this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
59 points (96.8% liked)

News

23287 readers
4248 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Apparently this is Vespa velutina, the Asian hornet. I thought it was Vespa mandarina, the Asian giant hornet, which is considerably larger, and also bad news for the European honeybee.

We had a small infestation of the latter a couple years ago on the West Coast that we think is gone. Was in the news for a while.

EDIT: Huh. Reading about it after the event, that sounds really weird. Apparently there were three completely-genetically-different populations -- not from the same places in Asia -- discovered that were all introduced at about the US-Canadian border at about the same time. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence. I wonder if that could be an intentional transport and release? Like, it'd harm American agriculture quite a lot if that thing started spreading, as it'd mess up European honeybees being used as pollinators. It'd be a very low-cost biological attack.

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

A mitochondrial DNA analysis was performed to determine the maternal population(s) ancestral to the British Columbia and Washington introduced populations. The high dissimilarity between these two was similar to the mutual distances between each of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean native populations suggesting the specimens collected in 2019 were from two different maternal populations, Japanese in BC and South Korean in Washington. This suggests that two separate introductions of the Asian giant hornet occurred in North America within about 80 km (50 mi) of one another within a few months.

In June 2021 a dead, desiccated male was found near Marysville, Snohomish County, Washington and reported to WSDA. Its different, more reddish color form immediately suggested yet another parental population from the Japanese and Korean ones already known. USDA APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) performed a genetic analysis several days later and, together with WSDA, confirmed it was of a third, unrelated population. The discovery of a male in June is "perplexing" given that the earliest male emergence in 2020 was July, which was already earlier than normal for the home range. This and its desiccated state indicate it did not emerge in 2021 at all, but is instead a dead specimen that had already emerged in a previous year.