WSDA, USDA announce eradication of northern giant hornet from the United States

https://agr.wa.gov/about-wsda/news-and-media-relations/news-releases?article=41658

by rguiscard • 2 years ago

169 116 2 years ago

agr.wa.gov

cbsks• 2 years ago

Invasive species (native to Asia) and 1.5-2” (40-50mm) long. I’m glad they are gone!

https://www.aphis.usda.gov/plantsplant-healthplant-pests-and...

heresie-dabord• 2 years ago

The richer oxygenation of the Earth's atmosphere in a previous geological era favoured the development of very large insects. Some wingspans attained 70cm! But the evolution of insectivorous birds likely favoured the smaller, nimbler insect variants.[1]

And then there is historical climate change as factor, not to mention K-Pg Extinction. [2,3]

[1] https://news.ucsc.edu/2012/06/giant-insects.html

[2] https://www.sci.news/paleontology/ypresiosirex-orthosemos-gi...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene...

shiroiushi6• 2 years ago

The richer oxygenation of the Earth's atmosphere in a previous geological era favoured the development of very large insects. Some wingspans attained 70cm!

This makes me wonder: what did these insects taste like?

Notice that humans already eat several animals that are basically very large insects: shrimp/prawns, crabs, and lobsters. According to a quick google search, these crustaceans are basically a sister group to insects, and interestingly are more closely related to insects than spiders are.

However, humans generally don't think of insects as appetizing meals, to put it mildly, while lobsters are considered a delicacy, and shrimp, crabs, and other crustaceans are not only commonly eaten, but are somewhat expensive food items.

Of course, one of the big differences between insects and these crustaceans is the size: even small shrimp are very large compared to just about any insect, so most people generally don't eat the shell, but only the fleshy insides. This is even more true with lobsters, where the shell is very thick and hard and inedible. Doing this with a beetle or grasshopper isn't so easy.

So if prehistoric insects could be so large, did they resemble sea crustaceans more (as far as having thicker shells, and more easily-separated meat)? And would humans find them tasty if we could somehow resurrect these giant insects today?

searine• 2 years ago

yet another example of thankless work done by regular everyday government employees. Good job USDA/WSDA.

LeFantome3• 2 years ago

I live about a mile north of the border and I saw one of these on my deck last summer. I am not sure I believe their timeline.

geor9e2• 2 years ago

You saw one of these? Did you report it? https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/1870579/asian-giant-hornet-si...

tomjakubowski• 2 years ago

Netflix documentary series "The G Word", produced by Barack Obama and featuring Adam Conover as host, does an outstanding job of highlighting these thankless civil servant positions.

Memorably, they interviewed NOAA scientists and pilots who fly into hurricanes to make critical measurements for meteorological predictions. I had no idea we did that!

mmooss5• 2 years ago

The Washington Post did/does have a similar series.

kleton2• 2 years ago

This is the Asian giant hornet. Apparently they had to make a euphemism that would obfuscate the continent of origin, when being from the wrong continent is precisely the reason it needed to be eradicated.

LeFantome3• 2 years ago

They are absolutely devastating to bee hives.

tptacek5• 2 years ago

Honey bee hives, meanwhile, are destructive to native pollinators.

wlesieutre2• 2 years ago

It’s in contrast to vespa soror, the southern giant hornet, which inhabits more southern climates in Asia.

Both of them are giant hornet species from Asia so “Asian giant hornet” isn’t a unique descriptor.

ungruntled• 2 years ago

It seems that the adoption of the southern/northern names was in part related to what GP is referring to.

https://entsoc.org/news/press-releases/northern-giant-hornet...

kleton2• 2 years ago

They could have gone with northern asian hornet, to follow proper taxonomy of including general and specific.

redeux• 2 years ago

If anyone is wondering, the infamous “they” in this case is The Entomological Society of America, not the USDA or WSDA. You can read the press release here:

https://entsoc.org/news/press-releases/northern-giant-hornet...

Their guide to creating common names for insects is here: https://entsoc.org/publications/common-names/use-submission

kbutler2• 2 years ago

There wasn't a common name for the multiple species before. The name change to distinguish the two species was done in 2020 to:

  - avoid the perceived unnecessary qualifier "Asian" 
  - avoid potential harmful negative perceptions being associated with "Asian"

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/murder-ho...

