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#foodchain

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"'Most Americans don’t want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.'“

Why is this happening, this disruption of a significant agricultural process that helps feed the entire nation? Lisa Tate is clear-eyed on that point:

It's happening because of Trump and ICE, because immigrant workers are being terrorized.


/2

Lisa Tate, a Ventura County, California, farmer talks about what's happening on farms in that county, where fruit and vegetables are grown to supply the whole country:

“'In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,' she said in an interview. 'If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day.'"


/1

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j

The Guardian · Ice raids leave crops unharvested at California farms: ‘We need the labor’By Guardian staff reporter
Replied in thread

@Angelaswf : sorry for a late response, but there were more cases like this. When I was young (6 - 12 years old, 1965 - 1971) I lived in Indonesia.

DDT was then used to kill mosquitos to prevent the spread of malaria. I personally recall cats dying because they ate birds who ate poisoned insects.

A search quickly returned pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/ (Borneo is now called Kalimantan):


In the early 1950s, there was an outbreak of a serious disease called malaria among the Dayak people in Borneo. The World Health Organization tried to solve the problem. They sprayed large amounts of a chemical called DDT to kill the mosquitoes that carried the malaria. The mosquitoes died and there was less malaria. That was good. However, there were side effects. One of the first effects was that the roofs of people's houses began to fall down on their heads. It turned out that the DDT was also killing a parasitic wasp that ate thatch-eating caterpillars. Without the wasps to eat them, there were more and more thatch-eating caterpillars. Worse than that, the insects that died from being poisoned by DDT were eaten by gecko lizards, which were then eaten by cats. The cats started to die, the rats flourished, and the people were threatened by outbreaks of two new serious diseases carried by the rats, sylvatic plague and typhus. To cope with these problems, which it had itself created, the World Health Organization had to parachute live cats into Borneo. [36]

[36] (dead link) President and Fellows of Harvard College, “Parachuting Cats Into Borneo,” 2002, available at pzweb.harvard.edu/ucp/curricul, accessed March 21, 2007

We have not learned. In the Netherlands, when driving a car on a warm evening, the front window will not become "dirty" because of dead insects. Farmers have killed most of them using insecticides.

@ReneDamkot @AngelaScholder

PubMed Central (PMC)PARACHUTING CATS AND CRUSHED EGGS The Controversy Over the Use of DDT to Control MalariaThe use of DDT to control malaria has been a contentious practice for decades. This controversy centers on concerns over the ecological harm caused by DDT relative to the gains in public health from its use to prevent malaria. Given the World Health ...

Happy #EarthDay! To celebrate, here’s our video about the Food Web, and how it’s a better model for ecosystems than the food chain. We made it for our friend the @RvingNaturalist’s channel, and she has a lot more videos there about nature and ecology that you should check out! youtu.be/OxKvcA4NpaQ

When elements of a #foodchain are lost, this can have #ecologicalimpacts with other species getting more abundant. N. Hammerschlag et al. (2025) report a sharp #decline in the #whiteshark population in #FalseBay, South Africa, possibly due to attacks by #orcas. This has implications for Cape fur seals and sevengill sharks.

© This text #StefanFWirth Berlin 2025

Paper

N. Hammerschlag et al. (2025):
doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2025.153

Photo

White shark by Terry Goss, Cr. Commons creativecommons.org/licenses/b