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00:01What can rocks from the past tell us about the world today?
00:05Why are we so resistant to change and what can we do to challenge the status quo?
00:10And how do invasive species threaten nature and our way of life?
00:15We'll be looking into all this and more on 10 Things to Know About.
00:19This week we're looking into some of the invasive species that threaten our biodiversity
00:31and checking out the latest monitoring technologies aimed at keeping them out.
00:49Invasive species can be found anywhere.
00:51But one pest in particular has been a cause of great concern for experts lately.
00:55A single Asian hornet was first spotted in Ireland back in 2021.
01:00But earlier this year a fully developed nest was found in Cork City
01:04with a second nest being found a couple of weeks later.
01:07So just what are these dangerous invaders that we've been hearing about so much lately
01:11and what can be done to curb their threat?
01:14Aidan Ohana was part of the task force led by the National Parks and Wildlife Service
01:19that investigated the Asian hornets that were found in Cork.
01:23As the name suggests it's native to Asia so it lives in China, Vietnam, parts of India.
01:27We know that they can spread very fast when they're introduced beyond their native range.
01:31So this species for example was introduced into France about 20 years ago
01:35and it has spread like wildfire around Europe ever since.
01:38It's now got a foothold in southern England and we've had two nests in Ireland this summer.
01:42Why are we worried about them being here?
01:44They're predators of other insects so imagine them in the insect food chain.
01:48They're kind of bigger than our other wasps so no other insects are going to eat them
01:52and they feed other insects to their young so they could have damaging effects on our pollinator populations.
01:59Asian hornets are a significant threat to Ireland's honeybees.
02:02A single hornet can kill and eat up to 50 honeybees a day
02:06and each nest can house around 6,000 hornets.
02:10So studying the nest discovered in Cork is an important step in understanding and tackling their establishment in the future.
02:21This is bits of that that we're seeing here in front.
02:23This is a section of one of them, yes. So this nest was taken from Cove.
02:26So it's a small enough nest. This one has been dissected out to study the nest demographics and population size
02:33and to take samples for future DNA work as well.
02:36As far as wasp nests go you can actually identify the nest.
02:38They have a different architecture.
02:40So our native wasps have this kind of like they have these straight lines of carton that they build around it and they're grey.
02:46Thankfully Asian hornet nests are sort of this orangey browny yellow colour.
02:50Like most insects they go through a complete metamorphosis so they start off life as an egg and then they spin a cocoon.
02:56So that's what these silk caps are, yeah.
02:59And I can actually, I'll open one up here to show you underneath.
03:01You can see there's a larva underneath it.
03:03Oh yeah.
03:04It'll spend a few weeks in there and then it will pupate.
03:06So it'll start to grow its legs and its antennae and it's kind of more recognisable insect head.
03:11The workers are female, they're more valuable because they're the ones that help propagate the nest and feed new workers and tend the eggs and so on.
03:18Males are unfertilised and they're only just used for mating in kind of late summer.
03:21Having the larvae will tell us two things, it'll just help to have extra specimens for DNA analysis but also we cut them in time and we'll be able to examine their gut contents and see what species of Irish insect they're being fed.
03:33Another trick to help that as well is as the larvae grow, so before they spin these cocoons, their entire gut contents get emptied into the cells called meconium.
03:41And the meconium is basically, it's a record of everything they've ever eaten.
03:45Does doing that kind of analysis allow us to see what the potential threat of these insects are to Irish species?
03:51Yes, I expect that the honeybees will feature very strongly in these nests.
03:54I was in the field one or two days and certainly we saw them carry off a honeybee.
03:58So honeybees would come to the bait station and the hornet would just pick them up and fly off with them.
04:02And we saw them attack wasps as well and green bottle flies.
04:06There were two Asian hornet nests found in Cork this summer and Aidan is about to give me a fascinating and slightly scary insight into the complex structure of the much larger and intact one.
04:19So, this is the big one.
04:21And this would be a mask situation because it's way more fresh than the other one.
04:26Oh wow.
04:28It's very cool.
04:29Unbelievably cool.
04:30So it's about 60 centimetres long.
04:33Yeah.
04:34It was hanging from a sycamore tree.
04:36So it would have been hanging like this upside down.
04:39Uh-huh.
04:40And you can see each different comb.
04:41So this was the first comb that was built and then they build out and they build down.
04:46So the second comb, third comb, fourth comb, fifth, sixth, seventh.
04:48And it's in order of age.
04:50So these later ones are brand new.
04:52They tend to be in older nests, the ones where they produce males and future queens from these newer parts.
04:57At the moment you can see there's nothing in them, just eggs.
04:59Which tells us that this is a mature colony, but it wasn't yet at the stage that it was producing males and future queens.
05:05You can see cocoons.
