed off to college in England; Edward to Cambridge, Richard to Oxford. College and academic life did not suit either of the boys, and both left (in Richard’s case, forcibly; he was sent down after attending a proscribed horse race) to pursue military careers. Over the next 50 years, Richard Burton devoted himself to restlessly wandering the world, roaming Africa and Asia, North and South America, and Europe. He was one of the first Europeans to visit the Islamic sacred cities of Medina and Mecca; he explored India, often on covert missions for the British government; travelled in Africa where he searched for the source of the Nile (and only missed discovering it through ill-luck and the machinations of others); he lived for a time in South America as consul at the port of Santos in Brazil and observed first-hand the war between Paraguay and the allied forces of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay; and in all travelled and observed enough to satisfy several lifetimes.

During his wanderings Burton saw and experienced much, events which invariably he became curious about, investigating further, writing down his views. Whether it was local uses of medicinal and psychoactive plants; details of tribal ritual, or the niceties of local sexual practice; the grammatical fine points of local dialects; geological formations; curiosities of natural history; or simply the price of staple vegetables in a native market, Burton was interested. These details inevitably found their way into his many books, articles and learned papers, packing paragraphs of ethnological, geographical, archaeological and natural history minutiae into his accounts of travels and expeditions.

It is Burton’s polymath approach to scholarly work that is the man’s most interesting feature. Perhaps it was his limited formal education (travelling tutors, two terms at Oxford) that fostered this approach. Though in many ways laudable, conventional academia can lead to a blinkered approach to research, ivory-towerism at its worst. If Burton had limited himself to purely single-strand studies, for example oriental languages (or even language), as may have resulted from following an academic career, the world, and Richard Francis Burton, would have been far poorer. Had he only recorded the bare geographical necessities required of, for example, his travels in the Great Lakes region of Africa, what dry accounts they would have been, and what details we would have lost.

This is not to say that Burton’s work was not scholarly, far from it. His translation of the Arabian Nights, although not the first, is certainly the definitive version, rich in anecdotal footnotes from a man for whom the deserts of Arabia were perhaps his first real home (as a child and a young man he had hated Britain, especially its climate), and his research and translation of the works of the Portuguese poet-explorer Camoes shows Burton at his most academic.

Burton has perhaps been more misunderstood, loathed and ignored than any of his contemporaries, or any comparable figure before or since. This is in part due to the man’s interests during his lifetime: translations of obscure erotica such as the Kama Sutra; a more than passing interest in the ins-and-outs of male and female circumcision; undercover reconnaissance of Indian homosexual brothels (which invariably led to rumours about Burton himself) all added to his infamy. Perhaps more than anything else, this meant that most of Burton’s books were not widely read, a trend which continues today, aided by the inflated prices demanded by booksellers for even the most popular of his works.

As if our view of Burton were not obscured enough, his over-zealous wife Isabel sought to soften history’s account of her “Jemmy” by burning almost all of his private papers after his death; writings which may have cast light on this enigmatic man were consigned wholesale to the grate. Because of this, Burton’s biographers have tended to be hard on Isabel, dwelling on her attempts to instill Catholicism into her part Muslim, part Atheist husband, and, of course, on her literary pyromania. This may be because of frustration on their part; biographers and commentators have never really been able to reason Burton out, and large parts of his life remain veiled in secrecy and obfuscation. The task has not been aided by Isabel’s actions. Yet she was devoted to Burton, who was never the easiest of men to get along with, being often bad tempered or absent for months on end.

But Isabel is only a scapegoat. Mainly, the problem is that there never has been any other person to compare with Burton. How could any man hope to fulfill all that he aspired to? Why the incessant wandering in search of new experiences? Why was it that the man did not focus his energies, rather spreading himself across a continent of interest, his curiosity endless? It has been said that if Richard Burton had concentrated his mind in this way, he could have been one of the foremost intellects of his time, rivaling Darwin or Huxley, Edison or Swan. Yet this misinterprets the man. It is doubtful whether Burton could have disciplined himself enough to centre on a single area of research; Burton was a searcher, a shifter of interests. Burton’s writings have been criticised as being unstructured, cluttered and self-indulgent, almost as if he had not the time nor inclination to properly revise and edit, but simply wanted to get the current project out of the way in order to get on with the next. This is borne out by the fact that, towards the end of his life, he had eleven desks set up in the study of his home in Trieste, where he was consul; each desk was for a different project and, when he tired of one, he would move to another, as if restlessly seeking for something.

