A close-up picture of a grasshopper nymph.
More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is changing how wild grasses grow in Kansas, and lowering their nutritional value to insects. That could upset the balance of life on the prairie.
MANHATTAN, Kansas Ellen Welti has a Ph.D. in, essentially, grasshoppers.
And yet she was still mystified about why the number of grasshoppers in a long-protected and much-studied patch of Kansas prairie was dropping. Steadily. For 25 years.
After all, the grass that the springy bugs feast on had actually grown more robustly as it absorbed mounting levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Climate Change Has Turned The Kansas Prairie Into Junk Food That's Killing Grasshoppers kmuw.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kmuw.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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KINSLEY, Kansas In the late 1980s, drought left the wells that supply water to the city of Hays and Russell in western Kansas precariously low. The near-catastrophe sent city leaders on the hunt for more water.
“We were just trying to survive from one year to the next,” former Hays mayor and city councilman Eber Phelps said.
The cities researched their options, including looking into purchasing water from several nearby reservoirs.
It looked like foresight. The two cities had locked in water rights that would allow them to grow in a relatively parched part of the world. It may yet prove to be just that if years of fighting with the farming neighbors of the R9 end in a win.
KMUW News staff
It probably goes without saying, but we re going to say it anyway: 2020, as a whole, is not an easy year to look back on.
But the year that started with a pandemic, ended with a tense election and saw a wave of protests against police violence in between, is finally coming to a close. As we always do, we asked KMUW reporters and producers to share the stories that shaped their year perhaps not the most significant stories, or the ones with the most page views, but the ones that, for whatever reason, have stayed with them.