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How To Support Pollinators | Earth Wise

August 4, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Pollinators of all sorts have been in decline for a while. This is especially true of bees, bats, and monarch butterflies. Without pollinators, fruits, vegetables, and other plants cannot provide their contributions to our food supply. According to experts, about 30% of the food that ends up on our tables gets there because of pollinators.

Bees are the most efficient pollinators, but plenty of other insects do their share as well. Butterflies and months, flies, beetles, and wasps all are good pollinators. In addition to insects, birds and bats can also be pollinators.

Entomologists at Texas A&M University have offered some science-based advice for homeowners who want to keep pollinators around and thriving during the summer months.

Pollinators need flowers that bloom at different times of the year. So, home gardens should overlap blooms. Native and drought-tolerant species are good additions to a garden or landscape.

Colorful gardens attract more pollinators because different pollinators are attracted to different colors. Bumblebees like blues and purples; other bees are attracted to yellows and whites. Butterflies like bright colors like oranges and pinks.

Plant flowers with different shapes and sizes because pollinators flower preferences come in all shapes and sizes.

Provide shelter for pollinators. Houses for bees and other pollinators are available for purchase. Or people can make their own using plastic tubes.

And probably most importantly, go easy on pesticides. If it is really necessary to apply pesticides, do it in the evening when most pollinators have called it a day.

Having a colorful garden with lots of variety is a fine addition to one’s home. Beyond that, it is a valuable contribution to helping preserve essential pollinators.

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Top Five Tips For Supporting Pollinators This Summer

Photo, posted August 14, 2017, courtesy of USFWS Midwest Region via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Assessing The Planet’s Most Unique Birds | Earth Wise

January 11, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Birds come in a huge variety of shapes, sizes and plumages. The physical attributes of birds are adaptations that have taken countless millennia to develop, and physical attributes are closely related to the roles birds play in their environment.

According to a new study led by researchers from the University College London in the U.K., bird species with extreme or uncommon combinations of traits have the highest risk of extinction. Losing these bird species and the unique roles they play in the environment, including seed dispersal, pollination and predation, could have severe consequences on the health of ecosystems.

In the study, which was recently published in the British Ecological Society journal Functional Ecology, the researchers analyzed the extinction risk and physical attributes of 99% of all living bird species. The research team used a dataset of measurements collected from living birds and museum specimens. The measurements included things like beak size and shape, and the length of wings, tails and legs. The researchers combined this data with extinction risk, and then ran simulations to see what would happen if the most threatened birds were to go extinct.

Some of the bird species that are both most unique and most threatened include the Christmas Frigatebird and the Bristle-thighed Curlew. Kiwis were excluded from the study because the researchers viewed them as extreme morphological outliers.

While most unique birds were also classified as threatened on the Red List, the research was unable to show what links uniqueness in birds to extinction risk

The research team warns that if more isn’t done to protect these threatened species and avoid extinctions, the functioning of ecosystems will be dramatically disrupted.

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Planet’s most unique birds at higher risk of extinction

Photo, posted June 25, 2012, courtesy of Kristine Sowl / USFWS via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Colorful Solar Panels | Earth Wise

September 22, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

More and more buildings and public spaces are incorporating solar panels and not only just on rooftops. Some buildings are incorporating power-generating structures all over their facades.

Using solar panels in this way puts some design constraints on buildings because solar panels are typically a deep black color. This is because solar panels need to absorb light and making them any other color decreases their ability to do so and generate power. But the problem is that people don’t necessarily want a black building.

One alternative to traditional solar panel design is to use structural sources of color that include microscopic shapes that only reflect specific light frequencies, like the scales on butterfly wings. But this approach generally leads to iridescence – which might not be what is wanted – and is often quite expensive to implement.

A team of researchers at a university in Shanghai has now demonstrated a way to give solar panels color that is easy and inexpensive to apply and that does not reduce their ability to produce energy efficiently.

The technique involves spraying a thin layer of a material called a photonic glass onto the surface of solar cells. The photonic glass is made of a thin, disorderly layer of dielectric microscopic zinc sulfide spheres. Even though most light can pass through the photonic glass, certain colors are reflected back, depending on the sizes of the spheres. By varying that size, the researchers created solar panels that were blue, green, or purple with only a very small drop in solar panel efficiency.

The solar panels made this way maintained their color and performance under durability testing. With this new technology, there may soon be colorful solar panels on our buildings.

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Colorful solar panels could make the technology more attractive

Photo, posted December 15, 2021, courtesy of Pete via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio