General

Dear Tom Vilsac,
I am writing you as a scientist and as an agribusiness-man who has used both aldicarb and neonicotinoid systemic insecticides commercially and who has suffered losses of honey bees foraging on treated crops. I have had personal experience using systemic insecticides on a commercial scale having been the owner of several agricultural businesses in the Northeast USA.

In the 1990's on two separate occasions I witnessed complete colony collapse of my bees. The first incident losing over a half a million bees that foraged on two acres of potted perennials which were treated with Imidacloprid. The second time I lost several hives to a neighbors 'Grubex' 1 control treated clover lawn. After seeing the total collapse of the hives we stopped using Imidacloprid and all other systemic pesticides. I no longer use any pesticides, or biocides and now practice sustainable organic methods of agriculture.

Dear Editor,
Sir Robert Watson, chief scientist at the Department of the Environment (Defra), has acted bravely in ordering a reassessment of the licensing of neonicotinoid pesticides in the UK.
Watson faces an uphill struggle; Defra, its Food and Environment Research Agency and the Advisory Committee on Pesticides have all resolutely ignored the many peer-reviewed studies from Europe, from as long ago as 1999, which proved the extreme toxicity of neoniocotinoids for honeybees, bumblebees and butterflies.
The wildlife NGOs are similarly in denial. With the honourable exception of Buglife, all have stood by silently as bees, pollinating insects, soil-invertebrates and farmland birds are wiped from the face of Britain's countryside.
Painful as it may be for Defra, the ACP and the leading wildlife bodies to admit that they got this wrong, they must call for a complete ban on these poisons now, or we will suffer complete ecological disaster in this country.

Five species of wildlife with declining populations have been added to New Jersey’s endangered list, and nine species have been added to the threatened list, the state Department of Environmental Protection announced. The newly-endangered are three species of birds - the black rail Laterallus jamaicensis, the golden-winged warbler Vermivora chrysoptera and the red knot Calidris canutus; the gray petaltail Tachopteryx thoreyi, a species of dragonfly; and the Indiana bat, which is listed as federally endangered. The newly-threatened are three species of birds - the American kestrel, the cattle egret and the horned lark; and six dragonfly species.

There have been two editions of the Atlas of Breeding Birds in Britain and Ireland, one in the early 1970s and another in the early 1990s; now a third will be published next year. Ireland's breeding birds have been subject to detailed annual surveys only since 1998, and not all species are covered, so the new atlas will be very important for the Republic: the clearest indication yet of how its avifauna has fared over the past 40 years. And the preliminary results do not all make happy reading. They show in particular that the birds which might be thought archetypal inhabitants of Ireland's wild west – the waders of the lowland bogs and upland moors such as snipe Gallinago gallinago, lapwing Vanellus vanellus, redshank Tringa totanus and curlew Numenius arquata – are in serious trouble. Since the last atlas, they have declined, respectively, by 11, 32, 40 and 65 per cent. These figures refer to distribution: the percentage of 10km grid squares on the map where the birds are found. The percentage loss of abundance, of the actual numbers of birds, will be very much greater. Indeed, the curlew in Ireland is in such headlong decline that it may soon go extinct. The greatest loss of all in the past 20 years, however, is that of the bird which once symbolised agricultural Ireland more than any other: the corncrake.

Het natuurlijke erfgoed van Europa laat, volgens nieuw onderzoek, een zorgwekkende daling zien. Met de Europese rode lijst, onderdeel van de rode lijst van bedreigde diersoorten™ van de internationale natuurbeschermingsunie IUCN, wordt de toestand van een aanzienlijk deel van de inheemse flora en fauna van de EU beoordeeld. Uit de beoordeling van ongeveer 6000 soorten blijkt dat 44% van alle zoetwaterweekdieren, 37% van de zoetwatervissen, 23% van de amfibieën, 20% van bepaalde groepen van landweekdieren, 19% van de reptielen, 15% van de zoogdieren en libellen, 13% van de vogels, 11% van bepaalde groepen van houtkevers, 9% van de vlinders en 467 soorten vaatplanten nu worden bedreigd.

Der Vogelschutz in Deutschland verzeichnet weitere Rückschläge. „Wenn heute fast jede achte heimische Vogelart aus Deutschland zu verschwinden droht, dann ist das auch ein Versagen der Naturschutzpolitik in Brüssel, in Berlin und draußen im Land“, stellte NABU-Vizepräsident Helmut Opitz fest. Am meisten Sorgen bereiten die Vögel der Agrarlandschaft und hier besonders solche, die das Grünland besiedeln. Als Beispiele nannte er den Großen Brachvogel Numenius arquata, den Kiebitz Vanellus vanellus, das Braunkehlchen Saxicola rubetra und den Wiesenpieper Anthus pratensis. „Die Rote Liste zeigt, dass es noch nicht gelungen ist, dringend notwendige Erfordernisse des Artenschutzes in Agrar- und Umweltprogramme zu integrieren“, so Opitz.

Imidacloprid, developed by Bayer CropScience in 1985, is an insecticide, a seed treatment insecticide and seed treatment insecticide/fungicide combination. Bayer still holds patents on the active for some formulations, specifically when combined with fertilizer. Its mode of action is nicotine acetylcholine receptor agonist/antagonist, and it is registered in more than 100 countries worldwide for use on more than 140 crops. It is used primarily on canola, cereals, corn, cotton, oil seed rape, pastures, potatoes, rice, sorghum, sugarbeet and sunflowers for approved control of aphids, fruit flies, leafhoppers, grubs, termites, thrips, white fly, wireworms, various beetles (including flea beetle and pygmy beetle), various weevils, nematodes and various fungal diseases. It also has widespread applications in noncrop, including nursery, landscape, forestry, pest control and veterinary applications. Bayer Animal Health has been using a 10% imidacloprid formulation for its popular Advantage/Advantix flea treatments for dogs and cats as early as 1986.