LeFantome3• 2 years ago

I live about a mile north of the border and I saw one of these on my deck last summer. They are massive. I do not buy the official timeline.

Not “confirmed” of course. Just like the report from 100 miles south of here 2 months ago. “Not confirmed”.

They do not believe the “eradication” announcement either clearly as they plan to continue search and trapping efforts throughout 2025 ( from the article ).

freeqaz• 2 years ago

Dang, that is unfortunate. I come here to comment that I'm really happy this happened. It is something that legit worries me. Bee populations are already suffering enough!

I hope the government is able to continue keeping the population from "stabilizing" to eventually get it eradicated. Crazy that you actually saw one!

olyjohn• 2 years ago

We have huge-ass hornets here in the PNW. I've seen lots of them myself. They definitely weren't the northern giants. But they're pretty close in size. I can see though people taking more notice of the existing ones after all the media coverage of the invasive ones.

toyg• 2 years ago

Which border would that be?

derektank• 2 years ago

USA-Canada / Washington-British Columbia

johnnyanmac5• 2 years ago

you seem to be embellishing that line a bit:

Although unable to obtain the specimen, WSDA did place traps in the area and conduct outreach to encourage reports of additional suspected sightings. Neither trapping nor outreach yielded additional evidence of hornets in the area. WSDA will conduct trapping in the area in 2025 as a precautionary measure.

That's just responsible book keeping. No different from making a proper test suite even though there is no unexpected behavior in the software product.

But if you really did find one of these in Canada, I'd definitely report that. You may unironically save Canada months of labor searching for a potential hive of migrated hornets.

Not “confirmed” of course. Just like the report from 100 miles south of here 2 months ago. “Not confirmed”.

who's doing the confirming, or lack thereof? There may be difficulties with investigations if they crossed country lines. the WSDA, if reported to, may not have the authority to properly search in Canada. I'm not sure what the equivalent organization in Canada would be.

ChoGGi• 2 years ago

I think I seen one of these last summer as well? It was a big sucker, we were trying to figure out what it was. I'm in Southern Alberta.

Modified30192• 2 years ago

How did you ID it? Cicada killers are commonly mistaken for Asian giant hornets: https://www.njbeekeepers.org/images/Vespa%20mandarinia%20and...

JumpCrisscross3• 2 years ago

Why can agricultural interests get their shit together on eradicating a harmful species while when it comes to human health, eradicating disease-carrying mosquitoes leads to endless hand wringing about playing god and whatnot?

geor9e2• 2 years ago

By attaching trackers to a few captured hornets they were able to find all of the nests. If only eradicating mosquitoes was that easy.

cogman103• 2 years ago

Eradicating mosquitoes is nearly that easy. At very least, significantly curtailing their population is something that's not terribly hard to do.

Mosquitoes need standing water for their eggs to hatch. That significantly limits where the things can breed. There are more than a few water additives that will kill off a population of mosquitos. However, there's always at least some resistance to wide deployment of those programs because of "playing god".

If you area suffers from mosquitos it's almost certainly because a group of anti-mosquito abatement folk got together to lobby against those programs being implemented.

shiroiushi6• 2 years ago

What ever happened to that project to build automated mosquito laser zappers? Didn't Bill Gates's foundation have a project to do this, by tracking them based on their wing-flapping frequency (which apparently is very particular to that species of mosquito) and then burning their wings off with a precisely targeted laser? This seems like a nice, pesticide-free way of eliminating these awful things.

zahlman4• 2 years ago

eradicating disease-carrying mosquitoes leads to endless hand wringing about playing god and whatnot?

The burden of proof is on you.

trilbyglens• 2 years ago

Probably because eradicating hornets can be done by finding and destroying nests. Mosquitoes on the other hand are far harder to get rid of. The most successful mosquito eradication campaign in history was the use of DDT in the 50s. We could always just use DDT again right?

ethbr1• 2 years ago

Releasing artificially sterilized singe-sex pests at scale is pretty effective. [0]

Tl;dr: Some species only mate once in individuals' lifetimes. Consequently, if that mating is with a sterile partner, no offspring will be produced. Thus severely limiting the size of the next generation.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2946175/

toast0• 2 years ago

DDT is still approved for mosquito control. It is problematic, but is very effective... The big deal was banning it for agricultural use. Targetted use to control malaria is probably justified, given the negatives of malaria.

wongarsu• 2 years ago

They only eradicated it in the US, where it is an invasive species.

