A crazy ant queen. Photo: Joe MacGown, Mississippi Entomological Museum

Since fire ants first invaded the U.S. through cargo ships docking in Mobile, Alabama, the aggressive pest has taken a firm hold in the South and Southwest. More than $5 billion is spent each year on medical treatment and fire ant control, according to Food and Drug Administration, and the ants cost an additional $750 million in agricultural damage.

Now, however, there’s a new ant on the block. The crazy ant – also an invader from South America – is displacing fire ants in the U.S. by gobbling them up. But this unprescribed cure is likely worse than the disease it’s treating. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Like fire ants, these South American invaders seem to be fond of electrical equipment. But unlike their stinging red counterparts, the tawny crazy ants create mega-colonies, sometimes in homes, and push out local populations of ants and arthropods.

Thus  far, the crazy ants are not falling for the traditional poisons used to eliminate fire ant mounds. And when local mounds are destroyed manually, they are quickly regenerated.

Though the crazy ants don’t deliver the same burning bite as fire ants, they do stubbornly make their nests in bathroom plumbing or in walls. So far, researchers haven’t documented any native animals preying on the crazy ants, so their colonies are allowed to run amok, sometimes growing 100 times the size of other species of ants living in the area.

This isn’t the first time one ant invader has been displaced by another. The Argentine ant arrived back in 1891, followed by the black ant in 1918. But the fire ant put an end to those two invasive species when it arrived a couple decades later. Now, the fire ant’s own day of invasive reckoning may have arrived, but rather than feel relieved, researches are worried. Southern ecosystems have had time to adjust to fire ants. Crazy ants—well, who knows what they’ll do?

More from Smithsonian.com:

Invasion of Flying Ants Is at Hand 
NYC Has Its Own Ant, the ManhattAnt

Photo: Ron Lute

Up on the roof of a government research building in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, the Canadian province that straddles Montana and North Dakota, Barbara Cade-Menun has a tarp filled with poo. Little brown pucks of cow manure that bake in the sun and freeze in the winter, where temperatures regularly drop below 5 degrees.

Cade-Menun and students are tracking how bacteria such as E. coli survive the harsh prairie winters. “[I]f E. coli can survive here, they’ll survive anywhere,” says the CBC. The research has important implications for people living in or downstream of agricultural regions as E. coli in your water can be a very bad thing.

Thirteen years ago this month tragedy struck a small Ontario, Canada, town when E. coli bacteria got into the water system. In Walkerton, Ontario, a town of 5,000 people, 2,300 fell ill suffering from “bloody diarrhea, vomiting, cramps and fever.” Seven people died. Over time, the tragedy was traced to manure spread on a nearby farm that had managed to carry the E. coli bacteria through the ground and into the town’s water system. That, alongside regulatory missteps, caused the preventable disaster—the “most serious case of water contamination in Canadian history.”

Though steps have been taken in the region to prevent similar disasters in the future, there is still much that is unknown about how E. coli moves through a watershed. From her rooftop investigation Cade-Menun found that E. coli are sneaky little bacteria.

Cade-Menun and her colleagues found that when the temperature plummets the frozen manure pucks seem to be bacteria-free. But the bacteria aren’t dead, and when the spring warmth returns so too do the bacteria.

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Genetically Modified E. Coli Bacteria Can Now Synthesize Diesel Fuel
Some Microbes Are So Resilient They Can Ride Hurricanes

Right now, astronauts on the International Space Station live on periodic supply drops, but if we’re ever going to really live in space, with colonies on other planets or aboard interstellar transports, we’ve got to figure out the food situation. Plants have spent their entire history growing under Earth’s gravity, and biologists know that living in zero-G stresses them out. But to really figure out exactly how plants get stressed meant killing the plant and cutting it open—an herbal autopsy.

On the ISS, says NASA, researchers are growing a strain of genetically engineered plant that glows when and where it gets stressed. With this tool, researchers can track how these plants are affected by living in space without having to cut them down.  The researchers are using a heavily researched flowering plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, more commonly known as thale cress. According to NASA, the research is important for learning how plants can grow in preparation for “future long-duration exploration.”