But none of this need be considered as faults in Burton’s character; he was probably no more flawed, neurotic or self-obsessed than any of the great men of his time. It seems impossible than an intellect as deep and all-encompassing as his, which mastered some twenty nine languages, produced fifty books (many of them comprising more than one volume) plus innumerable essays and articles plus all the work that Isabel burned, could ever hope to be completely stable and well adjusted. Eccentricities of writing and behaviour seem inevitable.

Now, one hundred years after his death, is as good a time as any to properly reappraise the life of Richard Francis Burton. As an explorer, anthropologist, geographer, linguist, orientalist, translator, diplomat, swordsman, writer (and a lot more besides) he stands unrivalled by the broad sweep of his experience and knowledge. Yet his private life seems consistently to get in the way of any objective assessment of the man and his accomplishments.

The scandalous view of Burton, prevalent in England during his life and long after his death, was as a man obsessed by sex, a delver into the sordid details of native life and custom, promoter (though not practitioner, Isabel would never have allowed it) of polygamy, an unpopular critic of certain governmental interventions abroad, a user of cannabis, opium and other, more exotic drugs, and an ill-tempered, frequently drunk, godless, misogynist racist. His reputation as a fighter, even a murderer, was often played up by Burton, though there has is only one well documented account of him ever killing anyone, and then in self defence. Yet the real Burton, so far as we can tell, does not deserve this misrepresentation. His interest in all things erotic was partly academic and partly out of concern for the then current view that women should not find pleasure in sex. Are these the motives of an over-sexed misogynist? His use of drugs, including alcohol, is well known, but was not unusual amongst Victorians exposed to the influences of the Far East, or for whom port, wine and whiskey were often viewed as medicinal necessities. Finally, Burton was no more racist than most Europeans of his time, yet it was from an intellectual stand point, not an emotional or cultural one. Most of the great academics of the period believed that there was a progression of human development, with white Europeans at the pinnacle. But no one who deeply despised Arabs or Indians could live and worship amongst them the way Burton did. He may have severely criticised them, but then he criticised everyone.

All of this points to a man more liberal than many people have believed; Burton was in many ways a free thinker, particularly given his upper middle class military background. Finally, there is the matter of his atheism, if such it was, which would today raise few eyebrows. Yet the man lived and prayed for much of his life as a Muslim, had been initiated into an esoteric Sufi brotherhood, and before that into a Hindu sect. This is not the life of a godless man, in the accepted sense of the word, but of a man searching for truth, who was too intelligent to believe he had ever found it in the rosary beads of his wife’s Catholicism or in the calling chant of a muezzin.

The life of Richard Francis Burton was dogged by ill-luck and, certainly towards its end, ill health, and furthermore seemed cursed by the intransigence of government officials and individuals with grudges. A character such as his finds no difficulties in making enemies, yet they always seemed to be foes with influence, willing to block his attempts at organising expeditions or soliciting official help for schemes to further the British Empire, or its servant Burton. He never did find the source of the Nile; this single act, more than any other, would have ensured his position as the greatest of the Victorian explorers. Yet had he been successful, would the constant round of lecture tours, press interviews, official visits, and all have given him time to think and write about anything else? I believe it would, though whether it would have satisfied his roving curiosity and incessant wanderlust seems unlikely.

The All-Ireland Pollinator Plan 2015-2020

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In the last 12 months we’ve seen the release of the National Pollinator Strategy for England and the USA’s Strategy to Promote the Health of Honeybees and Other Pollinators. Now the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have joined forces to produce the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, a strategy for 2015-2020 that has been released today. Follow that link and you can download a copy.

This appears to be the first cross-jurisdiction pollinator plan in the world and, as such, is to be welcomed; as I said in my reflections on the National Pollinator Strategy, biodiversity does not respect political boundaries.