“Scientists continue to hunt for the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD”. That statement presumes that there is a single cause and not a cascade of causes. It reflects the way we humans think – we naturally want to find the one answer, the simplest answer . If you were to mashup quotations from William of Occam (see Occams Razor) and Voltaire, you might get something like this: “If the simplest answer did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it”.
Kauai Bee working dwarf Ohi’a lehua in Alaka’i Swamp
I recently returned from a trip to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. While there, I visited the Makauwahi Cave Reserve and it’s founder, paleoecologist David Burney. The cave is described in a book by Dr. Burney, “Back to the Future in the Caves of Kaua’i“. The book describes Dr. Burney’s lifelong pursuit to answer the question, “Why are newly arriving humans so devastating for environments that evolved without humans?” Dr. Burney’s hunch is that the arrival of humans to new region (and the bugs and plants and animals associated with those humans) are not so much a single cause as a cascade of causes that result in the mass extinctions of local flora and fauna. These extinctions are documented in the pollen and bone samples found in core samples he takes from environments around the world. He describes the process that leads to mass extinctions as “negative synergy”. He has taken some flack from other scientists that insist on the idea that there must be a single, simpler solution.
As an illustration of “negative synergy”, Dr. Burney relays a conversation he had with a pilot that described to him why airplanes fall out of the sky:
“With the exception of terrorist bombing, very few jetliners ever go down for a single reason. These big planes fail mechanically all the time, and passengers don’t even know it. Crashes occur when, simultaneously, more than one thing goes wrong. For instance, a mechanical failure occurs during a storm, or a system fails and then the backup fails, too. Or a mechanical failure is made worse by a pilot error, or vice versa. Ultimately, planes hit the ground simply because they fall out of the air, and it usually takes a combination of problems to bring one that low.” (page 84-85)
Negative synergy has been described as “the outcome is less than the sum of the parts” but that definition fails to describe the nature of the tipping point that results in true catastrophes such as mass extinctions, airliner crashes, nuclear power plant failures, or (wait for it…) CCD. I would define “negative synergy” this way: “a catastrophic outcome that is unexpected given the sum of the contributing factors but is the result of those cumulative factors having reached a tipping point”. A tipping point is a condition of a nonlinear system that can be illustrated by a simple example: the removal of one leg from a 3 legged stool does not result in a 33% reduction in stability but a complete loss in stability.
The contributing factors for harming honeybees are numerous but no single factor has been found to explain CCD:
- persistent systemic insecticides such as neonicotinoids
- lost of bee forage and bee forage diversity
- introduction of a multitude of diseases, pests, and predators
- loss of genetic diversity due to import restrictions
- climate change (drought, temperature extremes, shorter bloom times)
We don’t know where the tipping point is for honeybees. We don’t even have the terminology or technology for describing the nonlinear processes for catastrophic failure. But, after all this time and research and the absence of the discovery of a single cause, CCD ‘feels’ like a consequence of negative synergies.
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