Arabidopsis thaliana. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But more than just being about growing plants in space, the scientists want to use the cress to understand the fundamentals of how stressed-out plants might adapt to climate change. So, they’re deliberately trying to stress the cress out, “exposing the plant to extremes of pressure, temperature, and drought.”

This isn’t the first thing we’ve genetically modified to glow-in-the-dark, either. In Japan, says David Biello, researchers used jellyfish genes to make glow-in-the-dark cats. We’ve also got glowing tobacco, that lets you know when it needs to be watered. And a still-ongoing Kickstarter campaign wants your help to grow glowing-plant technology, and they’ll give you a glowing arabidopsis to do so.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Food, Modified Food
What Will Convince People That Genetically Modified Foods Are Okay?

The honeybee, Apis mellifera, is in trouble because of colony collapse disorder. Photo: Philippe Henry

Across the planet honeybees have been in decline. A mysterious disorder leaves hives, full in the fall, empty come spring. The bees are gone, but the bodies missing. It’s a problem with a name—Colony Collapse Disorder—but without a known cause. Advocates, politicians, reporters and even some scientists have pet theories about the cause—pesticides, intensive agriculture, mites—but the reality is we just don’t know the true cause just yet. In all likelihood, it’s a combination of factors.

In a new study, researchers at the University of Illinois add one more. They found that high fructose corn syrup and other honey substitutes—sugary substances fed to bees in place of the honey we take from them—may be related to the recent dramatic decline in bee populations. According to the Los Angeles Times, eating honey made from pollen gives bees a chemical that they need to help break down the toxins in pesticides.

Although pollen winds up in the honey produced by Apis mellifera, these bees used to pollinate crops spend more time sipping on the same sugar substitute that is ubiquitous in processed foods – high-fructose corn syrup. The honey substitute is an important way for the industry, which contributes about $14 billion to the U.S. economy, to make ends meet.

The finding paints a picture of the complex interaction of forces that may be keeping the bee down: a bad diet makes them more susceptible to pesticides. Pesticides may, in turn, make them more susceptible to varroa mites, another contender for the cause behind CCD.

“People would love to have the one solution, but the problems is it really does seem like it’s a combination of factors,” Berenbaum said. But a compromised immune system, she added, could complicate all of the identified factors.

The researchers found that p-coumaric acid, a compound derived from plants, is “a key compound that revs up the bee’s defense system.” High fructose corn syrup and other replacements don’t have this, making the bees more susceptible.

Research in the 1970s had suggested that there were no health consequences or increased hazards associated with feeding bees on high-fructose corn syrup. But that was before beekeepers began putting mite-killing chemicals in hives, and before an entire class of agricultural pesticide was introduced.

Something is certainly going wrong with our bees, but as research builds it’s a reminder that it is going to take a wide-angled approach to figure out what’s going on and fix it.

More from Smithsonian.com:

These Little Robot Bees Could Pollinate the Fields of the Future
The American Bumblebee Is Crashing, Too

Photo: Stevemaher

From a report put out by the Food and Drug Administration in February, a scary note from the front lines of the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Looking at meat in the supermarket, the FDA found that around half of all ground turkey, pork chops and ground beef harbored antibiotic resistant bacteria says the New York Times. Almost all of the meat had Enterococcus bacteria, a family of microbes that has a high rate of antibiotic resistance and can cause urinary tract infections and other health problems. Chicken samples had antibiotic resistant salmonella and antibiotic resistant campylobacter, which cause food poisoning replete with diarrhea and fever.

High rates of bacteria on your meat isn’t really the issue, though. Everyone knows (or should know) to make sure their meat is cooked throughout, and to keep raw meat away from things that won’t be cooked.

The bigger problem, says the Times, is the rise seen in antibiotic resistant bacteria compared to previous years.

Of all the salmonella found on raw chicken pieces sampled in 2011, 74 percent were antibiotic-resistant, while less than 50 percent of the salmonella found on chicken tested in 2002 was of a superbug variety.

