Wind turbines will kill about 60,000 bats each year in the mid-Atlantic states alone.

Next post

Bats Are Worth at Least $3 Billion Per Year

Insect-eating bats are worth at least $3 billion — perhaps as much as $54 billion — per year to U.S. agriculture alone, say biologists who evaluated their ecological contributions.

 

With bats threatened by careless wind-turbine development in major flyways and, more pressingly, by the new and dreadful White Nose Syndrome, protecting them isn’t just ethical. It makes bottom-line sense.

 

If bat mortality “continues unabated, we can expect noticeable economic losses to North American agriculture in the next four to five years,” wrote the researchers, whose study was published online March 31 by Science. “A wait-and-see approach to the issue of widespread declines of bat populations is not an option.”

 

The estimates are an informed, back-of-the-envelope calculation based on earlier research by study co-author Tom Kunz, a Boston University bat specialist who in 2006 published the most detailed look ever at the relationship of bats to insects and agriculture.

 

In the eight-county Winter Garden region of south central Texas, Kunz’s group calculated that Mexican free-tailed bats annually saved about $740,000 in pesticide costs, or roughly $74 per acre. (The savings held steady for cotton genetically engineered to produce its own pesticides.)

 

The new study extrapolates those values, adjusted for local levels of agricultural productivity, to the United States at large. It’s necessarily a rough extrapolation: Some regions have more bats than Texas, or fewer. And they might eat fewer insects, or more. But even as precise values vary, the underlying truth is invariable: Bats eat bugs, lots of them.

 

Their taxonomic order Chiroptera contains more species than any order except rodents, and eating insects is what they’ve evolved to do. What’s more, there are many “downstream” costs to increased pesticide use — health problems in people, accelerated development of resistance in bugs — omitted from the study.

 

“Our estimate is very conservative,” said Kunz. “The devil is in the details, and the devil is that this is an extrapolation of one study over the entire U.S.. But that’s the only data we have, and we need to define this information.”

 

Estimated annual value of insectivorous bats in agriculture by county. Multiply values by $1,000, e.g., 2100 to 3400 equals $2.1 million to $3.4 million (Science).

 

Kunz’s emphasis reflects two critical threats to bats’ future. One is the installation near bat caves and flight routes of wind turbines, which suck bats into their blades. By 2020, wind turbines will kill about 60,000 bats each year in the mid-Atlantic states alone.

 

The other, more immediate threat is White Nose Syndrome, an extraordinarily virulent disease that emerged in upstate New York in 2006. It had spread to 14 states and two Canadian provinces by 2010, killing well over a million bats. Those death rates are unprecedented in known mammalian history, and threaten to eliminate bats from much of North America.

 

Spring is the season for identifying newly infected caves, and new reports came in March from Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, Maryland, Tennessee and New Brunswick. More are expected. Yet even as researchers dread the continued spread of White Nose, only a trickle of funding exists to investigate the disease.

 

‘A wait-and-see approach to the issue of widespread declines of bat populations is not an option.’

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the front-line federal protector of bats, spent about $2.4 million in 2010 on WNS. Spread across dozens of states and research teams, that money runs out fast.

 

Another $1.9 million specially allotted by Congress in 2010 was stripped, along with other so-called “earmarks,” from the stopgap funding resolutions that keep the U.S. government running in the absence of an official Fiscal Year 2011 budget, which should have been passed last October.

 

When that budget finally passes, White Nose Syndrome research probably won’t be part of it, and agencies that support research will likely have their budgets cut. Meanwhile, whether because money is tight and competition fierce, or because of an institutional failure to appreciate the threat — or both — the National Science Foundation has barely funded WNS research.

 

“We get drops of water following the bucket, compared to what we need,” said Kunz. “And it’s a dry bucket now.”

 

One potentially promising development is the proposed Wildlife Disease Emergency Act, which would provide, at least in theory, quick-turnaround funding for research on White Nose Syndrome and other animal outbreaks. However, according to Bat Conservation International policy specialist Jocelyn Ziemian, the legislation could produce an “unfunded mandate” — creating a purse, but not putting money into it.

 

If bats really are worth $3 billion each year in pesticides alone, short-term frugality may ultimately prove expensive. “In terms of budget, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” said Ziemian.

 

Photo: Mexican free-tailed bats in Texas (Merlin Tuttle).

Citation: “Economic Importance of Bats in Agriculture.” By J.G. Boyles, P.M. Cryan, G.F. McCracken, T.H. Kunz. Science, Vol. 331 No. 6025, April 1, 2011.

 

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/bat-value/

 and

Wind turbines 'hit' bat populations

Wind turbines are killing many thousands of bats contributing to a population decline that may be costing farmers millions of pounds, say researchers.

Scientists found the blades of wind turbines were a major threat to bats particularly when they are migrating.

Bats are useful to farmers because they eat large numbers of crop damaging insects, reducing the amount that has to be spent on pesticides.

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers estimated that bats could be worth billions to agriculture around the world.

Several migratory tree-living species of bats were being slaughtered "in unprecedented numbers" by wind turbines, said the researcher.

The work concentrated on North America but backs up research carried out in Britain that had similar findings.


Researchers urged policy-makers not to wait before addressing the issue of bat decline.

"Not acting is not an option because the life histories of these flying, nocturnal mammals – characterised by long generation times and low reproductive rates – mean that population recovery is unlikely for decades or even centuries, if at all," said lead researcher Dr Gary McCracken, from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

According to the researchers, a single colony of 150 big brown bats in Indiana ate almost 1.3 million potentially damaging insects a year.

"Without bats, crop yields are affected," said Dr McCracken.

"Pesticide applications go up. Even if our estimates were quartered, they clearly show how bats have enormous potential to influence the economics of agriculture and forestry."

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8419796/Wind-turbines-hi...

**************************************
Fair Use Notice: This website may reproduce or have links to copyrighted material the use of which has not been expressly authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available, without profit, as part of our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, economic, scientific, and related issues. It is our understanding that this constitutes a "fair use" of any such copyrighted material as provided by law. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes that go beyond "fair use," you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

 

Views: 125

Comment

You need to be a member of Citizens' Task Force on Wind Power - Maine to add comments!

Join Citizens' Task Force on Wind Power - Maine

 

Maine as Third World Country:

CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power

 

Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.

Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT

******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********

(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/

Not yet a member?

Sign up today and lend your voice and presence to the steadily rising tide that will soon sweep the scourge of useless and wretched turbines from our beloved Maine countryside. For many of us, our little pieces of paradise have been hard won. Did the carpetbaggers think they could simply steal them from us?

We have the facts on our side. We have the truth on our side. All we need now is YOU.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

 -- Mahatma Gandhi

"It's not whether you get knocked down: it's whether you get up."
Vince Lombardi 

Task Force membership is free. Please sign up today!

Hannah Pingree on the Maine expedited wind law

Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future

"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."

https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/

© 2024   Created by Webmaster.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service