Countless local and regional efforts to eradicate mosquitoes exist. Opposition seems rare until you propose exterminating a species globally

JumpCrisscross3• 2 years ago

until you propose exterminating a species globally

The proposals are all very local. Sterile mates, for example. Even e.g. gene drives work regionally.

johnnyanmac5• 2 years ago

is there any proposition whatosever that would meet zero opposition globally? It's hard enough getting provinces to agree on stuff. I can't imagine getting hundreds of countries to all unanimously agree on anything.

We'd need some hostile alien species to even consider that.

shiroiushi6• 2 years ago

They only eradicated it in the US, where it is an invasive species.

Last I heard, the type of mosquito that attacks humans is also an invasive species in most places outside Africa.

littlestymaar2• 2 years ago

They weren't eradicated through biotechnology use that could get out of control (people don't complain when there are mosquitoes eradication campaign based on suppression of stagnant water either, but some people are legitimately scared by the prospect of using gene drive at scale).

lupusreal5• 2 years ago

Eradication of mosquitoes was a very popular cause in the 20th century, but the means by which that was being done caused a lot of incidental environmental damage (draining wetlands, thinning bird shells, gassing other bugs, etc) so the brakes were pulled. Since then new techniques have been developed but they need to overcome the caution people now have for the whole idea.

zahlman4• 2 years ago

To clarify: I don't believe that such hand-wringing actually occurs to any significant extent. Please indicate why you believe it does.

dmix• 2 years ago

It's only been done a twice? in America in Florida and California and both had protests from environmental groups worried about bird/bat populations. Similar to any time a construction project is being done.

https://foe.org/news/ge-mosquito-experiment-halted/

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-key...

mmooss5• 2 years ago

I have heard serious concerns about letting genetically modified organisms loose in the wild, but not about killing mosquitos.

YAALS (yet another anti-liberal strawperson)? The term 'hand-wringing' seems to signal it, but I can't read anyone's mind.

KingOfCoders2• 2 years ago

For everyone else confused (I didn't hear of the Northern Giant Hornet before and thought of a new species):

"July 2022, the Entomological Society of America stated that they will adopt the common name northern giant hornet for the species to avoid potentially discriminatory language" -Wikipedia

[Edit] This is not meant judgemental

zahlman4• 2 years ago

It is native to temperate and tropical East Asia, South Asia, Mainland Southeast Asia, and parts of the Russian Far East. It was also found in the Pacific Northwest of North America

... in what sense is this hornet "northern"?

And in what sense is it "discriminatory" to point out the regional origin of a phenomenon?

tjohns• 2 years ago

It's "northern" when you compare its range with the other giant hornet, vespa soror or the "southern giant hornet".

You can compare the ranges here: https://entsoc.org/sites/default/files/2022-07/vespa-mandari...

tzs3• 2 years ago

... in what sense is this hornet "northern"?

All hornets are native or common to Asia (the North American native insects commonly referred to as hornets are actually yellowjackets), so calling something an "Asian hornet" or even "Asian giant hornet" doesn't really tell you much. It thus makes sense when coming up with a common name for a hornet species to pick something that distinguishes it from the other hornets, such as where its range is relative to others.

As to why they avoid regional origins in common names, the the Entomological Society of America says [1]:

"Common names are an important tool for entomologists to communicate with the public about insects and insect science," says ESA President Jessica Ware, Ph.D. "Northern giant hornet is both scientifically accurate and easy to understand, and it avoids evoking fear or discrimination."

[...]

In 2021, ESA adopted new guidelines for acceptable insect common names, which bar names referring to ethnic or racial groups and names that might stoke fear; the policies also discourage geographic references, particularly for invasive species. The Society also launched the Better Common Names Project, an effort to review and replace insect common names that may be inappropriate or offensive. No common name for Vespa mandarinia has been previously adopted by ESA, and neither name used in popular discourse meets ESA's guidelines.

[...]