According to a big investigative story put together by health reporter Maryn McKenna and colleagues, the rise of antibiotic resistant e. coli carried by chickens could be behind the prevalence of urinary tract infections in American women, with one in nine women being affected each year.

The federal government’s report, says the Times, was largely ignored until a follow-up report was put out by the environmental lobby organization Environmental Working Group, and Applegate, a company that sells “organic and natural meats.”

“Public health officials in the United States and in Europe,” says the Times, warn that the over-use is antibiotics in agriculture is helping to drive the rise in resistance.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Blame Your Chicken Dinner for That Persistant Urinary Tract Infection

Drought in western Kentucky. Photo: CraneStation

For more than two years, a devastating drought has gripped a huge swath of the U.S.—drying up groundwater, killing crops and choking shipping lanes. One part of that drought, dubbed the “2012 Great Plains Drought” for its effect on middle America, says Climate Central, was worse than the Dust Bowl droughts of the 1930s. For many places, the drought is far from over.

With high temperatures and low rain taking a staggering economic toll—with billions of dollars in losses—a federal task force set out to figure out what caused the drought and to sort out if we should have seen it coming.

It seems that every time horrible weather hits, people turn and ask, “Is this climate change?” Typically, the answer you’ll get goes something like this: climate change is defined as a long-term statistical change in the weather, and so you can’t say that is any one disaster is “because of climate change.” That response is about as common as it is outdated.

In the past few years, a new concept has entered the discussion among climate scientists. Spear-headed in large part by the work of English scientist Peter Stott, the field of “event attribution” uses climate models to try to say how much we can attribute a natural disaster to global climate change. The famine-inducing drought that struck East Africa two years ago, a plight that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, for instance, has been attributed to climate change: higher sea temperatures made the spring rains fail, driving the drought.

There’s never an all-or-nothing relationship between climate change and a particular extreme event. But what event attribution allows us to say is how much more likely a particular weather event was or how much stronger it ended up being because of shifts caused by climate change.

That being said, according to the Associated Press, the federal task force’s investigation says that the U.S. drought couldn’t be predicted by climate models and that the drought wasn’t due to climate change.

“This is one of those events that comes along once every couple hundreds of years,” said lead author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Climate change was not a significant part, if any, of the event.”

“There was a change in the large-scale, slowly evolving climate that made drought severity more likely” in the past decade or so, Hoerling said” to Climate Central, “but nothing that pointed to a severe drought in 2012 specifically.”

The report may leave more open questions than answers, given that it found that no known source of natural climate variability can shoulder most of the blame for the drought, nor can man-made global warming, which over the long run is projected to make droughts more likely in some parts of the U.S., particularly the Southwest.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Brace Yourselves, the Drought’s Not Close to Over Yet

Photo: taylor.a

Back in 2006, a study showed that global warming could eliminate 80 percent of the United States’ current vines. Vinters started getting serious about planting and researching heat-resistent grapes, working on water-saving techniques and surveying future properties if it becomes necessary to pick up shop and move to higher, less sizzling locations. Which means, perhaps, that in the not too distant future, vinters may end up wreaking havoc on the natural habitats of currently endangered species.

According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, Mother Jones writes, around 70 percent of the area currently suitable or used for grape growing could be gone by 2050 (when atmospheric carbon dioxide will likely double). This problem isn’t specific to wine growers. As the Environmental Protection Agency points out, both in the United States and abroad, crops of all kinds face an uncertain future under changing temperatures, fluctuating and extreme weather and increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. While some crops may benefit from warmer temperatures (wheat and soybeans are potentials) and higher levels of CO2, others, like some grains, will likely whither under increasing temperatures and won’t have time to produce as many seeds.

