密歇根新闻广播 杀菌剂是大黄蜂减少的原因之一

 

We've heard a lot about honeybees and how important they are as pollinators. But bumblebees pollinate wildflowers and crops, too, and some kinds of bumblebees are in trouble.

Scott McArt is an assistant professor of pollinator health at Cornell University. He says that bumblebees can be extremely important pollinators for certain crops.

"So, for example, the vast majority of tomatoes that you will buy at the grocery store are pollinated exclusively by bumblebees,"he says.

In a new study, McArt found that fungicides could be playing a role in the declines of four species of bumblebees. He and his team looked at two dozen environmental factors to understand why these species are declining.

"We have this excellent data set; this data set includes 10,000 individual bumblebee samples. And believe it or not, someone has actually gone through all of these 10,000 bees and pulled out their guts¹, and looked for the prevalence of a particular pathogen, this Nosema pathogen. It's a microsporidian, it's related to a fungus².”

They used the data set to look for landscape predictors.

"So the things that were around the different sites that these bumblebees were actually collected, and looked at the predictors of what was associated with this particular pathogen,"he says.

McArt says most fungicides are relatively³ non-toxic to bees, but there can be problems for bees when fungicides interact with insecticides. He explains that some pesticides⁴ can have synergistic interactions which can lead to up to a thousand-fold increase in toxicity⁵.

"So if you look in the pollen⁶ and look in the nectar that the bees are bringing back to the colonies, we're finding that there's a lot of pesticides that are coming back,"he says.

McArt says there's a still a lot to learn about the problem before they can figure out how to stop it.

"In the combination of those fungicides and insecticides, we don't know a lot about how these synergisms are actually occurring. So how often these synergisms are occurring and what types of toxicities result from these synergisms. This is sort of a new area of research that pollinator health is going into right now,"he says.

1 guts   

v.狼吞虎咽，贪婪地吃，飞碟游戏（比赛双方每组5人，相距15码，互相掷接飞碟）；毁坏（建筑物等）的内部( gut的第三人称单数 )；取出…的内脏n.勇气( gut的名词复数 )；内脏；消化道的下段；肠

参考例句：

• I'll only cook fish if the guts have been removed. 鱼若已收拾干净，我只需烧一下即可。
• Barbara hasn't got the guts to leave her mother. 巴巴拉没有勇气离开她妈妈。 来自《简明英汉词典》

2 fungus   

n.真菌，真菌类植物

参考例句：

• Mushrooms are a type of fungus.蘑菇是一种真菌。
• This fungus can just be detected by the unaided eye.这种真菌只用肉眼就能检查出。

3 relatively   

adv.比较...地，相对地

参考例句：

• The rabbit is a relatively recent introduction in Australia.兔子是相对较新引入澳大利亚的物种。
• The operation was relatively painless.手术相对来说不痛。

4 pesticides   

n.杀虫剂( pesticide的名词复数 )；除害药物

参考例句：

• vegetables grown without the use of pesticides 未用杀虫剂种植的蔬菜
• There is a lot of concern over the amount of herbicides and pesticides used in farming. 人们对农业上灭草剂和杀虫剂的用量非常担忧。 来自《简明英汉词典》

5 toxicity   

n.毒性，毒力

参考例句：

• The hoarse grunt or squeal is characteristic of toxicity.嘶哑的哼声和叫声是中毒的特征。
• Dieldrin is related to aldrin,and its toxicity to earthworms is similar.狄氏剂与艾氏剂有关，对蚯蚓的毒性是相似的。

6 pollen   

n.[植]花粉

参考例句：

• Hummingbirds have discovered that nectar and pollen are very nutritious.蜂鸟发现花蜜和花粉是很有营养的。
• He developed an allergy to pollen.他对花粉过敏。