Insecticides

While many people will be little moved by the loss of ‘creepy crawlies’, a massive extirpation of insects spills over to affect the numbers of birds, frogs, reptiles and fish that rely on insects as food, and the decline of these in turn affects larger animals. It impairs the successful pollination of plants which provide up to a third of the world’s food supply, as well as the renewal of landscapes and forests. Modern plants have evolved largely to depend on insects to fertilise them: lose insects and the whole web of life attenuates and, in some cases, collapses.

The current distribution and recent population trends of the Great Bustard ( Otis tarda ) in Iran were investigated based on a literature review and unpublished data (1995–2008) followed by three years of census (2009–2011) in areas where the species is still breeding. Results suggest that Great Bustards have disappeared from a large part of their former distribution in the country, including East Azarbayjan, Hamedan and Kurdistan provinces. The surviving groups are concentrated in West Azarbayjan where numbers are rapidly declining.

Neonicotinoids are the most widely used class of insecticides worldwide, but patterns of their use in the U.S. are poorly documented, constraining attempts to understand their role in pest management and potential nontarget effects. We synthesized publicly available data to estimate and interpret trends in neonicotinoid use since their introduction in 1994, with a special focus on seed treatments, a major use not captured by the national pesticide-use survey.

Birds are the common denizens of the ecosystem and are considered as indicator species of ecosystem health. Various studies depicted the reduced teemingness of several bird species in most parts of the world. Among these birds, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus indicus) is the most familiar species which are co-evolved with man. The disappearance of sparrows has been widely reported from all over the world, including India too. Among Indian states, Kerala is also not an exception.

New EPA documents have finally put hard numbers to the use of neonicotinoid insecticides, which have quietly grown to dominate corn and soybean acreage in the U.S. over the past five to six years. Data on the usage of clothianidin (Poncho, from Bayer), thiamethoxam (Cruiser, from Syngenta) and imidacloprid (Gaucho, from Bayer and Valent USA) has been scarce in the past, in part because the EPA does not regulate seed treatments in the same way it does foliar or soil applications of the same chemicals. Now pollinator and aquatic risk assessments on three neonicotinoids released on Jan.

Diethylstilbestrol oder DES. Die 1938 erstmalig synthetisierte nicht-steroidale Verbindung war das erste künstliche Estrogen und wird als endokriner Disruptor eingestuft. Von 1940 bis 1971 wurde es Millionen von schwangeren Frauen verabreicht, um Komplikationen im Schwangerschaftsverlauf zu verhindern, obwohl sich schon in den 1950er Jahren Anzeichen seiner weitgehenden Wirkungslosigkeit für diese Aufgabe häuften - mit Folgen für die behandelten Frauen. Die Substanz kam außerdem bei der Hormontherapie des Prostatakarzinoms und als Mastbeschleuniger in der Viehzucht zum Einsatz.

In the final weeks and months of the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Pesticide Programs issued a flurry of reports on some of the country’s most widely used pesticides. Decisions made on the basis of these environmental and health assessments will likely determine the level of pesticide residue allowed on the food we eat. They will affect children’s neurological health and development, particularly in agricultural communities. They will determine how farmworkers are protected from pesticide exposures.

Using a fully crossed experiment, the influence of dietary exposure to neonicotinoid insecticides (thiamethoxam and clothianidin) and/or the prevalent bumblebee parasite Crithidia bombi on hibernation survival and hibernation weight change of Bombus terrestris bumblebee queens was investigated. Both neonicotinoid and C. bombi exposures reduced hibernation success individually, but no additive or synergistic effects between the stressors were found.