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Seeds from Wild Crop Relatives Could Help Agriculture Weather Climate Change

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Monday, April 22, 2024

In the rugged Tumacácori mountain region 45 minutes south of Tucson, the Wild Chile Botanical Area (WCBA) was established in 1999 to protect and study the chiltepin pepper—the single wild relative of hundreds of sweet and hot varieties including jalapeño, cayenne, and bell peppers, found on dinner plates worldwide. The isolation of this ecologically rich archipelago of peaks, located in a “sea” of desert that stretches from northern Mexico into southern Arizona, means that plants grow here that don’t grow anywhere else. Its 2,800 acres—the first protected habitat for the wild relatives of crops in the United States—now shelter not just a single pepper but at least 45 different species. Between 2021 and 2022, the Borderlands Restoration Network (BRN), an Arizona-based conservation non-profit, worked with the U.S. Forest Service to identify and collect other wild relatives of crops in this area. The idea behind the project was to build food security in a world where all climate models are pointing to hotter and dryer extreme conditions. “You have this dramatic topography that provides all these different ecological niches for different things to grow,” said Perin McNelis, 36, native plant program director at the BRN. “Where better to start than an area that is already hot and dry, with all these wild relatives that are really adapted to conditions that will be more widespread in the future.” Crop wild relatives, or CWRs for short, are the hardy wild cousins of domesticated crops. In the U.S. alone, thousands of crop wild relatives exist in their natural habitats, often thriving in harsh conditions. In Arizona this includes wild species of onion, wheat, squash, strawberry, grape and many other important crops.  Increasingly, farmers and scientists are looking at them as reservoirs of genetic diversity with traits that can be bred into domesticated crops to improve drought, heat, and disease resistance—and perhaps serve as the key to the future of farming. “What makes them important is they have traits that can help crops be more adapted and resilient to climate change,” said Stephanie Greene, a retired plant geneticist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service. Erin Riordan, a conservation research scientist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outside Tucson, works to expand the regional food system to include dryland-adapted plants such as agave, mesquite, prickly pear, and tepary beans with low-water use agricultural practices. For instance, tepary beans—a tiny brown bean with a sweet chestnut flavor—require about 1/5 the water of pinto beans. Arizona is the third driest state in the U.S. It also has the highest diversity of crop wild relatives due to the state’s wide-ranging topography and habitats, “from low deserts to high elevation alpine, to everything in between,” said Riordan. One thousand of the estimated 4,500 CWRs in the U.S. are found in the state, including desert-adapted relatives of critical domesticated foods—not just peppers, but also tomatoes, squash, amaranth, beans, corn, and wheat. An Arizona Walnut tree. (Photo CC-licensed by Whitney Cranshaw, Colorado State University.) Wild cotton grows in the parched grasslands of the Sonoran Desert, surviving without irrigation, pesticides, or other human inputs that domesticated cotton depends on. The wild Arizona walnut, found in desert riparian areas,  has been used as a rootstalk for domesticated walnut trees to increase their tolerance to drought and diseases. Currently, 44 percent of the world’s food is produced in arid and semi-arid lands. According to a 2017 report from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, “80 percent of global cropland and 60 percent of global food output could be markedly affected by climate change, particularly in arid and semi-arid areas.” Riordan said protecting desert-adapted CWRs will be particularly important in a changing climate. One issue complicating the use of wild relatives as a solution, however, is that these banks of genetic resilience are under threat through habitat destruction and global biodiversity loss caused by development and climate change. A 2020 paper in the National Academy of Sciences’ journal found that over half of the 600 CWRs identified in the study were either endangered or threatened. When a wild species goes extinct, so do the evolutionary traits that have allowed it to survive environmental extremes. While the momentum for studying and conserving crop wild relatives has grown in recent years, few CWR species are protected at either a state or federal level. Arizona has been at the forefront of conservation efforts, protecting CWRs on public lands like the WCBA, at botanical gardens like at the Desert Museum, and at seed banks. Heat Stress, Water Scarcity, and the Need to Adapt Last year was the world’s hottest summer on record; in Arizona, temperatures routinely exceeded 110 degrees. Across the state, crops withered in the punishing dry heat, and farmers left land fallow amid statewide water cutbacks driven by a historic megadrought. “These last few years are indicative of the sorts of extreme conditions that are increasingly becoming the new norm,” Riordan said. “Arizona farmers have always experienced periodic drought and bouts of heat, but these events are happening with greater frequency, becoming more severe, and lasting longer.” At the same time, other sources of water are becoming increasingly scarce in the west, putting stress on farmers and making some crops untenable. Last year, Arizona’s allotment from the Colorado River was cut by 21 percent. “These last few years are indicative of the sorts of extreme conditions that are increasingly becoming the new norm.” Benjamin Ruddell, director of the National Water-Economy Project, said that Colorado River water shortages left large areas of farmland in Arizona unsowed, a bellwether of things to come. “Up to 40 percent of farmland has been fallowed in some parts of Arizona,” he wrote in an email. Additionally, in some parts of the Southwest, states are paying farmers to fallow their fields to save water. According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, three quarters of Arizona’s total water supply is used for agriculture. “It’s going to be increasingly less feasible to irrigate things,” said Riordan. “If you’re not relying on surface flows, you’re relying on fossil water [groundwater], and we don’t have enough rain to be recharging.” Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi dryland farmer and academic, pointed out that for millennia, Hopi farmers have successfully farmed, without irrigation, on ancestral lands that receive an average of 10 inches of rain or less per year. Farmers plant seeds deep in the soil, use passive rainwater harvesting, and rely on hardy desert-adapted seeds. “Our seeds are very resilient,” said Johnson. “They are just amazing in the way they can survive heat and lack of irrigation.” Johnson said that unlike conventional farming, every aspect of Hopi farming has been refined to retain soil moisture with agricultural practices and crops that fit the environment, not the other way around. Counter to this approach, many crops grown in Arizona require vast amounts of water and are maladapted to the environment, Johnson said. “As the temperature increases in Arizona, more water will be needed for commodity crops like cotton and alfalfa,” he said. “Those two crops are not place-based and will require even more water in the future.” For Johnson, statewide water scarcity will require a move away from these water-thirsty crops towards desert-adapted varieties. “We need crops that use less water,” he said. “Our seeds are very resilient. They are just amazing in the way they can survive heat and lack of irrigation.” Author and ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan has been studying crop wild relatives for over 50 years. According to Nabhan, plant breeders and agronomists have been slow to accept the fact that we need desert-adapted crops, even as all signs point to a hotter, dryer future. “For nearly a century, crop wild relatives were neglected because plant breeders did not need drought and heat tolerance as long as they had plenty of irrigation water,” said Nabhan. As a university student in the late ‘70s, Nabhan recalls a professor explaining why desert-adapted crops were unnecessary. “‘The more water you put on a crop, the more yield you get. We have the water, so why would you want to go back?’” said Nabhan of the conversation. “I mean, it’s just amazing in retrospect that he said that to me in 1976. [They saw] water as unlimited.” With growing heat stress and water scarcity, breeders will increasingly need the genetics from their desert-adapted cousins to survive. “Wild crop relatives will be the only alternative to deal with climatic changes on two fifths to one half of the continental U.S.,” said Nabhan about the impact of global warming on our semi-arid and arid lands. Nationally, the Botanic Garden Conservation International (BGCI) and the U.S. Botanic Garden (USBG) are working to increase the number of crop wild relatives at botanical gardens to fill gaps in gene bank collection and maintain samples from wild populations. But while some are working to identify and protect CWRs, Nabhan believes much more needs to be done. “Federal agencies have hardly ever invested time or funds in their protection or management,” he said. Protecting and Breeding CRWs Access to the critical traits crop wild relatives possess requires protection both in the wild and in the lab, said Riordan and the BRN’s McNelis. Both are proponents of a “trans-situ” approach to CWR conservation, or the combination of in-situ (on-site) protection of plants in their native habitats and ex-situ (off-site) conservation at seedbanks, gene banks, and gardens. “We have these important efforts to conserve them, both through protecting their wild habitats and through these backup collections,” said Riordan. Once researchers identify a desirable trait, breeders can cross pollinate the CWR with a domesticated crop. “The more genetically related the CWR and crop, the easier this is to do,” said the USDA’s Greene. Examples of wild and domesticated forms of crops. The first image of each row is the wild relative. a) teosinte and maize (Zea mays); b) chilli pepper (Capsicum annuum); c) common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris); d) cotton (Gossypium hirsutum). (Images CC-licensed, from Botanical Sciences 95(3):345). Past examples include breeding wild wheat with domesticated varieties to boost disease resistance. Wild relatives of potatoes have been used to increase frost resistance and blight—the cause of the devastating Irish potato famine in the mid-19th century. Sunflower wild relatives “have contributed genes for disease resistance, salt tolerance, and resistance to herbicides,” said Greene.  Another notable success story was the introduction of hardy American grape rootstalks to help counter Phylloxera, an aphid-like insect that nearly wiped out European Vitis vinifera. Nabhan said root stalks from crop wild relatives, such as grapes, hold vast potential as well. “Using hardy wild root stalks on grapes, apples, raspberries, blackberries is really viable,” he said. This is already being done on a commercial level. . . . It’s not pie in the sky.” Increasingly scientists are using molecular techniques to bring adaptive traits from CWRs into domesticated species through precise genome editing. Using CRISPR, researchers have modified genes from wild tomato relatives to increase fruit size and nutrition in an engineered tomato crop. A Botanical Area and a Desert Museum In Arizona’s Wild Chili Botanical Area, unique regulations help protect the CWRs, including an exclusion on cattle, limits on extractive industries such as mining, and the banning of road construction. To identify CWRs in the area during the recent survey, McNelis explored a remote portion of the Coronado National Forest, helping identify high-priority species such as canyon grapes, desert cotton, black walnut trees, tepary beans, and wild relatives of corn and wheat. She found many species surviving in nutrient-poor soils, growing on rock faces, or in overgrazed and disturbed environments. “It really does speak to what persists in this landscape,” said McNelis. Her experience reinforced the importance of preserving CWR in what she described as an era of mass extinction. “The genetic material holds so much potential for creating more resilient crops in a world where extreme climate events are likely to occur.” Meanwhile, at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Riordan is heading up a first-of-its-kind research program to conserve arid-adapted crop wild relatives. The 98-acre complex is a combination of zoo, aquarium, natural history museum, and botanical garden that includes one the largest living collections of crop wild relatives in the United States. “The Desert Museum is leading an effort to better understand and conserve the CWRs of the Sonoran Desert region by documenting important species, developing conservation priorities, and building partnerships,” including a collaboration with the Desert Museum in Phoenix and the Chicago Botanical Garden, said Riordan of the project. “Botanical gardens like this one play a key role in conservation,” said Riordan, as we walk past a mountain lion in the mountain woodland exhibit. Organized into various biomes of the Sonoran Desert, the museum has over 200 CWRs in its live plant and seed bank collections. One-hundred-thirty crop wild relatives are grown outdoors in the climate of southern Arizona, where desert adaptions can be maintained. “We need to keep that selective pressure of the heat and the drought on the plants,” said Riordan, pausing at a  grapevine covering a section of rock wall. This crop wild relative, Vitis arizonica, grows in the canyons of Arizona and is being studied for its potential to improve disease resistance in wine grapes. Other important CWRs at the museum include relatives of domesticated beans, sunflowers, and peppers–including the chiltepin, which also thrives in the mountains and canyons of northern Mexico. “I picked them from the side of the road in Sonora,” she said, opening a plastic container with a few dozen sun-dried samples. The fiery peppers have a fruity vegetable aroma and a smoky sweet heat that builds and lingers. Later, we pass a wild tepary bean plant, the ancestor of the legume domesticated by Indigenous Sonorans many centuries ago. From her satchel, she takes out a container of the small speckled wild beans, along with another bag holding a dozen or so brown domesticated versions. These cultivated teparies are nutrient and protein dense and far more climate resilient than the much more common pinto bean. “[This is] a result of thousands of years of native desert peoples domesticating a wild plant into an incredibly heat-hardy and drought tolerant crop,” said Riordan. Further along the path is a desert cotton plant—long utilized by indigenous Sonorans. A ProPublica investigation found that conventional cotton grown in Arizona requires six times more water than lettuce and 60 percent more than wheat. Its existence is made possible by massive federal subsidies and billions of gallons of water imported into Arizona to grow cotton as well as water-thirsty crops such as alfalfa, corn, and pecans. Though it bears a close physical resemblance to domesticated cotton, the drought-tolerant shrub growing in the botanical garden requires a fraction of the water. This species, she explained, has been researched for “drought resistance, salt tolerance, pest resistance, and crop quality.” It is also critically endangered. “It’s thousands of years of adaptation,” said Riordan. “When it’s gone, it’s gone.” The post Seeds from Wild Crop Relatives Could Help Agriculture Weather Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