05:06And some of the cocoons you can see there's actually adults ready to emerge.
05:12Terrifying.
05:13There you go.
05:14And so this is a female.
05:15It's a worker.
05:16It's cool.
05:17It's like a factory for wasps.
05:29By analysing the nest structure, the insects eating habits and their DNA profile, scientists can build a picture of where the hornets came from and what their potential impacts might be.
05:42This information can help our agencies plan a strategy for the years ahead and better inform and alert the public on what to be on the lookout for.
05:52And so is there anything that we can do to stop species like the Asian hornet from becoming established here?
05:58We can probably never stop them from being introduced.
06:00Just the way trade works.
06:01I mean, trade isn't going to slow down between Britain and Ireland.
06:04There's goods and services and people moving all the time.
06:06And these are tiny wasps.
06:07They can hitchhike in the back of a car on a pallet of food.
06:10A British colleague was telling us that somebody had a cabbage from France in England and they went to cut it open and a hornet crawled out of it.
06:16So they're really good at hiding.
06:18The best way to stop them from getting established in Ireland is to detect them early.
06:22That's what happened here and it was really great that we have something like the invasive species alerts with the National Biodiversity Data Centre.
06:28It's great that we have a public that are clued in enough to spots that something looks a little bit weird and they can take a photo of it and upload it.
06:34And then nerds like me can then help identify it and the National Parks and Wildlife Service will kick in a response to then track down and find the nest.
06:46One of the biggest problems that invasive species cause is the damage and destruction of crops.
07:01And one of the worst offenders across Europe is the stink bug.
07:05It doesn't look like much, but don't be fooled.
07:08It poses a serious threat to agriculture across the continent.
07:12Thankfully, the stink bug hasn't landed in Ireland yet.
07:15And scientists like Michael Gaffney are working hard to keep our crops safe from these smelly invaders.
07:21At the moment, it's estimated that it can attack about 300 different types of plants from about 48 different families.
07:28So from an agricultural perspective, you're talking about palm fruit.
07:31So your apples and pears, you're talking about soft fruit, raspberries and blueberries.
07:35It can attack tomatoes, it can attack potatoes, brassicas.
07:38It can also attack a wide range of trees.
07:40So things like ash, maple, sorbis, even buddlia.
07:43This is a brown marmorated stink bug.
07:45Called marmorated because if you notice on the edge of its body, it has little white flecks and brown.
07:51So it gives that kind of variegated look.
07:53And they kind of look like a green shield bug that you find in your garden.
07:57But where does the stink part of it come?
07:59So the stink part comes from scent glands.
08:01And when they get disturbed, when they get frightened, they release this scent.
08:06They also use the scent to attract other individuals, other stink bugs.
08:10And then if they gather together in your house, then it's a real problem.
08:13Yes, and you disturb them particularly, you can get quite a bad pungent odour.
08:17And you then at that stage do have to remove them or preferably have someone else remove them for you.
08:22But the good news is they're not in Ireland yet.
08:24It's natural territory is around Japan, Korea and China.
08:29In the last 30 years, it has significantly expanded its range.
08:33Mostly because of its habit of hitchhiking into shipping containers and into vehicles and other forms of transport.
08:40Last year in 2024, they did find the juvenile stages, the nymphs, in the wild in Britain.
08:45So that would be again an indicator that there's the potential that the pest is becoming maybe established in that country,
08:50which then has implications obviously for Ireland.
08:54To monitor both native and invasive pests, farmers currently use simple sticky traps.
09:09They hang them in their fields then check to see what insects have been caught,
09:13before assessing if and how they might need to take action.
09:16Michael shows me this example of stink bugs caught on a sticky trap in Italy.
09:21It is a real challenge to monitor effectively.
09:24It's time consuming.
09:25You need a fair bit of knowledge to identify the traps.
09:28Often the traps are, as I say, are even fuller than this.
09:30So it can take quite a bit of time to go through it.
09:32So we felt that to speed it up, we needed some sort of automated system.
09:35Even initially to take pictures, but then as the project developed,
09:38we discovered that actually we could use artificial intelligence and machine learning to actually help with the identification of the insects on the trap.
09:47The technological expertise to help identify these troublesome bugs is being developed by a team of researchers at Tyndall National Institute, led by Brendan O'Flynn.
09:57Computers and artificial intelligence are great at some things.
10:00One of the things that they're good at is looking at images and seeing very, very small, subtle differences between a wide variety up to millions of images.
10:09And we were able to provide our system that we've developed with that training data set to help them understand what is a brown marmorated stink bug and what isn't.
10:19So how does it work?
10:20So typically this system will be deployed to operate autonomously.
10:23It will be battery powered.
10:25The solar panel will charge up that battery so it can exist for a long time in a field where there is no mains power.
