Anchorage Daily News: Wasps – yellow jackets mainly – stinging their way north in Alaska
The Tracker missed this ten days ago in the Anchorage Daily News, but its staffer George Bryson had a fine story mixing a concise description of the sort of vital epidemiology that public health officers do with a little bit on climate change. As background: A few years ago, it was big news over in Nunavut, Canada, when a yellow jacket was spotted north of the Arctic circle. Locals didn’t know what it was. Well, yellow jackets aren’t so rare in northernmost North America anymore. Bryson brings readers up to date on the after effects of a wasp outbreak in his town two years ago, and discovery by local officials in a their follow up that something fundamental does seem to be unfolding in the local pest scene. One datum: In 1900, an entomological expedition counted two yellow jacket species in Alaska. Today there are eleven.
A tip of the hat to Paul Simons, the “Weather Eye” writer for the Times in the UK on this. He had an article this week inspired, from the looks of it, largely the the Daily News piece and bringing it to my attention.
-CP