The isolation of this ecologically rich archipelago of peaks, located in a “sea” of desert that stretches from northern Mexico into southern Arizona, means that plants grow here that don’t grow anywhere else. Its 2,800 acres—the first protected habitat for the wild relatives of crops in the United States—now shelter not just a single pepper but […] The post Seeds from Wild Crop Relatives Could Help Agriculture Weather Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

In the rugged Tumacácori mountain region 45 minutes south of Tucson, the Wild Chile Botanical Area (WCBA) was established in 1999 to protect and study the chiltepin pepper—the single wild relative of hundreds of sweet and hot varieties including jalapeño, cayenne, and bell peppers, found on dinner plates worldwide.

The isolation of this ecologically rich archipelago of peaks, located in a “sea” of desert that stretches from northern Mexico into southern Arizona, means that plants grow here that don’t grow anywhere else. Its 2,800 acres—the first protected habitat for the wild relatives of crops in the United States—now shelter not just a single pepper but at least 45 different species.

Between 2021 and 2022, the Borderlands Restoration Network (BRN), an Arizona-based conservation non-profit, worked with the U.S. Forest Service to identify and collect other wild relatives of crops in this area. The idea behind the project was to build food security in a world where all climate models are pointing to hotter and dryer extreme conditions.

“You have this dramatic topography that provides all these different ecological niches for different things to grow,” said Perin McNelis, 36, native plant program director at the BRN. “Where better to start than an area that is already hot and dry, with all these wild relatives that are really adapted to conditions that will be more widespread in the future.”

Crop wild relatives, or CWRs for short, are the hardy wild cousins of domesticated crops. In the U.S. alone, thousands of crop wild relatives exist in their natural habitats, often thriving in harsh conditions. In Arizona this includes wild species of onion, wheat, squash, strawberry, grape and many other important crops.  Increasingly, farmers and scientists are looking at them as reservoirs of genetic diversity with traits that can be bred into domesticated crops to improve drought, heat, and disease resistance—and perhaps serve as the key to the future of farming.

“What makes them important is they have traits that can help crops be more adapted and resilient to climate change,” said Stephanie Greene, a retired plant geneticist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service.

Erin Riordan, a conservation research scientist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outside Tucson, works to expand the regional food system to include dryland-adapted plants such as agave, mesquite, prickly pear, and tepary beans with low-water use agricultural practices. For instance, tepary beans—a tiny brown bean with a sweet chestnut flavor—require about 1/5 the water of pinto beans.

Arizona is the third driest state in the U.S. It also has the highest diversity of crop wild relatives due to the state’s wide-ranging topography and habitats, “from low deserts to high elevation alpine, to everything in between,” said Riordan. One thousand of the estimated 4,500 CWRs in the U.S. are found in the state, including desert-adapted relatives of critical domesticated foods—not just peppers, but also tomatoes, squash, amaranth, beans, corn, and wheat.

An Arizona Walnut tree. (Photo CC-licensed by Whitney Cranshaw, Colorado State University.)

An Arizona Walnut tree. (Photo CC-licensed by Whitney Cranshaw, Colorado State University.)

Wild cotton grows in the parched grasslands of the Sonoran Desert, surviving without irrigation, pesticides, or other human inputs that domesticated cotton depends on. The wild Arizona walnut, found in desert riparian areas,  has been used as a rootstalk for domesticated walnut trees to increase their tolerance to drought and diseases.

Currently, 44 percent of the world’s food is produced in arid and semi-arid lands. According to a 2017 report from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, “80 percent of global cropland and 60 percent of global food output could be markedly affected by climate change, particularly in arid and semi-arid areas.” Riordan said protecting desert-adapted CWRs will be particularly important in a changing climate.

One issue complicating the use of wild relatives as a solution, however, is that these banks of genetic resilience are under threat through habitat destruction and global biodiversity loss caused by development and climate change. A 2020 paper in the National Academy of Sciences’ journal found that over half of the 600 CWRs identified in the study were either endangered or threatened. When a wild species goes extinct, so do the evolutionary traits that have allowed it to survive environmental extremes.

While the momentum for studying and conserving crop wild relatives has grown in recent years, few CWR species are protected at either a state or federal level. Arizona has been at the forefront of conservation efforts, protecting CWRs on public lands like the WCBA, at botanical gardens like at the Desert Museum, and at seed banks.

Heat Stress, Water Scarcity, and the Need to Adapt

Last year was the world’s hottest summer on record; in Arizona, temperatures routinely exceeded 110 degrees. Across the state, crops withered in the punishing dry heat, and farmers left land fallow amid statewide water cutbacks driven by a historic megadrought.

“These last few years are indicative of the sorts of extreme conditions that are increasingly becoming the new norm,” Riordan said. “Arizona farmers have always experienced periodic drought and bouts of heat, but these events are happening with greater frequency, becoming more severe, and lasting longer.”

At the same time, other sources of water are becoming increasingly scarce in the west, putting stress on farmers and making some crops untenable. Last year, Arizona’s allotment from the Colorado River was cut by 21 percent.

“These last few years are indicative of the sorts of extreme conditions that are increasingly becoming the new norm.”

Benjamin Ruddell, director of the National Water-Economy Project, said that Colorado River water shortages left large areas of farmland in Arizona unsowed, a bellwether of things to come. “Up to 40 percent of farmland has been fallowed in some parts of Arizona,” he wrote in an email. Additionally, in some parts of the Southwest, states are paying farmers to fallow their fields to save water.

According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources, three quarters of Arizona’s total water supply is used for agriculture. “It’s going to be increasingly less feasible to irrigate things,” said Riordan. “If you’re not relying on surface flows, you’re relying on fossil water [groundwater], and we don’t have enough rain to be recharging.”

Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi dryland farmer and academic, pointed out that for millennia, Hopi farmers have successfully farmed, without irrigation, on ancestral lands that receive an average of 10 inches of rain or less per year. Farmers plant seeds deep in the soil, use passive rainwater harvesting, and rely on hardy desert-adapted seeds. “Our seeds are very resilient,” said Johnson. “They are just amazing in the way they can survive heat and lack of irrigation.”

Johnson said that unlike conventional farming, every aspect of Hopi farming has been refined to retain soil moisture with agricultural practices and crops that fit the environment, not the other way around.