Researchers can model how these fluctuations may shift suitable locations for growing certain crops, and in the new study, climate models predicted where the most suitable plots for wine growing may be located in Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and China. Mother Jones reports that places will gain appeal include the Northwest U.S.—bear and moose territory—and mountainous parts of China—panda habitat. As wine growers move their operations to suit shifting climate, they may infringe upon endangered species. And while the choice between wine and pandas is a particularly difficult one to deal with, these are the sort of compromises that we’ll have to make as the planet changes in order to keep growing the food we need to survive.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Climate Change May Obliterate Pandas 
Climate Change Means More Adelie Penguins 

Image: Penn State News

April 1st marks the beginning of Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Awareness Month. But how does one honor this event? For starters, by watching out for, reporting and killing invasive pests like these:

1. The pest: The horrifying giant African snail

These slimy villains have wreaked havoc from Florida to Australia. They’re the size of a baseball, lay 1,200 eggs each year, can survive at almost any temperature, carry meningitis and eat 500 different kinds of crops and the sides of houses. Right now, Australia is panicking over having discovered just one of these giant snails. The USDA wrote in 2012, after squelching an invasion:

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time we’ve faced this damaging invasive pest. Back in 1966, a boy smuggled three giant African snails into South Florida upon returning from a trip to Hawaii. His grandmother eventually released the snails into her garden. Those initial three snails grew into one giant family—after completing a 10 year, $1 million eradication campaign, we had collected and destroyed more than 18,000 snails!

How to celebrate Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Awareness Month with the giant African snail: Call an expert.

Aside from being a huge problem for crops and houses, the snails slime isn’t really safe to handle. And remember, they can carry meningitis. Let someone else handle your snail problem.

2. The pest: the Asian longhorned beetle

These beetles are quite beautiful, with shiny black bodies and little blue spots along their antennae and bodies. But don’t be fooled. The Asian longhorned beetle invasion has felled tens of thousands of trees in the Northeastern United States. The USDA writes:

The ALB has the potential to cause more damage than Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight and gypsy moths combined, destroying millions of acres of America’s treasured hardwoods, including national forests and backyard trees.

How to celebrate Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Awareness Month with the Asian longhorned beetle: Report it.

Your region might be quarantined, like some are right now in New York and other states, but there’s no cure for the beetle infection, so the only thing to do is to stop its spread.

3. The pest: the grapevine moth

These moths threaten something quite important—wine. They feed on the flowers of plants and can leave behind fungal diseases that rot the fruits. Understandably, winemakers of the United States are not pleased, and Napa Valley has its own dedicated grapevine moth initiative.

How to celebrate Invasive Plant Pest and Disease Awareness Month with the grapevine moth: Spray pesticides to kill it.

Farmers can apply the recommended doses of pesticides to keep the moth at bay. Here’s the Napa Valley program:

If applications are timed properly, conventional growers would only need to make one application for each of the two generations.  For organic growers, a total of four to five applications for the two generations will be necessary due to shorter residual of the organic insecticides.  Growers are advised to alternate between products to minimize risk of insecticide resistance.  Timing for the first application should be just prior to the beginning of bloom.

The list of invasive species goes on and on and—from your orange juice, to your maple syrup to your landscape, do apples and pears, to baseball bats—affects most parts of your day.

More from Smithsonian.com:

This Giant Snail Is Giving Australia Terrible Flashbacks to the Last Giant Snail Takeover
Are Humans an Invasive Species?
Invasion of the Longhorn Beetles

Image: Jack Zalium

Earlier this month, locals spotted what would prove to be the first of a plague of dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River in Shanghai, which supplies drinking water to the metropolis. The pig death toll has steadily risin since then—16,000 confirmed at last counting.

But just as officials said they were finishing up with recovering the last of the carcasses, dead ducks joined the swine in polluting China’s rivers. Locals in Sichuan Province spotted around 1,000 of the birds floating down the Nanhe River, the BBC reports.

As for the dead pigs, officials still have not produced an explanation for the animals’ presence. The Huffington Post writes:

Hog farmers have told state media that the dumping of swine carcasses is rising because police have started cracking down on the illicit sale of pork products made from dead, diseased pigs.

Local officials also told Southern Weekly that the city lacks enough facilities to properly dispose of dead pigs.

Though many hog farms are situated upstream of Shanghai, the authorities still haven’t nailed down any culprits. The New York Times explains that authorities do have their eye on the upstream farmers, though: 

Those suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Shanghai officials said that more than a dozen of the pigs carried ear tags indicating that they were from Jiaxing. The authorities then announced that they had detained a farmer who confessed to throwing his animals into the river.

But in Jiaxing, farmers denied dumping pigs into the river, calling it preposterous and saying that the animals could not possibly have floated all the way to Shanghai.

It’s also possible, the Times writes, that the animals died on their way to Shanghai and that truck drivers decided to dump the bodies in the river. The paper argues, though, that this may actually be a bit of positive environmental news from China:

In May, for example, the police in this hog-producing city arrested four people who had sold dead pigs to slaughterhouses. And in December, a Zhejiang Province court sentenced 17 people to prison sentences, one for life, for processing and selling meat from pigs that had died of various diseases. In less than two years, the group had collected about 77,000 animals.

So, as the authorities have cracked down on people selling diseased or dead pigs, agriculture experts say, it is possible that someone may have decided it was better to dump dead pigs into the river.

Officials insist to locals that the water is still safe to drink and that the city’s pork is fine to eat.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Is It Safe to Eat Pork? 
Horse Meat Turned Up in Irish and British Burger Meat 

Photo: killerturnip

They’re healthy; they’re plentiful; they’re kosher. Just in time for Passover, some Israelis are taking advantage of a swarm of locusts flying in from Egypt to whip up a unique holiday snack. The versatile insects, which are a couple inches long, are apparently equally tasty breaded and fried or covered in molten chocolate.

Israel has been dealing with the swarm for the past couple weeks, the BBC reports. Locusts can eat their body weight in a farmer’s crops per day, so innovative humans have decided to turn the tide on the hungry pests by eating them.

Eucalyptus, a fancy restaurant in Jerusalem, for example, has a particular interest in ancient Biblical food, according to the BBC. The chef there, Moshe Basson, recommends cooks “drop them into a boiling broth, clean them off, and roll in a mixture of flour, coriander seeds, garlic and chilli powder. Then deep-fry them.” He adds that they can also be mixed with caramel and pan-fried as a crunchy, sweet snack. The BBC continues:

Locusts are usually hard to source in Israel and Basson has to get them from a specialist lab. But nothing, he says, beats freshly gathered, locally sourced, wild ones.

Locusts that have feasted on sesame plants acquire an oily, shiny tinge, and are said to be particularly delicious.

Locust is the only kosher insect, and the Torah states that red, yellow, spotted grey and white locusts are fine for eating. Rabbi Ari Zivotofsky told the BBC, however, that he regularly fields calls from concerned Jews about whether or not everyone can eat locusts, or only those Yemenite and North African Jews who had a tradition of eating them. For Jews in Europe, the tradition likely died out since locusts rarely make their way that far north. But that doesn’t mean Ashkenazi Jews can’t enjoy locusts, he says.

While there are simply too many locusts to eat the swarm out of existence, Israelis who do tuck in will enjoy a healthy—and reportedly delicious—source of zinc, iron and protein.

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Plague of Locusts Descends Upon the Holy Land, Just in Time for Passover 
Cooking With the Bible 

Starting a few hundred million years after the universe expanded from an infinitesimally dense point, on and on through the formation of the Earth 4.6 billion years ago to the development of life, agriculture, civilization, and war, this dramatic video tracks the rise of America and sets out to encompass the span of human origins in just two minutes.

As YouTube commenters point out, as a representation of the chronological scale of the universe, the video is a bit skewed, with the formation of the Earth coming at the six second mark and the 20th century filling the bulk of the story. But as a story of humanity, the video, made by Minnesota high school student Joe Bush, highlights many of the important events, debates and developments of human history: the rise of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, the expansion of Asian, European and African civilizations, the Renaissance, the civil rights movement, and more. (There is a lot missing, and a big emphasis on video games and conflict, but I’d suspect any high school history teacher would be proud of the breadth of topics presented.)

Bush’s video, titled “Our Story In 2 Minutes,” was made for a unique class at Stillwater Area High School in Stillwater, Minnesota. Known as Cutaway Productions, the class gives high school students a chance to run a video production company, making public service videos, music videos, advertisements and more.

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Plagued by colony collapse disorder, the honeybees that do much of the world’s pollination work are in decline, and cheap access to many flowering plants that we depend on for food—from almonds to apples to soybeans—could follow them down.

Ideally, some intrepid scientist will find a fix for CCD, and the bees will be saved. But there could also be a technological solution to the pollination problem. Researchers have recently worked out the basics of a robotic bee which they say could be used to pollinate plants, search through disaster zones, or perform any variety of tasks where a small swarm of cooperative robots might come in handy.

Some of the scientists behind the project, Robert Wood, Radhika Nagpal and Gu-Yeon Wei, wrote recently in Scientific American about their efforts:

Superficially, the task appears nearly impossible. Bees have been sculpted by millions of years of evolution into incredible flying machines. Their tiny bodies can fly for hours, maintain stability during wind gusts, seek out flowers and avoid predators. Try that with a nickel-size robot.

They detail how they get their little bees to fly using a series of custom designed artificial muscles “made of piezoelectric materials that contract when you apply a voltage across their thickness.”

Instead of spinning motors and gears, we designed the RoboBee with an anatomy that closely mirrors an airborne insect—flapping wings powered by (in this case) artificial muscles. Our muscle system uses separate “muscles” for power and control. Relatively large power actuators oscillate the wing-thorax mechanism to power the wing stroke while smaller control actuators fine-tune wing motions to generate torque for control and maneuvering.

“These muscles generate an amount of power comparable to those muscles in insects of similar size,” they write.

More than just the mechanics of bee movement, however, the scientists also want to train their little robobees to behave like a real colony—interacting, communicating, working together for the good of the hive. They suggest that they still have a fair bit of work ahead of them, but they expect to see them in the wild in five to 10 years.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The American Bumblebee Is Crashing, Too
Could Disappearing Wild Insects Trigger a Global Crop Crisis?

Image: USDA

In Australia, they’ve got a giant snail problem. The giant African snail is a true nightmare. These snails grow to the size of a baseball, can lay 1,200 eggs every year, survive all sorts of extreme temperatures, have no natural predators, and eat 500 crops, plus the sides of houses. Also, they carry meningitis that can infect and kill humans. Somewhat understandably, Australia isn’t pleased with any of this. So when one of these snails showed up in a shipping container yard in Brisbane, it was seized by Australian officials and destroyed, as quickly as possible.

The last time Australia dealt with the snail was in 1977, when they spent eight months hunting the invaders and exterminated 300 of them. Florida has dealt with the snail in the past too, spending a million dollars in 1975 to get rid of the snail that they estimated cost $11 million in damages each year. And last year, they were back in Miami. ABC News reports:

Officials realized they had a problem on their hands last week when two sisters flagged down a fruit fly inspector performing a routine check.

“A homeowner came out and said, I found these snails in my yard and she had one of them.  He recognized it as potentially being a giant African land snail,” Feiber said.

Officials have been focusing on the one square mile area around the home in southwest Miami. They are only 30 to 40 percent done with their investigation and have already found 1,100 snails.

These snails were so bad that NPR actually ran a story with the headline: “Miami Invaded By Giant, House-Eating Snails.”

The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry of Australia has this to say about the snails:

Giant African snail originated in East Africa and is now present on most Pacific and Indian Ocean islands. The species was first recorded in American Samoa in the mid-1970s: a million snails were collected by hand in 1977 during a government campaign to reduce snail numbers, and more than 26 million snails were collected over the following three years.

The snails can come from all over. They might hitch a ride on a shipping container. Humans sometimes ship them in intentionally: In Miami, officials think an earlier snail outbreak might have come from a man practicing the African religion If a Orisha. In 1965, a child brought some snails back from Hawaii in his pocket, costing the city a million dollars and ten years of work.

