What about the bees?
Posted on Saturday 6 November 2004 to unknown
Assume for the minute that the huge meteor that slammed into the Earth
at Chicxulub 65 million years ago, blackened the skies sufficiently so
as to plunge the entire planet into winter and change the climate
irreversibly. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this scenario is
not the well-publicised extinction of the dinosaurs but rather the
survival of many
other species, especially the ones that today differ very little from their
Cretaceous predecessors.
Exhibit A, the humble honeybee.
Bees evolved during the Jurassic period
in symbiosis with flowering plants around 125 million
years ago. The bee pictured here, encased in amber for the past 80 million years, is of the species Cretotrigona prisca. This is a species that survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event and is almost identical to its modern-day cousin Dactylurina which today lives in tropical Africa.
Bees are notoriously sensitive to temperature and cannot stand very
cold conditions. The mere fact of
the survival of this tropical variety (which must also have relied upon the presence of flowering plants)
implies a lower limit to the depth of this Chicxulub-induced
winter. Drops in global temperatures of between 7 and 12 degrees
celsius are often advanced, however based on what is known about the
Cretaceous period and about bees in general, estimates of the severity of this dip
would need to be reduced considerably, probably by more than half.
"I'm not trying to say an asteroid impact didn't happen," says researcher, Jacqueline M. Kozisek of the University of New
Orleans. "I'm just trying to narrow down the effects."
Basically, the dinosaurs must have been wimps.