Counter to this approach, many crops grown in Arizona require vast amounts of water and are maladapted to the environment, Johnson said. “As the temperature increases in Arizona, more water will be needed for commodity crops like cotton and alfalfa,” he said. “Those two crops are not place-based and will require even more water in the future.”

For Johnson, statewide water scarcity will require a move away from these water-thirsty crops towards desert-adapted varieties. “We need crops that use less water,” he said.

“Our seeds are very resilient. They are just amazing in the way they can survive heat and lack of irrigation.”

Author and ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan has been studying crop wild relatives for over 50 years. According to Nabhan, plant breeders and agronomists have been slow to accept the fact that we need desert-adapted crops, even as all signs point to a hotter, dryer future. “For nearly a century, crop wild relatives were neglected because plant breeders did not need drought and heat tolerance as long as they had plenty of irrigation water,” said Nabhan.

As a university student in the late ‘70s, Nabhan recalls a professor explaining why desert-adapted crops were unnecessary. “‘The more water you put on a crop, the more yield you get. We have the water, so why would you want to go back?’” said Nabhan of the conversation. “I mean, it’s just amazing in retrospect that he said that to me in 1976. [They saw] water as unlimited.”

With growing heat stress and water scarcity, breeders will increasingly need the genetics from their desert-adapted cousins to survive. “Wild crop relatives will be the only alternative to deal with climatic changes on two fifths to one half of the continental U.S.,” said Nabhan about the impact of global warming on our semi-arid and arid lands.

Nationally, the Botanic Garden Conservation International (BGCI) and the U.S. Botanic Garden (USBG) are working to increase the number of crop wild relatives at botanical gardens to fill gaps in gene bank collection and maintain samples from wild populations.

But while some are working to identify and protect CWRs, Nabhan believes much more needs to be done. “Federal agencies have hardly ever invested time or funds in their protection or management,” he said.

Protecting and Breeding CRWs

Access to the critical traits crop wild relatives possess requires protection both in the wild and in the lab, said Riordan and the BRN’s McNelis.

Both are proponents of a “trans-situ” approach to CWR conservation, or the combination of in-situ (on-site) protection of plants in their native habitats and ex-situ (off-site) conservation at seedbanks, gene banks, and gardens. “We have these important efforts to conserve them, both through protecting their wild habitats and through these backup collections,” said Riordan.

Once researchers identify a desirable trait, breeders can cross pollinate the CWR with a domesticated crop. “The more genetically related the CWR and crop, the easier this is to do,” said the USDA’s Greene.

Examples of wild and domesticated forms of crops. The first image of each row is the wild relative. a) teosinte and maize (Zea mays); b) chilli pepper (Capsicum annuum); c) common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris); d) cotton (Gossypium hirsutum). Images taken from CONABIO.and CIAT and CIAT.

Examples of wild and domesticated forms of crops. The first image of each row is the wild relative. a) teosinte and maize (Zea mays); b) chilli pepper (Capsicum annuum); c) common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris); d) cotton (Gossypium hirsutum). (Images CC-licensed, from Botanical Sciences 95(3):345).

Past examples include breeding wild wheat with domesticated varieties to boost disease resistance. Wild relatives of potatoes have been used to increase frost resistance and blight—the cause of the devastating Irish potato famine in the mid-19th century. Sunflower wild relatives “have contributed genes for disease resistance, salt tolerance, and resistance to herbicides,” said Greene.  Another notable success story was the introduction of hardy American grape rootstalks to help counter Phylloxera, an aphid-like insect that nearly wiped out European Vitis vinifera.

Nabhan said root stalks from crop wild relatives, such as grapes, hold vast potential as well. “Using hardy wild root stalks on grapes, apples, raspberries, blackberries is really viable,” he said. This is already being done on a commercial level. . . . It’s not pie in the sky.”

Increasingly scientists are using molecular techniques to bring adaptive traits from CWRs into domesticated species through precise genome editing. Using CRISPR, researchers have modified genes from wild tomato relatives to increase fruit size and nutrition in an engineered tomato crop.

A Botanical Area and a Desert Museum

In Arizona’s Wild Chili Botanical Area, unique regulations help protect the CWRs, including an exclusion on cattle, limits on extractive industries such as mining, and the banning of road construction.

To identify CWRs in the area during the recent survey, McNelis explored a remote portion of the Coronado National Forest, helping identify high-priority species such as canyon grapes, desert cotton, black walnut trees, tepary beans, and wild relatives of corn and wheat. She found many species surviving in nutrient-poor soils, growing on rock faces, or in overgrazed and disturbed environments.

“It really does speak to what persists in this landscape,” said McNelis. Her experience reinforced the importance of preserving CWR in what she described as an era of mass extinction. “The genetic material holds so much potential for creating more resilient crops in a world where extreme climate events are likely to occur.”

Meanwhile, at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Riordan is heading up a first-of-its-kind research program to conserve arid-adapted crop wild relatives. The 98-acre complex is a combination of zoo, aquarium, natural history museum, and botanical garden that includes one the largest living collections of crop wild relatives in the United States.

“The Desert Museum is leading an effort to better understand and conserve the CWRs of the Sonoran Desert region by documenting important species, developing conservation priorities, and building partnerships,” including a collaboration with the Desert Museum in Phoenix and the Chicago Botanical Garden, said Riordan of the project.

“Botanical gardens like this one play a key role in conservation,” said Riordan, as we walk past a mountain lion in the mountain woodland exhibit. Organized into various biomes of the Sonoran Desert, the museum has over 200 CWRs in its live plant and seed bank collections. One-hundred-thirty crop wild relatives are grown outdoors in the climate of southern Arizona, where desert adaptions can be maintained.

“We need to keep that selective pressure of the heat and the drought on the plants,” said Riordan, pausing at a  grapevine covering a section of rock wall. This crop wild relative, Vitis arizonica, grows in the canyons of Arizona and is being studied for its potential to improve disease resistance in wine grapes.

Other important CWRs at the museum include relatives of domesticated beans, sunflowers, and peppers–including the chiltepin, which also thrives in the mountains and canyons of northern Mexico. “I picked them from the side of the road in Sonora,” she said, opening a plastic container with a few dozen sun-dried samples. The fiery peppers have a fruity vegetable aroma and a smoky sweet heat that builds and lingers.

Later, we pass a wild tepary bean plant, the ancestor of the legume domesticated by Indigenous Sonorans many centuries ago.

From her satchel, she takes out a container of the small speckled wild beans, along with another bag holding a dozen or so brown domesticated versions. These cultivated teparies are nutrient and protein dense and far more climate resilient than the much more common pinto bean.

“[This is] a result of thousands of years of native desert peoples domesticating a wild plant into an incredibly heat-hardy and drought tolerant crop,” said Riordan.

Further along the path is a desert cotton plant—long utilized by indigenous Sonorans. A ProPublica investigation found that conventional cotton grown in Arizona requires six times more water than lettuce and 60 percent more than wheat. Its existence is made possible by massive federal subsidies and billions of gallons of water imported into Arizona to grow cotton as well as water-thirsty crops such as alfalfa, corn, and pecans.

Though it bears a close physical resemblance to domesticated cotton, the drought-tolerant shrub growing in the botanical garden requires a fraction of the water. This species, she explained, has been researched for “drought resistance, salt tolerance, pest resistance, and crop quality.” It is also critically endangered.

“It’s thousands of years of adaptation,” said Riordan. “When it’s gone, it’s gone.”

The post Seeds from Wild Crop Relatives Could Help Agriculture Weather Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

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The Insect Apocalypse Hits Fiji: 79% of Native Ants Are Vanishing

Seventy-nine percent of endemic species are showing declines, underscoring how fragile island biodiversity is in the face of ecosystem changes. Insects play essential roles in ecosystems, from pollinating plants to driving decomposition and maintaining nutrient cycles. Their diversity and abundance are crucial for ecological stability, yet recent evidence of widespread declines has raised serious concerns [...]