All this makes it a little more understandable why Australia has spent so much energy killing this one individual snail.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Snail on an apple
Prehistoric Poo Linked Dinosaurs to Snails

A “big fuzzy” American bumblebee. Photo: Dan Mullen

You may have heard of a little thing called Colony Collapse Disorder—a “disorder” with no pinned-down cause that leads bees to abandon their hives or get lost on the way home. Beekeepers, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture, report hive population losses of up to 90 percent, but the cause of CCD isn’t definitively known. Possible culprits range from stress to parasites to pesticides to fungus, or a combination of them all. Colony Collapse Disorder, however, has not been affecting all bees—it targets honey bees. But now, says the Associated Press’ Seth Borenstein, bad news for the American bumblebee:

 ”It was the most dominant bumblebee in the Midwest,” [University of Illinois entomologist Sydney] Cameron said, saying it now has pretty much disappeared from much of its northern range. Overall, its range has shrunk by about 23 percent, although it is still strong in Texas and the West, she said.

People call them the big fuzzies,” Cameron said. “They’re phenomenal animals. They can fly in the snow.

A research team who spent weeks in the field cataloguing southern Illinois’ bees could find but one lonely American bumblebee, Borenstein reports. And, the humble bumblebee wasn’t the only thing missing: compared to the observations of a 19th century naturalist, the researchers could find only 54 of 109 expected bee species. The current dearth of bees, he says, could be due to forces similar to those affecting honey bees—”a combination of disease and parasites,” according to the AP.

The absence of bumblebees aligns with previous research described by Smithsonian Magazine‘s Sarah Zielinski a few years ago:

A group of biologists from Illinois and Utah examined the current and historical distributions of eight species of bumblebees from the genus Bombus, looking at thousands of museum records and data from recent nationwide surveys. They found that the abundances of half of those species (B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. pensylvanicus and B. terricola) have declined by up to 96 percent and their ranges have contracted by 23 to 87 percent in the last 20 years. The other four species, however, remain abundant and widespread.

More from Smithsonian.com:
Honey Bees Still Struggling
Honey Was the Wonder Food That Fueled Human Evolution (And Now It’s Disappearing)

Image: Eric Leslie

Across the United States, the ongoing drought, which has affected some regions for two years or more, is in all likelihood about to get much, much worse.

This past summer, the Department of Agriculture deemed most of the southwest, the midwest and the southeast in a state of natural disaster. The drought sapped groundwater stores, triggered gridlock on the mighty Mississippi, and threatened to reverse the flow of the Chicago River. The drought has already affected international food prices, and a shortage of water could upset energy infrastructure.

Now, says Climate Central, the countdown is on: “Without repeated, significant bouts of heavy snow and rain in the remaining days of winter, a large part of the country will face serious water supply shortages this spring and summer.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released their seasonal drought forecast yesterday, and the outlook is dire.

NOAA’s forecast has drought hold on for a huge chunk of the US. Click to legibilize. Photo: NOAA

Climate Central:

Federal forecasters predict that drought will persist in the Rocky Mountain and Plains states, expand throughout northern and southern California and return to most of Texas, a state that has been mired in drought since 2011.

With the on-going lack of water, the worries about irrigation shortages and rising prices are giving way to concerns over the availability of fresh water.

With drought extending into its second or even third year in some areas, the main concerns are shifting from agriculture and recreation to water supplies as rivers run dry and reservoirs shrink.

… “We’ve got the same trend we had last year,” Strobel said. “But prior to last year, we had very good snowpack, so there was a lot of moisture in reservoirs and soil” when drought conditions hit. This year, reservoirs are running low and soils are dry, which could magnify the impact of a winter without much snow buildup.

A continued drought could see a recap of the issues faced last summer, says Climate Central, including crop shortfalls, low rivers, and, possibly, a stage set for wildfires.

More from Smithsonian.com:
Watch Drought Dry Up America’s Groundwater
U.S. Faces Worst Drought Since 1956