Shadow Unit

[enismirdal]

I have discovered a new Thing. This Thing is bringing me enormous happiness. This Thing is Shadow Unit.

It combines three of my favourite other things into an overdose of awesome, namely:
1. Criminal Minds
2. Elizabeth Bear
3. Sarah Monette

It started off when some published authors started encouraging each other to write Criminal Minds fanfic to reinvigorate themselves and remind themselves of writing purely for fun.

And then they sat down together and said, "Wouldn't it be awesome if we could be screenwriters on Criminal Minds?"

And then they more or less figured, "Well, why don't we be?" Except they threw in a bit of a supernatural element, so instead of setting stories in the regular BAU, they created the Shadow Unit, a mirror unit who specialise in "anomalous" crimes with a supernatural element, but otherwise work the same way. Some of the characters are sort of alternate-versions of Criminal Minds characters, though not the same, and others are totally original, and all are brilliant. The plots are of the same genre but with the literary talents of the brilliant writing team involved and without the restrictions of 15-rated television constraining what can be done. Basically, they've produced a book version of a hypothetical spin-off TV series.

The books (mostly eBooks) are pretty cheap and are like the discs you get in a box set, with about 4 "episodes" per book, with "deleted scenes". The stories seem to be taking me just over an hour each to real, so better value for money than your typical 37-42 minute long Criminal Minds episode!

It seems they've got really into this and there are now 3 "seasons" of the "show". Awesome! It has its own fan wiki, the characters have livejournals (not all of them updated frequently, but still), Twitter feeds, and because it's a fun project for the writers, they contribute regularly to the fan forums.

Altogether, I think it's a really exciting project, a fantastic concept from the start and a really cool way for writers to keep themselves enthusiastic. I am on to book two less than a week after starting this (having, in the meantime, demolished one and a half paper books as well - hooray being on holiday), and thoroughly hooked.

Comments

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Nothing to do with this post, but Happy New Year!

[illusive-shelle.livejournal.com]

http://beyondblindfold.com/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought.html

Is there significant science and logic behind this? I thought you'd know!

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

I've skim-read the PLoS ONE paper behind that, although not in detail (bee research at the moment is saturated with pesticides papers at present), but the gist of it isn't overly surprising - yeah, trace amounts of all sorts of things are all over all sorts of crops. There's some question about how many of those things should be there if the pesticides were applied according to the label/instructions and how many are there because they're being applied in other ways (I honestly would have to do more research to be sure), and if so, whose fault that is.

To some extent I think this is probably similar to the controversies about mammalian livestock and things like hormones/antibiotics, etc. in them - yeah, they're present in a lot of systems, most people agree they aren't great, but they're also sort of necessary to making the agricultural system function under the current price-related and demand-related pressures. It'd be lovely to get rid of every pesticide in arable/horticultural farming and every unnecessary antibiotic in livestock farming but as long as people need large amounts of cheap food it isn't feasibly going to happen.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