Museum collection of pinned ants from Fiji. This study involved extensive genome sampling from thousands of Fijian ant specimens, highlighting the vital importance of these museum collections as resources for biodiversity monitoring and conservation.  Credit: Peter GinterSeventy-nine percent of endemic species are showing declines, underscoring how fragile island biodiversity is in the face of ecosystem changes. Insects play essential roles in ecosystems, from pollinating plants to driving decomposition and maintaining nutrient cycles. Their diversity and abundance are crucial for ecological stability, yet recent evidence of widespread declines has raised serious concerns about how insects are adapting to modern environmental pressures. Determining whether these declines reflect long-term trends is key for global conservation strategies and for uncovering the causes of what has been called the “Insect Apocalypse.” In a study published in Science, scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) applied a community genomics approach to investigate ant populations in Fiji as a model for broader insect biodiversity. By sequencing genomes from museum specimens, they reconstructed the ants’ evolutionary history, traced when species first colonized the islands, and examined long-term population dynamics. Conservation monitoring often emphasizes large, charismatic animals and ecosystems that are easier to survey, such as temperate regions. Yet many insects are believed to be undergoing steep declines, and island ecosystems—rich in unique species—are particularly vulnerable. Dr. Evan Economo, Professor at OIST and the University of Maryland and senior author of the study, explained, “It can be difficult to estimate historical changes to insect populations, because with few exceptions, we haven’t been directly monitoring populations over time. We take a novel approach to this problem by analyzing the genomes of many species in parallel from museum specimens collected recently. The genomes hold evidence of whether populations are growing or shrinking, allowing us to reconstruct community-wide changes.” During their fieldwork, the researchers sampled ants in Fiji by using bags to extract them from leaf litter, among other methods. Credit: Evan EconomoThe team’s findings were striking: 79% of Fiji’s endemic ant species—those found nowhere else—show signs of decline, with the timing of these reductions aligning with human arrival on the islands. In contrast, non-native ant species introduced by people are expanding rapidly. Much of the decline appears to have intensified within the last several hundred years, coinciding with European contact, colonization, global trade, and the spread of modern agriculture. A community-wide approach By focusing on the Fijian archipelago, a region of long-term interest to the researchers, they were able to get a broad, comprehensive overview of the population changes and colonization history of almost all the different ant species in the region. “Being closed, isolated ecosystems, islands are expected to feel the effects of human impact faster, so they are kind of a canary in the coal mine,” notes Dr. Cong Liu, first author on this paper. However, studying the populations of tropical islands is not without challenges. Often, fieldwork can be extremely difficult, and it isn’t easy to do continuous surveys. Therefore, instead of relying on real-time field monitoring, here the team used museum collections built across decades of fieldwork, including both the team’s previous collection efforts and those by other entomologists. Museumomics: reconstructing ant colonization One challenge of using museum collections is that DNA degrades over time. Therefore, the researchers had to use special sequencing methods (museumomics) to compare small fragments of DNA. In this study, they sequenced samples of genomes from thousands of ants from over one hundred different confirmed ant species. Using these data, they identified 65 separate instances (colonization events) where new ant species came to the island. These ranged from natural colonization (i.e. arrival of the ants with no human involvement) millions of years ago, to recent human introduction after Fiji became part of global trade networks. A small selection of the species encountered by the team in Fiji. A) Acropyga sp. FJ02 (endemic) carrying mealybug. B) Hypoponera eutrepta (endemic) carrying larva. C) Tetramorium lanuginosum (introduced). D) Colobopsis dentata (endemic). E) Odontomachus simillimus (Pacific native). F) Colobopsis polynesica (endemic). Credit: Eli SarnatBuilding on this history, the researchers were able to use their population genetics models to identify the rise or decline in population of different ant groups throughout the Fijian archipelago, noting the decline of endemic species, as well as dramatic increases in population of non-native species in more recent years. Island endemic species have often evolved traits that make them sensitive to environmental changes, including the arrival of new, damaging species. “Most recorded extinctions have historically been from island systems,” adds Dr. Liu. Going beyond the archipelago The team hopes that this work can act as inspiration for future work to continue building scientific understanding of insect populations, and to inform conservation efforts. “This study also highlights the importance of biodiversity and museum collections,” explains Professor Alexander Mikheyev of the Australian National University, a senior author on this study. “As our scientific toolbox expands, there is more and more information that we are able to capture from biodiversity collections, so it’s essential that we continue investing in and maintaining these vital resources.” The team are looking into this locally as well, to measure the biodiversity of Okinawan insect populations in real-time through acoustic monitoring and trapping as part of the Okinawa Environmental Observation Network (OKEON). “Insects are essential for the environment,” emphasizes Prof. Economo. “As scientists, we need to play our part in their protection, and provide and analyze the relevant data to ensure the long-term integrity of our ecosystems.” Reference: “Genomic signatures indicate biodiversity loss in an endemic island ant fauna” by Cong Liu, Eli Sarnat, Jo Ann Tan, Julia Janicki, John Deyrup, Masako Ogasawara, Miquel L. Grau, Lijun Qiu, Francisco Hita Garcia, Georg Fischer, Akanisi Caginitoba, Nitish Narula, Clive T. Darwell, Yasuhiro Kubota, Naomi E. Pierce, Alexander S. Mikheyev and Evan P. Economo, 11 September 2025, Science.DOI: 10.1126/science.ads3004 Funding: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.

Agriculture
Animals
Conservation

A Deep Look Into the Wild and Not-So-Wild World of Bumblebees

Over the past several decades the lives of the domesticated and native pollinators have increasingly overlapped

