Calendars that are on neither walls nor desks

Let us leave business for a while, and go to the other half of what this column is about: life. That is the only seemly thing to do in these glorious days, when spring slowly and inevitably seeps into summer, and one marvels and finds solace in the timeless repetitions of nature. Renewal is so enjoyable in Mongolia because the denial has been so severe. I come from a country of evergreens, where autumn is a word more of emotional nuance than specific tangibles. Thus my years here have taught me to wait with expectation and wonder for late May when the trees turn green in a matter of days, and the city sheds its severe, ascetic look to become a profligate playboy. If only it was so easy for us to change persona!

It is not easy, but it is also not required any longer for us to survive. For animals and plants, or at least for many of them, the ability to adapt to changing seasons by following their internal calendar is an absolute necessity. Scientists’ understanding of the circadian clock, that allows organisms to track the time of day, is reasonably advanced, as studies can be made in controlled laboratory settings. The circannual  calendar of which I speak is more difficult but certainly not beyond scientific commitment. The zeal to know more calls for abundant patience, and though our knowledge of seasonal biological variations remains incomplete, many of the mechanisms involved have been unlocked.
The most well-known of these are hibernation, migration, and seasonal reproduction.  This last ensures that animals give birth at the optimum time of the year for survival – largely determined by the relative abundance, or at least availability, of food. Many non-equatorial animals accomplish this by breeding only at certain times. During the rest of the year, their reproductive organs “regress”, or all but disappear, saving much-needed energy as well as blocking conception.

There is an interconnectivity between the seasonal adaptations of  species. Organisms higher up the food chain have to adapt their activities to the rise and fall in the abundance of those lower down the food chain. This means any interference, deliberate or fortuitous, with the population of one species can trigger a complex series of reactions across an entire ecosystem. Of this, later.

There are myriad ways in which our lives – and deaths – are affected by the time of the year, despite our smugness that we have devised means to let us do whatever we wish whenever we wish. There is the seasonal cycle of infectious diseases, as well as seasonal affective disorder recorded throughout human history. There have even been suggestions that the time of the year in which a person is born has significant statistical correlations. Predicting people’s future based on the month of their birth has long been the domain of astrologers, but there have been scientific studies showing that, depending on geographical location, date of birth may be linked to incidence of certain diseases, physical characteristics, and even personality traits. Summer babies in the USA have been found to be more likely to develop the digestive disorder called celiac disease, while winter babies show increased novelty and sensation seeking. In the Northern Hemisphere in general, babies born in the early part of the year are 6 to 8 percent more likely than others to develop schizophrenia in later life.

Humans, along with chimpanzees and gorillas, are ready to procreate more or less at the drop of a hat, so we have to look at factors like women’s nutritional status at the time of conception to account for variations in offspring. But our past is very much present in our present. In what is covered by the blanket term “the West”, June is still the most popular month in which to marry, and this is in part a vestige of what our agrarian forebears found most convenient. A June or July conception and a subsequent spring birth gave the mother enough time to recover to some extent to contribute labour to the busy harvest season the following year.

Climate change has already begun to affect the duration and disposition of the seasons, threatening all species. Those that succeed will be those with the most flexibility to change and adapt to the new temporal regime.  But what  about onslaughts from other sources? This is what I touched upon earlier when talking about forced depletion in the number of any species in the inextricably even if not obviously interlinked food chain. Things like the BP oil spill can have far reaching implications but at the moment I recall other repots.

Beekeepers in several regions of the world, including North America, France, Germany, and Sweden, have noticed a strange phenomenon in recent years. Bees disappeared without any clear reason. Entomologists call the phenomenon colony collapse disorder (CCD) — an abrupt and unexplained 50 to 90 per cent of loss of bees. Scientists are not sure why this happens have advanced as possible causes fungal infections or pesticides or even global warming.
Now mobile phones are being blamed. Observations that such phones pose a threat to honeybees, reported by a team of German researchers some years ago, have now been supported by an Indian zoologist’s experiments. Electromagnetic radiation from the phones have been blamed for altered behavior patterns among bees. Findings reported in  a recent issue of  Current Science, the journal from the Indian Academy of Sciences, assert that honeybees exposed to mobile phone radiation appear to lose the ability to return to their hives and queen bees produce a lower number of eggs. These have dire implications for many countries where bees are necessary not just for honey, but for pollination of crops. I have personal experience of what happens when use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides keeps bees away from flowers. Farmers have to do the job manually.

The first work in the subject, done by three researchers in Landau, Germany, in the early years of this century, offered data suggesting that electromagnetic exposure interfered with bees’ ability to communicate and navigate. The Indian scientist and her research students exposed two colonies of Apis mellifera to electromagnetic radiation, placing two mobile telephones on side walls of hives in call mode for 15 minutes, twice a day, for up to 12 weeks. The perceived result was that the number of bees from the infiltrated colonies returning to their hives after foraging for pollen declined while nothing similar was noticed with bees in two other untouched colonies. A queen bee exposed to the telephone radiation produced only 144 eggs a day while a queen in an unexposed colony laid 376.
A similar depletion was noticed in the honey-storing ability of the hives where the telephones were. Indeed, the researchers found that at the end of several months, the hives had neither pollen, nor bees. “The colonies collapsed,” they say simply. 

Obviously there has to be much more evidence before the loss of bees can be traced to electromagnetic radiation or rising temperatures. Ms. Jessica Hamzelou from the University College, London, once wrote in the medical journal The Lancet that CCD was by no means a recent phenomenon, and produced documented claims of abandoned hives from way back in 1869. It was not long after that Sherlock Holmes retired to bee keeping but so far it is nor known if he encountered any such curious case or what he thought of it.

Bees use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, and to a layman it is reasonable to assume that electromagnetic radiation can interfere with this ability but any such effect would need to be authenticated through physiological studies. In the meantime we can only remember that no less a person than Albert Einstein predicted that if the world’s bees were to disappear, humans would follow them soon.
A rather glum note on which to end what was intended to celebrate renewal, but, well, that is what the business of life is all about. The morning does not necessarily show the day. It is unlikely that people will give up their mobile telephones to save bees, particularly as a generation is growing which thinks food comes in plastic packing.