Baraza

When E.O. Wilson said it was  the little things that made the world go round I didn’t really take any notice. But I’ve just discovered that on in every 3 bites of food was pollinated by an insect. That is a fantastic statistic, it means that our very survival depends on them.

As an ecologist I’ve always found insects interesting but it’s so hard to study them, first there are just too many of the darned things, some are anti social and sting and bite, many are too small to see, and some give us nasty diseases. But most of all it’s damn hard to get any books or educational materials on them – compared say to elephants, birds or plants.

Then I met Dino Martins and I suddenly got answers to everything I’d always been curious about, and instantly fell in love with insects.

If you don’t know him already, Dino writes the amazing

Dudu diaries blog about insects, and if his effect on me was profound, it was nothing compared to how he’s changing peoples perceptions all around Kenya. He’s back from Harvard University (where he’s doing his PhD) for a couple of weeks. We had lunch yesterday and he  told me about how he stopped a group of farmers from killing carpenter bees that were visiting a passion fruit farm in western Kenya. Thinking that these large bees were damaging the flowers the farmers went about crushing them and their nests, believing that they were saving their precious crop. After demonstrating that these bees were essential for pollination and production of the passion fruit crop, Dino was able to convince the farmers that they were actually damaging their crop by killing the bees and persuaded them not only to stop killing the bees, but to implement practices that would enhance the bee population and therefore secure a good fruit set of this important cash crop.

At another location he responded to farmers whose eggplant crop had failed for several years. Looking at the fields he noticed that no pollinators were present during the flowering season, and was able to advise the farmers to stop using pesticides which was killing the pollinators. The next year no pesticides were used, pollinators returned and a bumper crop was harvested. In both examples the solutions might sound obvious to anyone who knows about pollination services, but for rural communities education and information are rare. Misinformation and decisions based on ignorance abound which can at best fail to take advantage of natures free service, and at worse destroy these services.

Dino is now working on a new project to use insects as a way of protecting forests. By working with, and involving farming communities and school children, Dino and Nature Kenya (one of Kenya’s most active conservation organizations) aim to save a myriad of endemic and endangered species of plants and animals in rare and vulnerable tropical forest patches located in a sea of humanity. The survival of these forests will depend on their value in the eyes of communities that surround them. He plans to demonstrate the link between agricultural production and healthy pollinator populations that are forest dependent.

For example, he’ has found a native stingless bee that pollinates vanilla, an extremely valuable cash crop that, believe it or not, is pollinated by hand everywhere in the world because of lack of pollinators! Imagine the cost savings just because of the presence of one little stingless bee…

What I really love about his proposed project is that it is simple, is community owned and will be led and monitored by a leading conservation organization that is a key training ground for young conservationists in Kenya. The project will do visual activities and involve local communities and children, they will plant pollinator gardens on school grounds and monitor the pollinators that visit. In this way  communities will gather data about the presence, diversity and abundance of pollinators as well as crop production – they be able to demonstrate the link between the species and abundance and fruit production. For example did you know that strawberries will not form properly if there are too few pollinators? Neither will papayas. I didn’t know any of this before yesterday!

Having this information should enable communities to make management decisions locally and to gather information, document the local knowledge and share it. And Guess what? They will be able to share that information on the internet through the WildlifeDirect blogs as well as a new site that is a wiki resource on all the species of the world. Anyone anywhere can now contribute to and learn about all the creatures on earth through an amazing project that E. O. Wilson is involved with called the Encyclopaedia of Life at this website here

http://www.eol.org/

“The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth.” The plan is to have a page for every single species!