A few years ago, my partner and I were under COVID lockdown both working from home in a 1-bedroom apartment. We were lucky enough to have the means to have saved up enough to finally buy a house, so we moved to the suburbs. I didn’t love the idea of being outside of a walkable neighborhood but I quickly fell in love with living amongst wildlife other than humans, pigeons, and rats. We have coyotes, lizards, turkeys, and perhaps my favorite nonhuman neighbors: great horned owls. They make this beautiful hoot that’s equal parts spooky and soothing.
But I also learned from my human neighbors that there are a few animals they’d prefer go away, with the most annoying being gophers. Gophers wreak havoc through our yards, eating anything we plant and leaving a mess of holes and tunnels. And in talking to my neighbors about it, I learned that many of them chose to deal with the problem by hiring companies to come out and poison the gophers.
Here’s the rub: you know what great horned owls eat? Gophers. And you know what great horned owls do not have? Poison control centers.
According to Audubon, 81% of great horned owls studied in New York state contained rodenticides. The more poisoned rodents they eat, the more the poison builds up in their system until they die. So by poisoning the gophers, my neighbors were poisoning their predators, unintentionally making the gopher problem worse for all of us, not to mention depriving us of those haunting hoots.
I’m thinking of the unintentional effects that happen when we screw with the ecosystem thanks to a pair of studies that have popped up recently. As my $5+ Patreon supporters already know because I discussed it in a newsletter, the first of these was published in Science this month and it linked the decline in the bat population in the United States with an increase in the deaths of babies. Not bat babies. Human babies.
That’s right, I know it’s spooky season now and bats are a standard part of our scary decorations, it turns out that they actually save lives. Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, is an “environmental economist,” and returning viewers already know how I feel about most economists but for the record, yeah, I really wish we didn’t have to put a monetary value on things that are unequivocally beneficial to humanity but as he pointed out in an interview with PBS Newshour in 2021, “If we don’t inform those policy discussions about what is the value of a species, we’re essentially implicitly assuming a value of zero.”
So he set out to examine the economic impact of “white-nose syndrome,” which is a fungal infection bats in the US and Canada started getting in the early 2000s, probably thanks to humans accidentally bringing it into their caves on their shoes and clothing. The fungus causes the bats to wake up during hibernation in the winter when there’s no food around, which leads to about 70% of infected animals freezing or starving to death. In less than two decades, the disease has killed millions of bats, some of which are endangered species, and since bats only have one pup at a time, experts estimate that it will take about 500 years for the population to recover.
How does this affect humans? Well, bats are voracious hunters of insects, and as they disappeared, farmers had to come up with new ways to protect their crops from a sudden surge in damaging bugs. Frank found that farmers tended to increase their use of pesticides by more than 30% following the bats’ population decline,. He then overlaid this increase in pesticide usage on a county level with the rate of infant deaths from internal causes (meaning causes other than accidents or homicides), finding an increase of about 8% on average in counties with white-nose syndrome compared to counties without it.
He also found that farmers in areas with white-nose syndrome lost about $27 billion, which is important because that’s the figure that might encourage big industry to give a shit.
I wrote in my newsletter that I found the study really interesting but I was debating doing a video about it. I pulled the trigger today because I saw that Frank has just published ANOTHER study, this time in the October issue of American Economic Review and this time about vultures: when the population of vultures goes down, human mortality goes up. The reason? Because the patent on a common painkiller expired. Yes, really. Hold on tight:
In India in the mid-1990s, the population of vultures suddenly dropped by a stunning 95% and no one could figure out why. Two decades later, researchers would figure out that the cause was their ingestion of livestock carcasses containing a common painkiller called diclofenac. Diclofenac was introduced in the mid 1970s for managing pain in humans, but in the ‘90s the patent on the original brand expired and cheap generic versions flooded the market. This lowered the cost to the point that farmers began using it to treat their livestock. Unbeknownst to them, vultures cannot process diclofenac and thus would die of kidney failure within weeks of eating the carcasses that had been treated with it.
This became a serious issue because vultures were important sanitation workers who farmers relied upon to clear carcasses quickly. Now those carcasses were left to rot on the outskirts of towns, which risked spreading diseases.
Sure enough, Frank found that in places where the vulture population collapsed, “all-cause human death rates increased by more than 4%,” plus there was a significant “increase in feral dog populations and rabies, and lower water quality.”
How’s that for a butterfly effect? Usually when a pharmaceutical company’s patent expires, human lives are saved because more people can afford to get the drug in question. In this case, it may have had the opposite effect.
It’s all a bit depressing, but the upshot is that the more we know about these downstream effects of our environmental fuckery, the more hope we have of fixing things. As individuals, we can plant native gardens, set up bat boxes or owl houses, avoid using harmful pesticides, and let our representatives know that we want legislation to force corporations to take action. Maybe tell them how many infants are dying…you know what, scratch that, it’s probably better to lead with how many billions of dollars they stand to lose.
As for me, I’ve shared with my neighbors the information about how poisons work their way from gophers up through the ecosystem and have the opposite of the intended effect, and I think it’s working! Recently one neighbor excitedly shared that she had bought something called a Gopher Hawk. I thought it must be a fake hawk or something to scare gophers away but no! It turns out it’s a spring-loaded spike that you stick in a gopher hole and when they wiggle around it fires straight into their tiny little gopher faces. Hers went off almost immediately, and she pulled the poor impaled fella out and flung him into the street, where a coyote made off with the corpse within the hour. I gotta say, it solves the problem in the best way possible: quick, relatively painless, no poisons, and the local wildlife gets an easy snack. But yeah, I think I’ll just keep on tossing Indy’s dog turds down the holes in the hope that the gophers smell a predator and go to her yard. I can’t even bring myself to cook a turkey for guests at Thanksgiving, for god’s sake, I’m not ready to serve gopher tartare shish kebabs to my furry and feathery friends.