I guess the whole business of bees and pesticides is getting increasingly hysterical and losing sight of some key facts:
1. Most bee ecologists agree that the number one overriding cause of wild bee declines is habitat loss - 97% of flower-rich meadows in the UK have been lost in the last century or so.
2. It's fairly well accepted that current honeybee-keeping practices of loading them on to trucks and shipping them thousands of miles around the US (for example) to pollinate almonds, then apples, then maize or whatever puts them under enormous stress.
3. Pesticides aren't going away any time soon.
4. Neonicotinoids are relatively new and a lot of the research on them recently is possible because they're comparatively safe enough that you can observe sublethal effects - if we looked at many older pesticides (like carbamates), the sublethal effects would be almost irrelavant because the bees would be DEAD not merely confused.
5. The neonic seed treatments result in tiny amounts of pesticide in the pollen/nectar compared to drenches, foliar sprays, etc. - a neonic seed treatment may save the farmer loads of spray treatments that have far higher odds of contaminating nectar, getting into waterways, etc.
6. If you lose neonics, the farmers either have to go organic (which does NOT mean pesticide-free by any means), which only works if they can get a price-premium for the extra input required and the loss of yield that often results (10-20% is typical) or else they revert to using older pesticides with potentially a worse safety profile.
7. Organic farming still permits pesticides, they just usually have to be either plant-derived or mineral-derived - which is no guarantee of safety or consistency, and because they're generally less good, they need applying more often. For example, rotenone is freakin' nasty but organic-approved, and pyrethrum is essentially the same thing as pyrethroid insecticides, but on soft fruit you'd probably normally need 1-2 pyrethroid treatments per year, but 3-4 pyrethrum treatments.
7. France and Germany have basically banned neonics since years ago...and still have wild bee and honeybee declines. Australia still uses them and their honeybees are the healthiest in the world.
8. Some gardeners are using pesticides at MASSIVELY higher concentrations than any farmer would dare, including lots of chemicals that are banned now, and blatantly ignoring instructions on the packets in some cases. And there are way more bees in suburban areas than in rural areas now...so perhaps we should stop attacking farmers and turn our ire on middle-class suburban gardeners and their spotless Pelargoniums.
9. In the end, I guess we could ban all pesticides and go 100% organic...if all people, rich and poor are willing/able to pay 50-100% more for their food, or if everyone gave up meat, or if we were willing to fell a load of ancient woodland, turn all remaining playing fields and meadows into agricultural land, stop all house-building and use it for growing food instead... To meet food demands, farming either needs to be more intensive (same amount of land, more yield) or extensive (more land but lower average yield) - and if the latter, the extra land has to come from somewhere (or world population needs to drop).
10. Basically, it's Hitler's fault - during WWII all the spare amenity land, meadows, commons and gardens were churned into vegetable gardens and arable land. We never regained those flower-rich environments and ever since, bees have been a bit stuff. Although declines may be slowing in the last couple of decades perhaps maybe (data deficient!) - ironically, since neonics arrived.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

The fungicides are a new area of investigation for bees and I'm intrigued to see what happens. The effects are relatively subtle, but fungicides are pretty necessary in a lot of fruit and veg crops, and if you know anything about mycotoxins, you probably want to keep using them. I guess we need more research to work out how important a higher parasite load is to honeybees' health and whether we can trade that off against possible risks to human health from not using them.

...sorry, this is long. It's been simmering as an idea for a full LJ post for a while. Even within the academic field, there are people who just want to work on pesticides to the exclusion almost of all other factors, and other people who are looking at the nuanced multiple threats to wild bees and honeybees, and other people who are most interested in looking at the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation. Personally, I think more would be gained by restoring habitats than by banning pesticides, and villifying farmers won't help.

[illusive-shelle.livejournal.com]

And sorry it's taken me so long to reply! I've needed to try and... I think coagulate my thoughts is the best way to put it. They're definitely all runny and not wanting to solidify.

I know a little about mycotoxins, mostly from suspect mycotoxicity when animals eat them. Not nice effects so I definitely agree on a need to keep them under control.

The perception of an outsider is that everyone agrees that loss of habitat = bad, but that no-one sees a way to restore al the habitat, so some people focus on trying to reduce the impact of the 97% caused by habitat loss, and some people do a lot of research into the remaining 3% to see if there's anything else we can do rather than change our current agricultural methods.

I agree completely that it will take a huge shift in public willingness to pay more for food to significantly change the industry. Unfortunately, people can't or won't do that if it stops them having luxuries such as holidays, new belongings etc. I think many more people could afford it than would want to accept it (i.e. the numbers of people driven to poverty would be much smaller than those who would complain), but unfortunately we are stuck with that as a working model.

Tell me more about neonics? I know little about them.

I've seen the effects of 'organic' on cattle. Intensive organic just doesn't work - I desperately wanted to give them a dose of good wormer more frequently than the organic regulations would allow.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Hey there!

I think you're right that people agree in principle that habitat loss is bad, although I think a lot of people have no concept of the type of habitat loss that is bad - there are some areas of wasteland/ex-industrial that have more value for bees and other wildlife than areas like parks, playing fields and some modern gardens. I think it would be WAY more helpful to plant more flower-rich margins and restore hedgerows in agriculture, leave road verges untrimmed, and plant amenity land more thoughtfully (less of the South American evergreens and hideous bleeping Pelargoniums, more of the native/naturalised flowering plants and ones with actual value to insects) than it would be to try and overhaul pesticide use all in one go.