A Deep Look Into the Wild and Not-So-Wild World of Bumblebees Over the past several decades the lives of the domesticated and native pollinators have increasingly overlapped Jude Isabella, bioGraphic September 17, 2025 8:00 a.m. The domestication of some species of bumblebee has had unintended consequences. Grant Callegari / Hakai Institute Bumblebees are lovable, adorable and admirably occupied. They tumble along like toddlers drunk on the sweet smells of pretty flowers, breathing in one, then another and another. If Winnie-the-Pooh were an insect, he would be a bumblebee—a fuzzy, chubby, stinging insect that rarely stings. But I had no idea how much I cared about bumblebees until I had trouble meeting one particular species: the western bumblebee, Bombus occidentalis. Even before that, during the Covid-19 pandemic when my physical world contracted, a different apian wonder lured me into the big world of bumblebees. I had a garden, thankfully, and while working remotely, I had more time to consider its denizens. Cute and rotund, the bumblebees that routinely buzzed my tomato blossoms were small delights at a time when the world felt particularly grim. I snapped a photo of one, uploaded it to a website devoted to bumblebee identification and discovered it was a native species called Bombus vosnesenskii, the yellow-faced bumblebee. A sunny-blond mask covers its face and spreads across what I think of as its shoulders, like a fur wrap. Another strip of yellow near its tail contrasts with its otherwise black body. Enchanted, I dug deeper into online sources about bees, and B. vosnesenskii led me to B. occidentalis—also known as the white-bottomed or white-tailed bumblebee—the species that would have been pollinating my tomatoes in Victoria, British Columbia, some 30 years ago. Since then, B. occidentalis has slipped from being the most common bumblebee species in western North America to noticeably uncommon. In some areas, its populations are down 90 percent from what they were historically. The story of B. vosnesenskii has the opposite trajectory. In 1996, entomologists in British Columbia thought the bumblebee was in need of threatened or endangered status in the province. By 2000—not long after B. occidentalis populations crashed—researchers documented a dramatic B. vosnesenskii range expansion in the province, especially in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island. Bombus vosnesenskii—the yellow-faced bumblebee—has expanded its range in British Columbia in the past couple of decades. Julia Hiebaum / Alamy Stock Photo Sure enough, everywhere I looked in my small pandemic bubble—in the garden, in urban parks, along the seashore—I saw B. vosnesenskii and other natives, but no B. occidentalis. I became fixated with the bee and its plight as an augur for an impoverished world. In a sense, my quest felt like an apology to the bee for my previous inattention. As I ventured deeper into B. occidentalis territory, I realized how dramatically the spheres of wild and lab-born bees have collided over the past few decades. The reality for B. occidentalis and many of its brethren is anything but cute. From a distance, Sarah Johnson’s hair looks like a floral bouquet. Standing still in a sea of beach grass infused with introduced Queen Anne’s lace, the bee biologist’s streaks of chartreuse, mauve, azure and garnet shine bright against the pearly blossoms bumblebees busily devour. We’re on a bumblebee safari in Bella Coola, a small town nestled along an inlet on the British Columbia coast. Johnson traveled here on a road trip with her dad in 2019. At the time, Johnson, who had become an incurable bee stalker while studying biology as an undergrad, was a graduate student at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, researching how wildfire affects bumblebee communities. Beside Bella Coola’s ferry terminal, she spotted B. occidentalis on goldenrod. “Every single flower had a bumblebee,” she recalls, and not just any bee; it was B. occidentalis, which had become rare across much of its range in the province by then. “I was starting to freak out—‘Wow, this is amazing!’—so we drove around, and they were everywhere. There were tons of them. It was a time warp into the past,” Johnson recalls. “This is what their populations would have looked like.” Sarah Johnson, a bee biologist, looks for Bombus occidentalis—the western bumblebee—in an estuary in Bella Coola, British Columbia, where she first chanced upon a population in 2019. Grant Callegari / Hakai Institute I reached out to Johnson after grazing the internet looking for B. occidentalis sightings, and she offered to meet me here, five years after her last visit, hoping the site was still abuzz. On this June day in 2024, the temperature is 61 degrees Fahrenheit—a little chilly, but the fuzz that covers bumblebees acts like a jacket, so they’re often the first pollinators on the scene in spring and the last to exit in fall, when it’s too cold for many other pollen gatherers. The smell on the breeze is botanical, with a hint of licorice and the sweet sap of cottonwood trees lining the shoreline. “There’s an occidentalis!” Johnson says as she points to one clambering over a blossom among the ivory floral canopy. “Two more! And another.” She smiles and sighs. We watch the bumblebees forage. With the combs and brushes on the inside of their legs, they stuff pollen into bristly baskets on their hind legs. A bit of nectar mixed with saliva keeps the pollen moist and sticky so it stays put—all of the million or so golden grains in each basket. This site, a beach, does not fit the established understanding of ideal bumblebee habitat: It’s wet, and the flowers are sparse. But the known world of wild bumblebees is like a 2,000-year-old map: devoid of details and hopelessly myopic. B. occidentalis, it seems, like this location just fine. When Johnson, founding president of the Native Bee Society of British Columbia, stumbled upon this B. occidentalis hot spot, she was well aware that the species was on a downward spiral. She, like other bee biologists, suspected disease was to blame. So soon after she first spotted the bees in 2019, she gathered a handful of B. occidentalis, along with specimens of another native, Bombus vancouverensis—also called the Vancouver bumblebee—that were buzzing around Bella Coola, and she brought them back to her lab. Peering through a microscope, Johnson sliced into their abdomens and peeled back their insides to assess their disease load, something she would do when running a bumblebee recovery program for a nonprofit conservation organization in Ontario in the mid-2010s. Under the light of the microscope, B. occidentalis glowed with spores of Vairimorpha bombi—a fungus implicated in the great bumblebee die-off in the 1990s and originally known as Nosema bombi. A known pathogen of bees in general, the fungus seems particularly problematic for B. occidentalis, and researchers suspect that captive-bred bumblebees helped its spread to the wild. The B. vancouverensis she collected had no fungus. Since Johnson’s dissection was a one-off assessment, the scientific takeaway is fuzzy, though it feeds into the general consensus among some bee biologists that B. occidentalis appears more susceptible to agents of disease than most other bumblebee species. Why B. occidentalis in Bella Coola has managed to thrive despite the heavy fungal load is unclear, says Johnson. But it’s likely that the bees have fewer environmental stressors overall undermining their health here. B. occidentalis forages for pollen on Queen Anne’s lace in the Bella Coola estuary. Grant Callegari / Hakai Institute During our visit, Johnson wades through the waist-high flowers, climbing over driftwood and skirting discarded fishing detritus, her camera ready. “So cute,” she murmurs as a bumblebee skitters across an umbrella-shaped cluster of flowers. I feel like I’m on a bumblebee safari, and like all good safari guides, Johnson is happy to dole out facts about the wildlife, with tons of caveats—there are many species, and many of them are under-investigated. Most bumblebees nest underground, moving into abandoned rodent burrows or finding space at the bottom of fence posts or in the roots of trees, she tells me. Those that dwell aboveground tuck themselves behind house shingles, occupy birdhouses or nestle into other nooks they find. Each spring, hibernating queens emerge from their winter homes and disperse to establish their own nests. Eventually, female workers hatch from the queen’s first batch of eggs. The workers survive only a few weeks, toiling to deliver nectar and pollen back to the nest to benefit the next generation. Males, with shaggier, thinner legs, don’t collect pollen; they solely exist to perpetuate the hive, as if they are the ones in red in The Handmaid’s Tale. They mate with the queen late in the season. When the hive dies off, the queen’s end-of-season offspring, her potential successors, hibernate until it’s time to start their own colonies. Johnson shares these bumblebee basics through public outreach tables at farmer’s markets and other events. She also provides expert identification for the database Bumblebee Watch, where amateur enthusiasts can upload pictures of bees they’ve tracked. Public databases allow researchers to track the movements of and make educated guesses about bumblebee populations. Johnson points out that B. vosnesenskii—the yellow-faced bumblebee in my garden—may be continuing its range expansion, perhaps filling the B. occidentalis niche. Yet the story playing out beyond the sightings is a complicated one. It unspools in laboratories where scientists tinker with domesticated pollinators; in greenhouses where lab-born bees are released en masse; and in increasingly simplified agricultural landscapes that favor efficiency over diversity. Until B. occidentalis caught my imagination, I had no idea that bumblebees are akin to valuable livestock and that some species have already been domesticated on a large scale. The more familiar pollinators are non-native honeybees, probably first carried from Europe to North America in 1622 by English colonists of Virginia. Today, honeybees are integral to the food system in North America, though their services vary. In the United States, for example, they pollinate 100 percent of almonds but only about 25 percent of pumpkins. And they’re poor pollinators for one of the most lucrative crops: tomatoes. The tomato business is enormous. Globally, the market value of tomatoes is over $200 billion annually, compared with apples at around $100 billion. Bumblebees are ideal tomato pollinators because they are plump, they are hairy, and they vibrate. Tomatoes need that buzz: The high-frequency vibration of a bumblebee’s thoracic muscles shakes pollen from the plant’s flowers. “To anthropomorphize,” says Jon Koch, who was until recently a research entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Utah, “that’s why we benefit, or the world does—because they’re not very good at wiping their mouths. A lot of pollen ends up on their own bodies.” Bumblebees then transfer the pollen grains between blossoms as they dance from plant to plant. Honeybees, by contrast, don’t vibrate, and they struggle to reach the pollen at the end of tomato blossoms. Being inside a greenhouse also tends to disorient honeybees, so they bang against the glass instead of working. Bombus mixtus is a commonly found bumblebee species native to western North America, in the Rocky Mountains to the coast, from Alaska south to northern California. Grant Callegari / Hakai Institute Before they could buy commercial bumblebees in the 1980s, tomato greenhouse growers hand-pollinated with electric vibrating wands. Compared with this laborious task, bumblebee pollination can lead to plumper fruit and a 30 percent increase in tomato yield. In addition to their effect on greenhouse tomatoes, domesticated bumblebees have increased the yields of bell peppers, cucumbers, eggplants and, in some regions, field crops like blueberries, strawberries and cranberries. Worldwide, 5 species of bumblebees out of about 265 are commercial crop pollinators. B. occidentalis was briefly one of them. Bumblebee domestication started more than a century ago, when farmers began moving four bumblebee species, including a species called Bombus terrestris, the buff-tailed bumblebee, from the United Kingdom to New Zealand—once a bumblebee-free land—to pollinate feed crops such as alfalfa and red clover. The effort to raise bumblebees in captivity progressed in fits and starts for much of the 20th century. But the commercial value of B. terrestris soared soon after a Belgian veterinarian and bumblebee breeder named Roland de Jonghe released a colony into a tomato grower’s greenhouse in the Netherlands in 1985. The grower saw his yield increase, and he noticed that his bumblebee-kissed greenhouse tomatoes were also prettier—with rounded flesh and fewer blemishes—than the hand-pollinated fruit of his competitors. He made a record profit. Within a few years, tomato growers in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg all began using B. terrestris for pollination, and de Jonghe launched Biobest, which is now one of the world’s largest suppliers of domesticated B. terrestris and other commercial pollinator species. All along, bumblebee breeders understood that their wards were prone to jailbreaking. As Koch points out, “Bumblebees are great escape artists. I’ve learned that they will find the smallest hole anywhere, and they’re persistent.” For that reason, breeders raising bumblebees for the greenhouse industry endeavored to use species local to where they’d be employed. It didn’t always work. In Australia, for example, breeders tried native great carpenter bees, but they were uncooperative in confined settings. In North America, breeders set their sights on domesticating two bumblebees native to Canada and the U.S.: B. impatiens, the most common bumblebee in the east, and B. occidentalis, the most common bumblebee in the west. The quest to create a pollinator from wild B. impatiens worked; B. occidentalis, however, faltered. In the late 1990s, not long into industrial-scale breeding of B. occidentalis, the V. bombi fungus felled commercial populations. Wild B. occidentalis soon fell ill as well, possibly infected by some of the domesticated variety released into greenhouses and farm fields. If hysteria ensued—as it did when colony collapse disorder first struck honeybees in 2006—it seemed to be kept within the sphere of breeders, researchers, trade publications and maybe local farm news. Commercial breeders abandoned B. occidentalis by 1999. “The hothouse tomato industry faced a calamity in terms of productivity,” says Paul van Westendorp, the chief apiarist for the province of British Columbia before his recent retirement. Meanwhile, growers on the other side of the continent, in places like Ontario and New York, were relying on B. impatiens, a proven winner in domestication. Western growers clamored for permission from their governments to import B. impatiens. Promises were made to keep the non-native bees inside, and permission was granted. “We always knew that 100 percent control was perhaps idealistic or unrealistic, but it was considered to be perhaps not a great threat as such,” van Westendorp says. Washington and California also gave permission, with conditions, while Oregon was a holdout. In greenhouses, bumblebee colonies live in a cardboard box about the size of a banker’s box. Inside is a plastic chamber for the hive and where the queen lays her eggs. A round opening, an excluder, to the outside allows smaller workers out, but it should be too small for queens. Did B. impatiens escape greenhouses in western North America? If you ask Gary Jones, program manager for the B.C. Greenhouse Grower’s Association, the evidence is circumstantial. “It’s an assumption,” he says. The assumption is based on surveys by researchers in the spring of 2003 and 2004 of blueberry and strawberry fields in the Lower Mainland, where hundreds of greenhouses dot agricultural fields: They found over 500 B. impatiens, including a queen, at two different sites, roughly one and three miles from greenhouses, typical foraging distances for bumblebees. Commercially produced bumblebees arrive at greenhouses in cardboard boxes that serve as their hives. Carlos Gonzalez / Minneapolis Star Tribune / Alamy Stock Photo Aside from using excluders, growers are also supposed to euthanize hives that have finished their pollinating job, usually by freezing them. Yet there are no rules specifying how long to freeze the hives to kill the bees before disposing of them, says Sheila Colla*, a conservation scientist at York University in Toronto, who led the bee surveys in British Columbia’s blueberry and strawberry fields. And no regulatory agency has anyone methodically