Amid a rise in hate crimes and discrimination against people of Asian descent, usage of "Asian" in the name of a pest insect can unintentionally bolster anti-Asian sentiment. And, from a taxonomic perspective, all hornets—22 species of wasps in the genus Vespa—are native or common to Asia, meaning "Asian giant hornet" does not convey unique information about the biology or behavior of the species Vespa mandarinia.

They cite a news report on the rise in anti-Asian violence in the US.

They probably want to avoid things like this, one of the examples from that news report:

In March 2020, Bawi Cung and his 6-year-old son were attacked by a man armed with a knife at a Sam’s Club in Midland, Texas. The man, who later pleaded guilty to hate-crime charges, thought the Burmese American family was Chinese and blamed them for COVID-19.

There are a lot of complete morons who if something bad in the news is labeled as the "X something" where X is a country, region, religion, or probably anything else that is associated with an identifiable group will think any random individual they encounter from that group personally bears significant responsibility for that bad thing.

Wikipedia's got a long article of examples where the something was COVID [2].

[1] https://entsoc.org/news/press-releases/northern-giant-hornet...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia_and_racism_related_...

water-data-dude• 2 years ago

I always just referred to them as “murder hornets” anyway (see the bee massacre video below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_8B4bcrSs8

zabzonk• 2 years ago

Apparently they are being controlled quite well in the UK at the moment.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/13/rapid-sp...

HeckFeck2• 2 years ago

I did my part.

Five years ago, while I was driving one of the blighters landed on my windscreen. I pushed the wiper lever to rinse, expecting it to swipe him away.

Instead it beat him down to my air intake vent, and he was sucked into the AC system.

I made sure to warn the mechanic of what lurked down there when I brought the car for her annual service.

pjbeam• 2 years ago

Did your mechanic visit happen soon thereafter? Was it alive?

hocuspocus• 2 years ago

Not the same Asian hornet, in Europe we have Vespa velutina vs mandarinia in the PNW.

Our invasion was traced back to 2004 when a queen was supposedly brought from China to France through the port of Bordeaux. The spread is very much not controlled in Mediterranean countries, but I believe beekeepers have adapted.

snickmy• 2 years ago

What's the expected longevity of the solutions put in place? I mean, doesn't just take a swarm migration outside state border to reverse the trend?

jmclnx• 2 years ago

Very nice and a bit of a surprise to me. I hope they are correct.

But unless some form of full inspections or spraying N/S America wide for containers coming from overseas, we will probably have more of these.

With the direction/trend of the "US Gov." being run as a business for the past 40 years, I believe we could very well see these hornets arrive in other areas.

IIRC, there is a insect in the East that is killing millions of trees which arrived 10 or 20 years ago. I forgot the details but eradicating them is now impossible.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

You're probably thinking of the Spotted Lanternfly, which people of all ages take great satisfaction in trying to stomp whenever we see them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_lanternfly

BrentShikoski• 2 years ago

More likely the Emerald ash borer, extremely destructive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_ash_borer

generic92034• 2 years ago

Is it really worse than the members of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_beetle subfamily? They are able to destroy whole forests if the trees are under stress (drought, pollution, acid rain) already. But they should be nothing new.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

With the direction/trend of the "US Gov." being run as a business for the past 40 years, ...

Businesses that do get $37 trillion in debt go bankrupt. That government lovers managed to make believe it's normal for governments to go ever more into debt to then tax everybody through the inflation "hidden" tax is one of the biggest travesty of our time.

bluSCALE4• 2 years ago

Great, pesticides next.

user3939382• 2 years ago

Can we do the emerald ash borer next :(

xattt• 2 years ago

Too far gone …

dyauspitr• 2 years ago

Too late, pretty much invisible unless we use some kind of genetic agent.

pfdietz• 2 years ago

Some insects can be eradicated by release of sterilized males, but I doubt the EAB is one of them.

stronglikedan• 2 years ago

right after the spotted lanternfly (i.e., likely never)

evanjrowley• 2 years ago

I had these around my house earlier this year. Hopefully they really are gone...

xedrac• 2 years ago

Giant hornets all got diabetes on the Standard American Diet and died... is my working theory.

bux93• 2 years ago

The headline conjures up an image of one giant hornet, rampaging through US cities like Godzilla, carrying a hockey stick to underline its northern/Canadian affiliation.

WSDA, USDA announce eradication of northern giant hornet from the United States

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