You're right about food - I guess people these days spend a smaller proportion of their overall income on food than at any time ever, but then they spend a larger proportion on housing in a lot of cases, and we are probably more acquisitive than ever before. We probably also need to shift the type of food we're eating to a more sustainable balance of animal versus vegetable proteins.

I remember emperor's explanation of organic dairy in the UK and it made me think carefully about organic and trading off different aspects of the possible benefits. I certainly like farming to be sustainable...but it needs to be actually sustainable, not greenwashed, and if a couple of well-targeted pesticide treatments make the operation more financially viable and mean the farmer can afford to leave some wildflower strips and wildlife corridors, if the quality is higher (so less rejection of crop by supermarkets) and if the crop is sold locally then that to me is better than wilfully avoiding pesticide use without really doing anything to actively improve the farm's footprint. There are also some speculations I've heard that one of the reasons organic crop yields in the UK are even as high as they are is a spillover effect from surrounding conventional farms - fewer pests can migrate in because they're being killed off on your neighbour's crop, type of thing. Not sure how far that goes but would love to see it investigated at a landscape scale.

Apparently the one place organic does give massively improved yields is Africa - partly because it tends to go hand in hand with better farmer training and more conscientious growing techniques so the soil has more organic matter and so on (and pesticides in Africa are often adulterated or mislabelled). It's an area I hope to work on more myself.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Neonicotinoid insecticides...well, they're a relatively new (~30 years old) class of pesticides derived from nicotine. The trouble with nicotine is that it's got incredibly high vertebrate toxicity, so they modified the chemical formula to reduce that aspect and came up with stuff like imidacloprid and so on. These are relatively (though not totally) safe for mammals - better than most of the other types - but do tend to be more stable and long-lasting than other classes of pesticides (hence the buildup in waterways if over-applied). They act largely, I think, as neurotoxins, and it's the low-level neurotoxic effects that are upsetting the scientists working on them as you get disruption in navigation, learning, etc. There are a good dozen or so papers looking at their effects on bees now, some of them at realistic concentrations/exposure routes, and others in slightly more contrived scenarios.

The objections to neonics mostly seem to be with crop seed treatments, not totally sure why as the level of contamination you get in waterways and in nectar is lower than when they're used as drenches or sprays. Sure, it's bad IPM (integrated pest management) to use pesticides prophylactivally rather than reactively, but when a low level results in a much reduced need to spray later, I think the costs/benefits need a considered analysis. I guess one potential issue is that WAY more oilseed rape (one of the major seeds being treated) is being grown in the UK than ever before, and it's bee-pollinated, so the sheer area of monoculture means there's an exposure route for bees whatever pesticide you use. And oilseed rape really needs pest control as there's this beetle that can pretty much decimate the flowers otherwise...and when the seed is the bit with value...

The other main classes of pesticide in use are:
- pyrethroids, which are chemical modifications of pyrethrum, which is basically an extract from a type of daisy/chrysanthemum. These are far more toxic to mammals and insects than neonics, with neurotoxic effects. Not much is known about the sub-lethal effects, partly because most things you test tend to wind up dead so quickly it's moot. The older ones are unstable and break down in sunlight rapidly; the newer ones are more stable.
- organophosphates, probably the next most widely used class. They apparently work on acetylcholinesterase, so neurotoxic effects again. And they're even more nasty for mammals. And they've been around for donkeys' years, e.g. malathion.
- carbamates, which are mostly banned in developed countries now, but widely used in China and Africa in some systems, and a select few products are still used here in Europe - e.g. Pirimicarb is actually quite a safe treatment for aphids on soft fruit. These are probably even nastier than all the previous classes by and large!
There are other groups, like organochlorines (e.g. DDT), spinosad (derived from a bacterial toxin), and minor products like neem (plant-derived), insect endocrine disruptors that mess up moulting, Bt (a bacterial toxin that specifically targets moths/butterflies), etc.