inspecting domesticated bumblebees in the province’s commercial greenhouses. Washington and California have no monitoring processes in place either. “I wonder if they’re just being dumped into dumpsters, and that’s how they’re getting out,” says Colla. Katie Buckley with the Washington State Department of Agriculture also knows that some greenhouse growers sold hives to other farmers, who may have placed them outside. That was “not uncommon practice,” she says, referring to the early days of B. impatiens in the West. “There were chains of people that these hives would go through.” No governmental entity checked for escapees. Hunt for bumblebees in farm fields in the Lower Mainland today, and 40 percent will be B. impatiens, as revealed by scientists from the University of British Columbia in 2024, helping fill the void left by B. occidentalis, once the humming majority. While B. impatiens is not responsible for B. occidentalis’ worrisome decline, it may have kept the threatened bee from rebounding in certain areas, through competition or by spreading disease. And even though colonies of native bumblebees—domesticated B. vosnesenskii and another hometown buzz called Bombus huntii—are finally available, it seems unlikely we’ll ever put a lid back on feral B. impatiens. They’ve become a permanent component of the region’s pollinator mix. The question is: What will this now-common species do to wild bee diversity in the long term? By 2017, Washington State firmly jumped on the feral bumblebee worry train when a single image of B. impatiens uploaded to an online insect identification site caught the eye of Chris Looney, who studies insects at the Washington State Department of Agriculture. Looney is famous—at least in some circles—for his work on tracking and eradicating the Asian giant hornet (aka murder hornet, Vespa mandarinia). The photo was taken in Blaine, Washington, roughly half a mile from the Canadian border. “This is only the third location, I would say on Earth, where a bumblebee has been introduced in a place where other bumblebees live,” Looney says over a video chat from his office in Olympia, Washington. Aside from the northwest coast of North America, the other two places are Japan and Chile. In Japan, B. terrestris imported from Europe may be interfering with the mating of native species and competing for nests, but the effects have been subtle so far. In Chile, the effects are profound. Introduced B. terrestris have spread south into Argentina, and now they’re displacing the native ginger-furred Bombus dahlbomii throughout Patagonia, a revelation made in 2013 by Carolina Morales, at Argentina’s National University of Comahue, and her colleagues. B. dahlbomii, the largest bumblebee on Earth—likened to a flying mouse—is the region’s only native bumblebee. Bombus dahlbomii, Patagonia’s only native bumblebee, has struggled since Chile introduced Bombus terrestris into greenhouses in 1997. The largest bumblebee in the world, B. dahlbomii is now considered endangered.  bbr0wn / iNaturalist “In that case, the impacts [in Patagonia] were immediate and obvious,” Looney says. In the Pacific Northwest, the trajectory is less clear. “Will [B. impatiens] just slot in and not really be a competitor? Or will they have disparate impacts on some native bee species but not others? Who knows, right?” Looney and a colleague visited Blaine and immediately found B. impatiens. He then investigated the potential for B. impatiens to spread even further through a modeling study using climate data and habitat needs: The bee has the potential to go big and colonize the coast from British Columbia’s Haida Gwaii archipelago to California’s San Francisco Bay. In 2022, Looney launched a four-year survey. With colleagues, including Koch, who was then at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he put 46 sites under surveillance for B. impatiens in Washington and in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. One question the team hopes to answer is whether the bees have a preference for certain landscapes, and if so, which ones. Anecdotally, they’re associated with urban and suburban gardens, parks and agricultural fields, but Looney’s team has also found them on mountains and forested foothills. “Obviously, they found something to eat up there,” he says. He’s also found that the traps he set for the Asian giant hornet, baited with a mimosa-like concoction—rice wine and orange juice—tend to lure B. impatiens. Chris Looney, an entomologist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture, holds a bottle trap used to capture invasive Asian giant hornets. Bombus impatiens are also drawn to the traps.  Paul Christian Gordon / Alamy Stock Photo In October 2022, Looney found 30 of the introduced bumblebees—way more than the usual handful he encounters—inside a hornet trap set in a meadow in Lynden, Washington. Lots of males and queens were flying around, a signal that it was the end of a colony cycle. Another pass at the site in spring 2024 turned up nine B. impatiens nests under the ground. “Big nests,” Looney says—far bigger than those produced by B. occidentalis, which typically contain a few hundred bees. In the fall, he and his team used pickaxes, shovels and a shop vac to collect a colony and bring it back for dissection. Based on the number of larval cells they found—3,600—they estimate that collectively, the nine nests in that meadow habitat could have produced 3,933 gynes, potential queens. About 60 percent survive overwintering, which means that the nests could produce 2,360 would-be queens in spring. The team is far from generating an overall hypothesis about whether the flying infringers are worrisome adversaries or tolerable neighbors for native species. Looney, Koch, Colla and others have noticed that the bee from the east shows up to pollinate later in the season than most natives. The queens are out at the same time as other species’ queens, but the workers take their sweet time heading out to flowering fields—perhaps because they’re reliant on introduced plants, cultivars bred to provide a cascading series of blooms all summer long, or fruits and vegetables ready to harvest at various times over a growing season. From surveys of the Lower Mainland, bee biologists at the University of British Columbia found that B. impatiens binge on the pollen of cultivated dahlias, tomatoes, blueberries and other plants found in suburban gardens. The bee dominates parks in the Vancouver metro area, too. Despite the apparent size of the feral population, the British Columbia government continues to sit on its hands. B. impatiens is no longer welcome in Washington’s greenhouses, though the domesticated eastern worker continues to labor in California. Counties in California inspect greenhouses before issuing permits, yet that state also has a documented feral population. Oregon continues to forbid B. impatiens and so far has no established populations. Bee biologist Lincoln Best at Oregon State University has had teams searching for them since 2018 when he launched the Oregon Bee Atlas. He believes they are dispersing along the coast and into watersheds, finding open areas with decent bumblebee habitat, and that their expansion from either Washington or California into Oregon is probable. “It’s just a matter of time,” he says. On another bumblebee safari, to the Lower Mainland, the apparent gateway of B. impatiens to the West, I meet Sandra Gillespie, a bee biologist with the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Gillespie’s focus is on pathogens and bumblebees, but Looney and Koch asked her to join their survey of B. impatiens. Abbotsford is part farm community, part suburbia. To meet Gillespie, I drive down a two-lane road lined with greenhouses and commercial blueberry crops and crowded with trucks, cars, and the odd tractor. “Oh, here’s an impatiens—she’s moving fast,” Gillespie says as we stand at a blackberry patch in a public park. I blink, and the bee is gone. We’re about a mile from the nearest greenhouse, which means the B. impatiens is either feral or a recent escapee. “Once they built that greenhouse, that’s when I started seeing Bombus impatiens at one of my field sites, over there,” she says, pointing north toward the Fraser River. She’s been monitoring the same sites for eight years and rarely sees a B. occidentalis, although she’s spotted them on Vancouver Island. Sandra Gillespie, a bee biologist at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, studies pathogens in bumblebees. Toby Hall / Hakai Institute A couple of other native bumblebee species whizz by before we stroll to a patch of native fireweed where bumblebees gulp an abundance of nectar from the bubblegum pink petals. Different plants offer different nutritional value, and research has shown that bumblebees thrive on a varied diet. But the intense commercialization of the blueberry crop in Abbotsford has simplified the landscape with thousands of shrubs. “Blueberries are attractive to bumblebees because there are so many of them,” says Gillespie, noting they don’t offer bees much protein. She equates the vast blueberry fields to big box stores, teeming with processed foods. It’s hot, and the bees are fast. Gillespie points to a couple of B. impatiens flying deep into the flower patch. Then she chuckles: A bumblebee in front of us sticks its face deep into a bright pink blossom. It’s a B. vosnesenskii, the yellow-faced bumblebee that first lured me into the world of bees. Earlier in the season, Gillespie collected a handful of B. vosnesenskii queens from the wild and placed them in a box designed for brood rearing, as a means of learning more about the behaviors of her study subjects. Koch and Looney did the same in a couple of different sites in Washington. Gillespie has had little success so far. “I think there’s something wrong with our queens,” she says, clearly frustrated, noting it could also be the lab setup. For publicly funded researchers and commercial breeders alike, figuring out how to rear bees in labs has been notoriously finnicky since the beginning. Gillespie trains students to identify and net bee pollinators in her survey sites. Toby Hall / Hakai Institute Koppert, a commercial breeding operation based in the Netherlands, began raising B. vosnesenskii around 2007, and early results were mixed—the bee was not easy to domesticate. But eventually the company got it right, and commercial sales began in 2020. What did it get right? Who knows. Production methods are proprietary. “As you can imagine, we compete heavily with the likes of Biobest and other smaller local producers all across the world,” says Martin Wohlfarter, Koppert’s global regulatory affairs specialist. Fair enough: The pollination-services industry was worth $2.5 billion in 2024. B. vosnesenskii could prove as lucrative as B. impatiens—it’s one of the two domesticated bumblebees allowed to pollinate crops in Washington and Oregon, both in fields and greenhouses. If British Columbia ever bans B. impatiens, it is likely that B. vosnesenskii and B. huntii will take their place. But will using domesticated native bumblebees ultimately prove better than using non-native equivalents? Well, domesticated B. vosnesenskii can potentially overwhelm habitat and outcompete other species, but more than one researcher points out that they’ll mostly stick with the “big box” floral department they’re released into. More worrisome is the spread of disease to wild bumblebees if an outbreak of a fungus, virus, parasite or bacteria hits a lab or two. What is known is that since the start of the commercial bumblebee breeding industry, infections caused by V. bombi, the fungus that sliced into B. occidentalis populations, have risen in wild species in western North America. Maybe bumblebees meet at a flower patch, alight on some of the same blossoms, each make their own little messes while sipping nectar and gathering pollen, and a pathogen hitches a ride back to a wild hive. Felix Wäckers, head of research and development at Biobest, based in Belgium, is an ecologist and former academic. He joined Biobest 16 years ago, and at the time, he says, shipping pollinators around the globe was not acknowledged—at least by the industry—as a risk to native bumblebee species. Since then, he says, disease protocols have become more rigorous. For instance, scientists will breed queens for multiple generations to weed out potential pathogens from the original wild progenitors. Biobest has also bred native Japanese and South American bumblebees and has stopped selling B. terrestris to Japan and Chile. “I think as an industry, we have taken considerable steps over the last one and a half decades to minimize the impact,” Wäckers says. “That doesn’t mean that what happened with Chile is not a problem.” It also doesn’t mean other companies have stopped selling the non-native bees to Chile or Japan. Colla, the conservation scientist, and her colleagues are calling for a “bumblebee clean stock certification program” across North America to reduce disease risk in captive production, which in turn would reduce the risk of infections in wild pollinators and other insects. As Colla points out, pathogen spillover is a regular occurrence between livestock and their wild counterparts—between cattle and bison; between farmed salmon and wild salmon; between poultry and wild birds. My final bumblebee safari never pans out. I’m home, sick with a case of dramatic irony, infected with the Covid-19 virus. Looney, Koch and their team head out without me to Whatcom County in Washington to check their B. vosnesenskii colonies. They’re doing well. Koch’s lab manager Tien Lindsay sends me photos. The mid-September day looks ablaze in foliage as the team checks a hive surrounded by the white and red blossoms of rugosa, a lovely flowering shrub from eastern Asia. Against an emerald backdrop of western red cedar striped with the white bark of an aspen, a scientist peers inside a white box. The yellow-faced livestock are hidden from the camera. Unlike conventional livestock, bumblebees play a role in the agricultural system that is mostly hidden from consumers. It’s not intentional, just business: Bumblebees have become invisible in a system where profit comes first, food second and biodiversity barely registers. A handful of bumblebee species are tools, necessary tools for growers big and small, including the family-run greenhouse a couple miles from my house that sells the most exquisite heirloom tomatoes at the summer farmers market. The corporate point of view isn’t wrong. An economy that hinges on one metric—money—rewards profit-driven behavior. But money is like a god that demands complete allegiance, leaving less space for the gods of small things, for the 260 or so other wild bumblebees that do not fit into today’s economic system but are likely impacted by it. This is not the end of the story. Farmers have always been creative problem solvers. Change the goal, and farmers and researchers—highly skilled people—can transform the agricultural landscape into healthier ecosystems with space for all bee species. In fact, domesticating bumblebees led to a boost in biocontrol research, resulting in new ways to manage pests without relying solely on chemicals to massacre other life forms. Maybe change begins with an idea: to look at the world through the eyes of wild pollinators while acknowledging them as partners in our food systems. If we simultaneously reject the simplification of agricultural landscapes, we can create diverse food-producing ecosystems that encourage a variety of species that interact for the benefit of the whole. B. vosnesenskii, a bumblebee native to western North America, rests on Looney’s hand at one of his survey sites in Washington State. Chris Looney Another picture in the batch that Lindsay sends me has a caption: “A Bombus vosnesenskii worker bee rests on Dr. Chris Looney’s finger. We were expressing our gratitude for her efforts and services.” Maybe change starts with that. Travel and photography support for this story came from the Tula Foundation. * Sheila Colla passed away on July 6, 2025. As a journalist, I only knew Sheila through a video interview and emails. She answered questions with clarity, patience and kindness and was always responsive. When we chatted many months ago, she was outside with her students, giving thoughtful answers to my questions, occasionally engaging with someone in the background, smiling all the while. She seemed unflappable. When I interviewed other biologists for this story, they often referred to Sheila’s work. From our brief encounter, Sheila came across as a matriarch of the bee biology world, a powerful, influential woman and scientist who cared deeply about the natural world. Please read about her remarkable sojourn on this corporeal plane here. This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