10:32Every dawn and every dusk, this system takes an image of the two sides of this trap.
10:37And then the algorithm starts working.
10:40It establishes the regions of interest.
10:42So it sees blobs on the sticky trap and it understands that this might be an insect.
10:48But then the artificial intelligence kicks in and it looks at those regions of interest and understands which one is actually a brown marmorated stink bug and which is not.
10:56OK, brilliant.
10:57And that's based on very subtle differences in terms of antenna, colour, carapace shape and size.
11:03You can see where each brown marmorated stink bug has been identified correctly as opposed to being some random insects that happens to be stuck onto the glue trap as well.
11:12So you've just developed a little built in at home entomologist in this little system.
11:16Effectively, it gives the farmers the capability to make decisions on their farms that previously they would have needed an entomologist to help them.
11:24Yeah.
11:34And this is a prototype. You're developing it all the time and not just teaching the algorithm about what a stink bug looks, but actually working out the best way of it functioning in the field.
11:43Absolutely. It's a big challenge taking technology like we're developing out of the lab and into the real world because it's the unknown unknowns that you have to encounter then.
11:51So we developed a second iteration of this system where we've stripped out the mechanical component in terms of the motor.
11:57We've integrated the improved algorithms, but it's a far simpler system to deploy and it's a far simpler system to maintain.
12:05And this is really important from a cost perspective because the farmers have a very narrow margin to operate in and reducing the maintenance costs and the maintenance cycle with these sort of systems is really important.
12:14I love the idea that you're trying to make something that's quite, you know, very cutting edge, but like as cheaply and as deployably as possible as accessible as possible.
12:23Yeah. So we designed this specifically to be simple, but there's a lot of background engineering and science that has gone into the development of this prototype.
12:30There's mechanical engineering, 3D printing, electrical engineering, the edge analytics and machine learning, obviously, and the embedded systems programming of the microcontrollers.
12:39So it's a very multidisciplinary team that has developed this quality prototype system for deployment.
12:46The hope is the future is that we can develop systems like this that can do multiple insects, that can monitor your aphids, your thrips, your common pests, not just invasive species.
12:56Because the trap can run on batteries and can almost run relatively independent, it could be deployed in forests, hard to reach areas.
13:03It could potentially be deployed in ports and places like that, places where you may have shipping containers and other things coming in that might have invasive pests on it.
13:13This system shows how technology and AI can play a crucial role in protecting our food systems and biodiversity.
13:20I'm glad to say, I don't know what a stink bug smells like, and I really hope that we can keep it that way.
13:50Australia is a long way from here, and sometimes home comforts can make all the difference.
14:12So thought an English landowner in the 1800s who introduced rabbits for sport, leading to a cascade of unintended consequences.
14:22Quickly, the rabbits began to multiply, like, well, rabbits.
14:27And a huge rabbit proof fence was built in a vain attempt to keep them from damaging crops.
14:33Fast forward to the 1930s, and many ex-World War I soldiers had moved to Western Australia to farm.
14:42But when drought struck, the native emu came for the wheat fields.
14:46And being over six foot tall, the emus made light work of the rabbit proof fence.
14:52Desperate times called for desperate measures.
14:56The former soldiers called in the current army.
14:59The Great Emu War had begun.
15:02Arriving at a rural outpost, an army unit unpacked machine guns and unloaded on the emus.
15:09Now, emus, being master tacticians, do two things.
15:13Scatter and run really fast.
15:16So fleet of foot is this flightless bird that even machine guns mounted on trucks were too slow.
15:22And after much mockery of its methods by the opposition in Parliament, the government called it off.
15:28The emus, unaware that they were even fighting a battle, had won the war.
15:34From the invasive introduction of brazen bunnies to the military misstep of machine gunning a national symbol,
15:41the beloved emu population remains stable and in peacetime to this day.
15:47See you next time.
15:52It's a long way from the largest lake in the world to the largest lake here on the island of Ireland.
16:07But that's the distance that the zebra mussel has travelled to set up home here in Loch Ney.
16:12And this invasive mollusk is creating serious problems for this vital local resource and its ecosystem.
16:19I'm on the shores of the Loch to meet Caroline Murphy, who carries out research on water pollutants and biohazards.
16:26Caroline, can you tell me why Loch Ney, aside from being very beautiful, is so important?
16:33It's the largest lake in both UK and Ireland. It takes 47% of the water from Northern Ireland.
16:42The water flows in from six different lakes and then it's also used as drinking water for 40% of Belfast.
16:49So it's hugely important as well as the natural beauty.
16:52There's huge biodiversity here with ducks and a lot of migratory birds come and nest in Loch Ney during the summer.
17:00The concern here at Loch Ney at the moment is the arrival of the invasive zebra mussel.
17:06It originally came from the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea and it has overrun and taken over from the native freshwater mussel here.
