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Electronic smog 'is disrupting nature on a massive scale' |
Electronic smog 'is disrupting nature on a massive scale'
New study blames mobile phone masts and power lines for collapse of bee colonies and decline in sparrows
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 7 September 2008
AP
Bees
are able to change the polarity of their antennae at will. It is
believed that that it is this that enables them to navigate using the
Earth's magnetic forces
Mobile
phones, Wi-Fi systems, electric power lines and similar sources of
"electrosmog" are disrupting nature on a massive scale, causing birds
and bees to lose their bearings, fail to reproduce and die, a
conference will be told this week.
Dr
Ulrich Warnke - who has been researching the effects of man-made
electrical fields on wildlife for more than 30 years - will tell the
conference, organised by the Radiation Research Trust at the Royal
Society in London, that "an unprecedented dense mesh of artificial
magnetic, electrical and electromagnetic fields" has been generated,
overwhelming the "natural system of information" on which the species
rely.
He believes this could be responsible for the
disappearance of bees in Europe and the US in what is known as colony
collapse disorder, for the decline of the house sparrow, whose numbers
have fallen by half in Britain over the past 30 years, and that it
could also interfere with bird migration.
Dr Warnke, a lecturer
at the University of Saarland, in Germany, adds that the world's
natural electrical and magnetic fields have had a "decisive hand in the
evolution of species". Over millions of years they learned to use them
to work out where they were, the time of day, and the approach of bad
weather.
Now, he says, "man-made technology has created
transmitters which have fundamentally changed the natural
electromagnetic energies and forces on the earth's surface. Animals
that depend on natural electrical, magnetic and electromagnetic fields
for their orientation and navigation are confused by the much stronger
and constantly changing artificial fields."
His research has
shown that bees exposed to the kinds of electrical fields generated by
power lines killed each other and their young, while ones exposed to
signals in the same range as mobile phones lost much of their homing
ability. Studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau, reported in The
Independent on Sunday last year, have found bees failed to return to
their hives when digital cordless phones were placed in them, while an
Austrian survey noted that two-thirds of beekeepers with mobile phone
masts within 300 metres had suffered unexplained colony collapse.
Dr
Warnke also cites Spanish and Belgian studies showing that the number
of sparrows near mobile phone masts fell as radiation increased. And he
says that migrating birds, flying in formation, had been seen to split
up when approaching the masts.
But the Mobile Operators
Association, representing the UK's five mobile phone companies, says a
US research group has found collapsing bee colonies in areas with no
mobile phone service, and Denis Summers-Smith, a leading expert on
sparrows, has described the link as "nonsense".
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