Agriculture
Business
Chemicals

As Federal Support for On-Farm Solar Declines, Is Community Agrivoltaics the Future?

Byron Kominek, who owns the farm, sees similar benefits from the solar panels he has installed on some of the land. “What’s important is to think about the solar array as a tree canopy,” Kominek said. The solar garden includes 3,276 panels that generate 1.2 megawatts of community solar power, enough to power 300 homes. […] The post As Federal Support for On-Farm Solar Declines, Is Community Agrivoltaics the Future? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Some of the thickest hay in the meadow at Jack’s Solar Garden, in Longmont, Colorado, is on the west side under an elm tree. The tree offers shade, absorbs the brunt of afternoon sun, and keeps more moisture in the ground. Byron Kominek, who owns the farm, sees similar benefits from the solar panels he has installed on some of the land. “What’s important is to think about the solar array as a tree canopy,” Kominek said. The solar garden includes 3,276 panels that generate 1.2 megawatts of community solar power, enough to power 300 homes. Through his agrivoltaic system—the dual use of land for solar generation and agriculture—he’s found success growing blackberries, raspberries, asparagus, and more under the panels. While growing these crops, he’s also been able to generate and sell electricity—another boost to farm revenue. With hotter, drier years ahead, Kominek also thinks having additional shade on farmland will be important for reducing ground temperatures and keeping water in the soil. Both will expand the lifespan of his property. Through his agrovoltaic system—the dual use of land for solar generation and agriculture—Byron Kominek can grow crops while generating and selling electricity, a boost to farm revenue. Like most farmers and farm advocates, Kominek is concerned about the loss of productive farmland across the country. He sees large-scale solar energy development that involves wiping out farms entirely as part of that problem, but he believes his farm and many others can demonstrate a different approach. “It takes a little bit more upfront, but one can consider some of the main points around developing solar arrays that can make it safer, more accessible, and useful for farmers and ranchers for the long run,” Kominek said. The Biden administration invested in solar through landmark climate legislation, which included additional funds for on-farm solar projects. State policies have also helped spur agrivoltaic growth. But the Trump administration has taken steps to move federal support away from solar energy. Most recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said it would no longer support solar projects that take away viable farmland. That will make it harder for rural businesses and farmers to access grants and loan guarantees that largely go to small-scale solar arrays. In years past, farmers have gravitated toward these awards because of the energy cost benefits that can help sustain their businesses. Increasingly, though, as federal policies become less stable for solar, states and farm groups are looking to community solar projects to fill the gaps. Trump’s Far-Reaching Changes to Rural Energy In August, the USDA shared a press release explaining how the agency would move away from solar through changes to the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP). First created under a different name in the 2002 Farm Bill, REAP has grown to become the primary program in the farm legislation. While other technologies once dominated, energy efficiency and solar projects are now some of the most popular. The program currently supports solar projects that range in scale, funded through grants and loan guarantees for agricultural producers or small rural businesses. Solar arrays can range from small-scale, like task-oriented solar for an irrigation pump, to multi-acre utility-scale projects where electricity generated can go to the grid. It’s also a low-risk, established technology that farmers and small rural businesses have gravitated toward to stabilize energy prices. Company climate pledges and consumer demand are also pushing low-carbon products, which has similarly pushed farmers to solar. “The benefit of solar to agriculture producers is that it provides stable energy cost, predictable energy cost, and helps them to reduce their carbon footprint, as markets increasingly demand,” said Andy Olsen, senior policy advocate at the Environmental Law and Policy Center. “The benefit of solar to agriculture producers is that it provides stable energy cost, predictable energy cost, and helps them to reduce their carbon footprint, as markets increasingly demand.” A recent USDA memo sent to state Rural Development directors and obtained by Civil Eats provides more insights into how the agency plans to move REAP away from solar. Ground-mounted solar projects larger than 50 kilowatts and installed on “certified cropland” are now ineligible for REAP loan guarantees, it says. Any solar projects that have any component made in a foreign adversary country, like China, would also be ineligible. Solar projects that fall under these size, location, and component restrictions will also be “disincentivized” for REAP grants. From 2015 to 2025, 72 percent of REAP projects included solar, according to an analysis by the Environmental Law and Policy Center shared directly with Civil Eats. An estimated 65 percent of these solar projects were larger than 50 kW and could therefore be ineligible for loans, or “docked,” under the new parameters. While available data does not directly include the size of projects, the center’s analysts came to this conclusion by estimating kilowatts by the cost of the project. A separate analysis by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, also shared with Civil Eats, found that relatively few—only about 150—of these projects are larger than 50 kW, mounted on the ground, and classified as an agriculture project. Many existing REAP projects involve solar arrays mounted on land adjacent to buildings or on the edge of property. But experts point out that nearly every solar array, no matter the size or location, is likely made using components from China. “This is farmers who are saying, ‘I want to go solar to help my farm,’ or, ‘I’m a rural small business and I want to go solar to help my business,’” said Liz Veazey, state policy campaigns director at Solar United Neighbors. “These people are not going to put a bunch of solar in the middle of their farm and impact their farm. They should be able to do whatever they want with their land.” Rural businesses and farms look to REAP and solar as a way to stay in business by lowering or controlling their energy costs, Veazey said. These projects can also create jobs that support the broader local, rural economy. REAP loan guarantees specifically can help support utility-scale solar projects that farmers can use to sell electricity. REAP applications are scored and get “priority points” based on criteria like energy savings, location, committed matching funds and more. These scores are factored into USDA’s selection process. As the internal USDA memo notes, the new restrictions on solar projects will be factored into this point system. But it’s unclear how severely projects involving more than 50 kW, ground-mounted solar, projects on farmland, and systems made with components produced in China will be docked in this new system. Depending on how much projects are docked because of the new solar parameters, it could lead to hundreds fewer systems receiving grants, Veazey said. The USDA is expected to reopen REAP applications on October 1, and she expects more information about the point system to be released then. “Making it harder to get these grants is probably going to reduce applications for solar, [and] potentially push applications to other, maybe less practical technologies,” Veazey said. The new REAP parameters add to a wave of “uncertainty and chaos” in the program, Veazey said. Earlier this year, USDA briefly froze REAP funding and delayed opening the latest cycle of applications. Veazey said she’s also concerned that cuts to agency staff could make it harder to process all the applications. “Making it harder to get these grants is probably going to reduce applications for solar, [and] potentially push applications to other, maybe less practical technologies.” Meanwhile, the federal government has implemented other policies that signal a shift away from solar energy. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) boosted the amount REAP grants could cover to 50 percent. Developers could also stack these grants with other IRA tax credits to further lower the cost of the project. However, under the Republican-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, several IRA credits for clean energy were rolled back. Specifically, the residential solar credit will go away at the end of 2025, and the solar credit for businesses that many farmers or rural businesses could have used becomes more complicated with the introduction of “foreign entity of concern” rules that clean energy developers are still seeking formal guidance on. Already, getting a REAP grant entails a competitive but complicated application process, particularly for farmers and rural businesses that may not have technical expertise or support. Adding additional parameters, particularly around foreign components, could add red tape to the application process. The new parameters set by the USDA are “largely killing the REAP program,” said Olsen of the Environmental Law and Policy Center. States Consider Community Solar As the federal policy on solar shifts, some states are increasingly exploring community solar programs that can include farms and rural businesses. Community solar arrays are often funded by private investments and subscriber payments. These are generally smaller, requiring about 50 acres, and usually capped at 5 MW of electrical capacity. So far, 19 states have community solar programs and are exploring agrivoltaics as a way of bringing on low-cost power quickly. This system allows residents and small businesses to get a credit on their electricity bill that could help offset costs. Farmers who implement these projects can also directly see benefits from lower-cost power or selling electricity. So far, 19 states have community solar programs and are exploring ways to enhance agrivoltaics, said Liz Perera, senior director of national programs and policy at Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA). These states are trying to bring on low-cost power quickly, and community solar is an economical way of doing this, she continued. “As the cost of power goes up and electricity on these farms goes up, there’s going to be a lot more interest in solar on these farms,” Perera said. “That’s their way of actually dealing with that increased cost.” With community solar projects, farmers can lease land to solar developers, earning dollars from lease payments while still harvesting crops on nearby fields, Perera said. These also bring economic benefits for the entire community. CCSA estimates that 750 mW of community solar nationwide could deliver $2.1 billion in economic impact and create over 14,000 local jobs, based on state-level studies. In Colorado, for example, the community solar program has brought $1.4 billion in private investment while creating jobs largely in rural communities, according to a CCSA report. Creating Opportunities for Agrivoltaic Meanwhile, the types of crops that can be grown in an agrivoltaic system are also expanding with further investment and research. Leafy greens, berries, root vegetables, legumes and more can all be grown under the arrays, Perera said. In September, American Farmland Trust (AFT) announced the Farmers Powering Communities partnership with Reactivate and Edelen Renewables Community Solar. The initiative aims to bring more community-scale solar projects to farmers and rural communities, which AFT believes will protect farmers and farmland while delivering energy savings to rural communities. These projects can also be a mix of agrivoltaics, rooftop solar, and arrays on the edge of farmland. The coalition aims to connect with partners across the country, but is currently focused on New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, states that have already have community solar and agrivoltaic programs. Ethan Winter, director of the Smart Solar program at AFT, said these states are more land constrained. “You’re trying to create some opportunity for the next generation of producers, you’re trying to not accelerate farmland loss, and you’ve got some really ambitious energy targets that are going to continue despite the federal policy headwinds,” Winter said. For farmers, one of the key barriers to entering the community solar space is a lack of information about the process, said Joel Tatum, senior solar specialist at AFT. This partnership aims to give farmers the background and research to site projects responsibly. “You’re trying to create some opportunity for the next generation of producers, you’re trying to not accelerate farmland loss, and you’ve got some really ambitious energy targets that are going to continue despite the federal policy headwinds.” Still, agrivoltaics and incorporating community solar into farms is an emerging concept. Even as innovations, farmer interest, and public awareness of solar on farmland grow, consistent support from the federal or state level are necessary. Despite the lagging support at the federal level, many groups remain optimistic that community solar and agrivoltaics will persist. On September 16, community solar developer Lightstar Renewables officially launched its Plains Road Agrivoltaics project in Montgomery, New York. The solar project was tailored to fit within the existing operations at the DiMartino Farm, so hay planting and harvesting can continue around or under the panels. The project is expected to generate enough energy to power 466 homes annually. Previously, county bylaws had banned solar development on prime farmland. But developers and partners on the project were able to amend these bylaws with specific height restrictions and lot coverage, allowing for agrivoltaics, said Lucy Bullock-Sieger, chief strategy officer at Lightstar. This shift is happening in other parts of the country as well, as more examples of agrivoltaics show their benefit to farms and communities, she said. “Agrivoltaics is going to be even more important because the conversation over prime farmland is not going away,” she said. “We have this opportunity to make sure that people understand that agrivoltaics is a viable, commercial, and scalable option for farmers.” The post As Federal Support for On-Farm Solar Declines, Is Community Agrivoltaics the Future? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Agriculture
Business
Climate

