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Comment by ashark | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. So maybe it wasn't just my imagination.

I remember butterflies being everywhere in Spring in this area when I was a kid. Fields and air full of 'em for weeks. Monarchs especially, but all kinds. I haven't seen that kind of thing even once in probably a decade, at least.

And the windshield thing. I hadn't really thought about it, but I remember my parents having to scrape the windshield just about every gas-station stop to get rid of several really bad splatters. Now I rarely get even one bad one, and almost never need to scrape, even on road trips.

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I always just chalked it up to the "there were more thunderstorms when I was a kid" phenomenon (that a large number of people will remember there being more thunderstorms when they were children, despite studies suggesting the number of thunderstorms has remained constant).

It's not really surprising to me though, at least in my neighborhood in Toronto there has been massive urbanization; there are no more wild fields. Parks and even hydro fields (land under power lines) are being mowed bi-weekly, destroying any chance of native plant biodiversity. I haven't seen a mosquito in literally years. But to be fair once you leave the city, not much has changed; insects are still plentiful.

I'd be wary to draw any conclusions from this study, since the areas the researchers set up their monitoring stations may have experienced a similar level of urbanization.

> I always just chalked it up to the "there were more thunderstorms when I was a kid" phenomenon

That's a thing? I thought that since the house I grew up in at the time didn't have A/C and had a leaky roof just meant that thunderstorms were more important to the family. Not having A/C meant that the windows were open on hot days when thunderstorms were more likely, then had to hurry and close them when one happened. The leaky roof meant get some buckets and towels.

Merely conjecturing; if memory recall is correlated with the intensity of emotions during events, kids with their heightened sense of wonder are probably more likely to remember rare events like thunderstorms.

> So maybe it wasn't just my imagination.

And mine. BTW I was wondering what use will be that famous "ark" they're building with seeds - in a world without insects for pollination? Like having a backup of half of your data only...

Edit: clarified.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like eating insects is all the rage when it comes to talking about the future of food...?

That's not too inconsistent, we've depleted stocks of fisheries all over the world, and the solution is - fish-farming, on land!

I have the same childhood memories.

Mid 90's - Mid 2000s: We did a 10 hour road trip twice every summer to visit family, and always joked about how the car had a mustache because the front bumper was peppered with bugs. 2007/2011 - During college, I used to do 6-8 hour road drives up and down Florida to visit friends and we used to catch a butterfly or 2 on the window. 2011-2013 - After graduating college, I made a few more of those drives and I can't remember catching a butterfly in the windshield wipers. I've never had the bumper-mustache problem since becoming a driver, either.

The only bug that seems to thrive now-a-days are mosquitos. Still plenty of those in Florida... probably less, but I don't have any good childhood reference

How much of this do you think may be due to more advanced aerodynamics on modern automobiles?

I wonder how global this trend. Driving on a highway in southern Europe in summer made me realize why white cars were not popular there. My car was visibly covered in blood of killed insects after 500 km of scenic road.

When you say "blood", do you mean a red substance? I'm asking because insects don't have blood- they have haemolymph which doesn't contain hemoglobin and is not coloured red (it's actually bluish). If the colour of the substance on your car was red, it was probably human blood from mosquitoes.

Those little flying bastards are plentiful in southern Europe and they can get real fat on human blood and make a surprisingly bloody mess when splatted. They would definitely leave a mark on a white car if it hit them.

Thanks for pointing that out! The color was red, so that was mosquitoes then.

I've noticed a decline in Monarchs here in Northern California as well. The very few I do see are colored differently than when I was a kid. They used to be a deep orange hue, but now they are all a pasty yellow color. At first I thought it was a different species. I've mentioned it to other people, but they don't really care. They're more interested in upgrading their cell phone or checking their instabook.

The monarch population is actually declining to dangerous levels. Scientists believe this is due to the decline of the milkweed plant which is the monarch's main source of food.

I was wondering the same thing. Butterflies, and even many dragonflies in a big Polish city where I live. I chalked it down to "we had more flowers". But it seems global ? And even in Poland, which uses relatively little pesticides ?

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