17:15Those zebra mussels are the shells that we're seeing all around the place.
17:19Absolutely. Yes.
17:20There's an awful lot of them. Yeah, quite a bit.
17:23Yeah, they're much smaller than the native freshwater mussel, but they're everywhere and it has caused an awful lot of damage.
17:32What it has done, it has filtered the water here in Loch Ney and clarified it so much that the sunlight can penetrate now much deeper down into the water column.
17:42And this has done two things. It's brought extra sunlight and warmed up the water.
17:47And that in combination with intensive agriculture in the area, climate change, more flooding has meant that there's been a tipping point for the production of algal blooms and some of these algal blooms are harmful.
18:01The first recorded appearance of toxic algae in Loch Ney was back in the 1970s, but the blooms have been a major concern since 2023.
18:11We're heading out into the Loch to get a better view of the problem.
18:20This is incredibly visually striking. I mean, I was not expecting it to be so dense.
18:25Yes, an unprecedented algal bloom. It's so vast and it's stretching across the lake as far as we can see.
18:32The important thing about this as well is to note that there can be a few different types of algae.
18:37Not all of them are toxic, but it's important for us to be able to detect whether there are some toxic species present.
18:44OK, and when you say toxic, what makes these algae toxic?
18:49They can produce a lot of different toxins.
18:51Microcystin, ILR, it's the most toxic and most ubiquitous, so it's most common.
18:57It's not known fully what impact the toxins have on the lake because they don't seem to impact on the fish,
19:04but they are very harmful for humans and for pets.
19:08It can cause nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and it's a hepatotoxin, so it targets the liver.
19:16So if you were consuming the water over a long time, it would damage your liver.
19:31While the green algae is clearly visible to the eye, it's important to determine whether toxic microcystin is present within the algae.
19:39And the team at DCU have developed an antibody-based test that can be carried out on site to detect small amounts of the toxin in the water.
19:48To show me how the test works, Caroline collects a series of samples from the lake.
19:53She lets the algae settle, filters out any debris, and adds each water sample to a tray with the special antibody.
20:00Paul Leonard is part of the research team developing the test.
20:04At current methods, if you want to do this now, you have to take a water sample, put it in a van and bring it to a lab, and it takes days.
20:13It's very expensive, requires highly skilled people.
20:16It means that you get very few tests.
20:18But if you wanted to monitor it continuously over the spring, summer months when these blooms can happen, you won't be able to do multiple testing.
20:25If the toxin is present in the water sample, the antibody reacts and changes the colour.
20:30The lighter the colour, the more toxin there is.
20:33As you can see, there's a lot of colour. It looks complicated, but it's actually not. It's actually quite simple.
20:38So if you can see here, our colour is very dark, and it gets lighter.
20:41That's because we have a standard curve. All that means is that we have known concentrations of toxin, and it allows us to have a curve so we can quantify.
20:48Not only do you want to say it's there, we want to know how much is there.
20:51And then we have our water samples. And you can see where we have a very dark colour.
20:55Yes.
20:56That's where there is no toxin in the water.
20:58So this sample here then is quite pale looking.
21:01Yeah.
21:02That's our water sample.
21:03Yes.
21:04There is a bit of toxin in the water then?
21:05Yeah, there is.
21:06Okay.
21:07So that's not great now. Well, it's what we expected.
21:08Well, with the amount of algae that we saw, I'd be surprised if we didn't, right?
21:11Yeah, exactly.
21:12So no swimming here today then?
21:13No swimming.
21:14Not personally.
21:15Presumably the water that goes to people's houses is treated and is safer, right?
21:20A hundred percent. As it goes through water treatment and process, no it's a hundred percent safe.
21:26Perfect.
21:27The researcher's next aim is to make the test even more simple and accessible so it can be used by members of the public to test the water in local rivers, lakes and canals.
21:38Something like your COVID test for water, something that you could buy in the supermarket and you can come here and test the water and make sure that it's free to bathe, free to do water sports or allow your pets in and swim as well.
21:51And what we can also see is that since we're here, we want to be able to get that result and have everybody do the test, the citizen science.
21:58One of the things we can see if you can detect this with your mobile phone and we could geotag.
22:03So not only can you get the result and know but we can see the result and go to the local authorities and we can see that there's an algal bloom or there's some toxins in the water being generated.
22:11And so it's a quick alert system.
22:13So I suppose the big point here is that it's almost impossible to stop invasive species.
22:18But what we can do is come up with ways of working out the impacts that they're having and enable us to respond to that and to change our behavior or to understand what we need to do in response to that changing environment.
22:30Is that fair?
22:31Absolutely.
22:32That's our 10 things to know about invasive species.
22:44Next time we check out the story of carbon and its essential yet highly complex role for all life on Earth.
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