Zika and climate change

Anyone else notice a rise in carpenter bees? I keep a decent sized garden and since honeybees have started to decline in the last six or seven years, I've noticed a huge surge in carpenter bees. They love my butterfly bushes and the neighbor's overgrown Rose of Sharon bushes.

 

Actually, it was something along these lines that sparked this train of thought for me. I was looking at the Scotland/sell everything thread and thought,"meh. Not gonna matter. Zika's gonna kill us all before any of this comes to pass."

Love how you guys are keeping it light.

 

If the mosquito population surges, wouldn't there also be a surge in predatory species such as birds, bats and fish that feed upon mosquitoes? I would think that would help keep the ecosystem in balance and prevent a runaway infestation of mosquitoes.

 

Maybe they were former coal miner bees who got re-trained.

 

The obligatory pop-culture tie-in, as dictated by the SJ manual.

 

In the very long run the Sun will go red giant and engulf the earth.
To survive as a species we must figure out how to achieve interstellar travel without succumbing to cosmic rays.
To survive the heat death of the universe, we need to find a new universe.
And you fools are worried about a few skeeters in South America.

 

That's 5 billion years into the future.
Much more likely that we'll succumb to some other extinction factor before then.
I don't believe it's immanent, but still more likely some time in the next few billion years.

 

It's OK to bend your barbs every now and then.

 

I'm more worried about the Zima virus, myself.