Acorn watchers wonder what happened to crop

Acorn watchers wonder what happened to crop

www.msnbc.msn.com

But Simmons really got spooked when he was teaching a class on identifying oak and hickory trees late last month. For 2 1/2 miles, Simmons and other naturalists hiked through Northern Virginia oak and hickory forests. They sifted through leaves on the ground, dug in the dirt and peered into the tree canopies. Nothing.

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
www.washingtonpost.com

Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
Mysterious disappearance of American honey bees
Honey Bees Disappearance in US Mystery UPDATE
Killer squirrels....



[edit: title to same as source]
Headline: Please use the original story headline from your source.

[edit on 30-11-2008 by 12m8keall2c]

This is an article from msnbc.com regarding apparently starving squirrels and a seeming total lack of acorn and hickory nut production. At the moment, according to the article, experts aren't worried. They are, however, a bit mystified.

I had a thought while reading about the importance of certain pollens to the oak tree, which was that perhaps this had something to do with the dying off of bees also reported in recent years. I don't know if there is any correlation with colony collapse and areas reporting this unusually low acorn production, though.

I just thought people would find this interesting, if not slightly concerning.

www.msnbc.msn.com
(visit the link for the full news article)



[edit: title to same as source]
Headline: Please use the original story headline from your source.

[edit on 30-11-2008 by 12m8keall2c]

edit: Sorry about that. It said "Where'd all the acorns go?" in the tag at the top and on the front page link to the story, so I thought that was considered the title.

[edit on 11/30/2008 by AceWombat04]

As a follower of the problems of CCD I find this an nteresting story, I going to go explore the woods near here (when it stops raining) and see for myself.

Not too many squirrels around here, I imagine the French would shoot them all!

Will check back in a day or two.

Thanks for the info.

hi there,

very interesting,

here in western Europe there is an overabundance of acorns this year ...loads and loads of them !!!

plus this year there are LOADS of acorn apples.


anyone else also noticed this or is it the same as in the USA ??

snoopyuk

Originally posted by snoopyuk

anyone else also noticed this or is it the same as in the USA ??

snoopyuk

Well, down here in Florida, at least where I am, the oak trees aren't having any problems producing acorns.

Have an oak tree in the front yard and plenty of acorn nuts on the ground, also pulled into a customers concrete driveway the other day and it was covered with acorns.

Mid Atlantic region - NO ACORNS!

My daughter and I usually go out and gather bags and bags of acorns from the wooded area and bring them back to feed our squirrls with. This year - not a single acorn. We were wondering about it.

We're having lots of them right now in New Orleans. You can drive down some streets and hear all the "crunch crunch crunch" as you roll over them. Most of the oaks down here are Live Oaks (evergreen varieties,) I don't see many of the other species around here in the city as much.

Don't tell your squirrels though, we have enough of those here already!

In North Texas, the Live Oaks produced plenty as usual, but I have noticed a lack of Burr Oak and Red Oak acorns. Also the pecans are fewer this year. My young Pecan produced nothing this year after producing well the last two. Also, my Pear Tree didn’t bear a single fruit this year. Hopefully, it’s just a cycle.

This is so wild! And upsetting.

We definitely have at least some varieties of acorns in GA.

Here's an excerpt from that WAPO link:

The idea seemed too crazy to Rod Simmons, a measured, careful field botanist. Naturalists in Arlington County couldn't find any acorns. None. No hickory nuts, either. Then he went out to look for himself. He came up with nothing. Nothing crunched underfoot. Nothing hit him on the head.

Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill….

…The absence of acorns could have something to do with the weather, Simmons thought. But he hoped it wasn't a climatic event. "Let's hope it's not something ghastly going on with the natural world."

I really hope it's not related to the bees in the affected areas.

Check out the areas without acorns and late spring frost in that region.

LOTS of em round here.

A walk through the woods (once a week) and you can watch dozens of squirrels running around gathering them.

Man, the squirrells here are tubby chuckers. All late summer and fall we have been hearing the acorns nailing the top of my van in the driveway. Piles of them all over. Heck, we had an Air Conditioning check-up and the HVAC guy pulled a buttload of acorns out of the fanbox next to the house.

Definitely NO acorn problem in Lake County, Illinois.

Cuhail

reply to post by AceWombat04


I am shocked to see this article because this year we had the most acorns we had ever seen, and they were 5 times larger than usual, we usually only see the little bitty ones, same trees but this year they were humongous! And everywhere! My father in law tore up his leaf sucker thingy trying to get them up out of his yard, they were all over and when you try to walk on them they are too big to step on!

Hopefully - and judging from people's responses this is likely the case - it's just a regional fluke of some kind and is totally natural, if rare. If it were to get worse, or happen for a number of years in a row with consistency then, as noted in the article, we might have something of a red flag on our hands. I don't live near any trees so I can't say what it's like here.

It would be interesting to cross-reference locations experiencing this with weather and CCD occurrences, to see if there's any correlation at all. I have no clue as to how to even begin to do that, though.

[edit on 12/1/2008 by AceWombat04]

reply to post by space cadet


Same here; all types too. I've never actually taken the time to pick them up and mention how big they were to someone else... But I guess I had it coming to me when I got laughed at for talking about 'big acorns'.

one would have thought that ` an experienced botanist ` like simmons CLAIMS he is would know that its not very unusual at all for areas to experience cyclic variations in yeild

also - if there is a low yeild - they will disapear very quickly as the forrager species fight for them

PS - here [ NW of the UK ]

Oak acorns

horse chestnut [ conkers ]

beech nuts

have all been abundant - and those are just the very obvious species i have noticed

That's what I'm thinking; that there were just fewer of them and animals that eat them took what little there was. Still, the number of people inquiring about it suggests something that even long time residents regard as beyond the norm. That doesn't prove anything, though.

Scientists baffled by mysterious acorn shortage - CNN's wasted time

Scientists baffled? Seriously? "Maybe it's global warming" *snicker*. I'm a scientist, I'm not baffled. This is an ecological 'known'. Trees drop acorns cyclically. These 'droughts' get the squirrels to move on. If the tress dropped the same amount every year, the growing squirrel population would grab them all and there'd not be any new trees. Perhaps I could give them my professor's e-mail address from when I was in college, she explained in great detail how and why.

ignorant_ape has it right.

[edit on 16-12-2008 by saint4God]