Chesapeake Bay’s oysters make a steady comeback

The Maryland mollusks have survived decades of overharvesting, disease and drought.

For the fifth year in a row, the oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay is doing well after decades of combating drought, disease, loss of habitat and overharvesting.The Maryland Department of Natural Resources said in March that its annual fall oyster survey showed that the “spatfall intensity index” — a measure of how well oysters reproduced and their potential population growth — again hit above a 40-year median.“We seem to be making some headway,” said Lynn Waller Fegley, director of fishing and boating services for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. “With the work we’ve done to help restore oysters, and combined with the fact that we’ve been gifted with some really favorable environmental conditions, we’ve seen the oyster population trend upward.”Oyster-processing companies, oystermen, conservation groups and local fish and wildlife departments in the region have spent years trying to boost the population of oysters, which serve an important role as “filter feeders,” sifting sediment and pollutants such as nitrogen out of the water.The cleaner water in turn spurs underwater grasses to grow, while oyster reefs create habitats for fish, crabs and dozens of other species. Adult oysters can filter up to two gallons of water per hour, making them the bay’s “most effective water filtration system,” according to experts at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the health of the bay.Oysters thrive in brackish water — a mix of saltwater and freshwater. They attach and grow on hard surfaces such as rocks, piers or old shells. Too much rain lowers the salinity, while drought makes water too salty. Both situations can create conditions in which oysters can become vulnerable to disease or unable to reproduce as well.Before the 1880s, the oyster population was so healthy it could filter in a week a volume of water equal to that of the entire bay — about 19 trillion gallons — according to the bay foundation. But now it would take the vastly smaller oyster population more than a year to do the same amount.This fall, biologists in Maryland collected more than 300 oyster samples from the bay and tributaries, including the Potomac River, for their annual survey. The results were promising, experts said, given that 2023 was an unusual year for oysters because drought conditions raised the salinity in the bay.There are several other encouraging signs, experts said. The mortality rate of oysters has stabilized, their “biomass index,” which shows how oyster populations are doing over time, has been increasing for the past 14 years, and an analysis of their habitat showed continued improvements.“They’ve been hit by a pretty severe drought, then got pretty decimated by disease,” Fegley said. “They’ve been cycling back, and we’re now in a state of grace.”Another sign oysters are doing better is their “spat sets” — the process of the tiny larvae (spat) attaching to a hard surface so they can grow into mature oysters. A high number of spat equals successful reproduction. A low number means there are fewer young oysters that will grow into adults.Fegley said last year, the bay’s oysters had “epic, generational spat sets.”“Not only were there a lot of young oysters, which is a good sign of health, but they were distributed through the bay in a way that we had not seen in many years where they were farther up tributaries,” Fegley said. “We’ve had years where the conditions in the bay were just right — with a good balance of salinity levels, no disease and good reproduction.”The success of oysters is also due in part to Maryland and Virginia working over the past few years to build more oyster reefs along the bottom of the bay so oysters could grow successfully, according to Allison Colden, executive director of Maryland for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. In recent years, she said, more than 1,300 acres of oyster reefs have been replenished in both states.In the past decade, Virginia has also tried to boost its oyster population with aquaculture farms that raise oysters in cages and return their spat to natural waters. The commonwealth increased its number of oyster farms to more than 130 in 2018, up from 60 in 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.Last season, Virginia harvested 700,000 bushels of oysters, one of the highest annual harvests since the late 1980s, according to Adam Kenyon, chief of the shellfish management division at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.Those efforts, plus Mother Nature, have helped create the delicate combination oysters need to survive.“In the last five years, we’ve seen a rebound,” Colden said. “Reproduction has been higher than the long-term average, and we’re seeing more consistency in how they’re doing year-to-year, and that’s a positive sign.”For Jeff Harrison, a fifth-generation waterman who serves as president of the Talbot County Watermen Association, the changes have been like a roller coaster over the 47 years he has made a living off the bay. He’s seen diseases hit, oyster-harvesting seasons shortened, prices fluctuate and many other watermen leave the business because they couldn’t turn a profit.“I’ve seen some of the worst seasons in oystering,” he said. “We’d always have ups and downs. Now we’re seeing a steady up, and we’re hoping we have turned the corner.”

Agriculture
Business
Conservation

N.C. Farm Bureau Asks State Supreme Court to Strike Environmental Protections From Hog Farm Permits

The North Carolina Supreme Court seemed to side with the agriculture lobby Wednesday in a hearing for a case whose outcome could nullify key environmental, civil rights and public health protections for neighbors of the state’s 2,000 industrialized livestock farms. If the justices uphold an appellate court’s decision in favor of the N.C. Farm Bureau […]

Lawyers for the farm lobby said requirements for releasing information and monitoring pollutants had resulted from a “sue and settle” tactic, when Black residents living near the farms filed a civil rights complaint and the federal government forced a settlement.By Lisa SorgThe North Carolina Supreme Court seemed to side with the agriculture lobby Wednesday in a hearing for a case whose outcome could nullify key environmental, civil rights and public health protections for neighbors of the state’s 2,000 industrialized livestock farms.

Agriculture
Health

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