Here’s another case from the “pitting one animal against another” file: Japanese conservationists want to use bees to protect terns from crows.
Seabirds called little terns nest near Tokyo’s airport after migrating north from Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. But National Geographic reports that are area’s crows are bad neighbors, prone to attacking and killing young terns.
To protect the terns, members of the Japanese non-profit Little Tern Project got another group, the Ginza Bee Project, to move hives of honeybees to the airport area. Because the bees attack dark-colored creatures around their nests—perhaps an evolutionary defense against bears—the conservationists expected them to battle the crows, which would protect the terns by proxy.
Ginza leader Kazuo Takayasu says the group moved two hives into the area last autumn, and then another one this May. The terns migrated north in April, and Naoya Masuda of the Little Tern Project says the seabirds and bees are getting along great, though there’s no word yet how well the bees are faring against the crows.
Alas, this is one of those problems that would have been far easier to simply avoid by not destroying the terns’ habitat with construction and development projects. The bee idea sounds promising, but elaborate schemes that include moving in a new species to do humans’ dirty work often have unintended consequences, too.
Image: flickr/Wolfpix
