Insects Are in Serious Trouble

There are two major categories of ways to kill an insect.

1. Attack it with chemicals that interfere with its biologically processes in such a way that it dies.

2. Physically attack its body causing sufficient damage to kill it, such as by crushing it, or shredding it.

(I'll include things like burning it with fire or acid as physical attacks rather than chemical attacks because they kill by destroying the body. I'll count drowning as a physical attack, too).

Within each of these categories there are simple methods that are effective and cheap, but are also not very discriminatory. In the chemical category, that would be pesticides that attack some widespread biological process that is shared by many insects, or in many cases all animals or even all cellular life.

To use this kind of pesticide safely you have to find ways to confine its application to things you are willing to kill, or you have to rely on it taking a lot less of it to kill the "bad" insects than it takes to harm a human and so with some care you can kill the bugs and not make too many people sick.

There are also within each of those categories ways to kill that will only affect one species.

In the chemical category, the key is hormones. An insect is like a little robot that has several built-in behaviors that normally play out in a specific sequence. The timing of when these behaviors happen is controlled by hormones. They are essentially the clock that drives the program.

So let's say you've got some insect that is bothersome. It hatches in the spring, is a pain in the ass all summer, and lays eggs and dies in the fall. If you study it you will find something like the cooling weather in fall triggers a hormone change, and that hormone invokes the "lay eggs and die" behavior.

Congratulations! You now have a way to make a safe pesticide for that insect! You just need to make a pesticide based on that hormone, and apply it sometime between spring and fall before the insect has matured enough to have viable eggs. The hormone will still trigger "lay eggs and die", but the eggs won't be viable. So not only have you killed the insects that summer, you've also decimated the next generation.

The beauty of a hormone approach is that these hormones are already out there in the ecosystem. Every time some predator eats one of the target insects in the fall, that predator is eating the hormone. The hormone is already spread up the food chain, and so things are already adapted to an environment where they are exposed to it. The extra exposure when we start using it in a pesticide will cause little or no harm to other species.

So why don't we do this more? I'll cover that below, after first talking about the physical category of killing insects.

In the physical category, the key is other insects. For a large variety of insects we consider pests, there exists some other insect that either preys upon it or is a fatal parasite to it or that it depends on in some way.

If you know enough about your target insect, you can often bring in one of its predators or parasites, or attack something it depends on, and indirectly control the target that way. This can be especially good when the target is an invasive species.

In many cases insect predators are very specific in their prey, only preying on one specific species. If you pick such a predator to import to attack your target, that is safe because the predator cannot turn to other insects after wiping out the target. Once the target is gone, the predator dies.

So why don't we do this more?

Same reason we don't do the hormone-based pesticides more. Both of these approaches require a much deeper understanding of the insect and its environment than the broad poison approach does.

A lot of this is covered in the excellent book "Life on a Little Known Planet" by Howard Ensign Evans [1]. In the book he mentions an incident where California was suffering large citrus crop losses from some invasive insect. In Florida that insect was kept under control by a particular predator insect. California officials imported that predator--and nothing happened. It turned out that there was another species related to the predator, but it preyed on something other than the species that was invading California. These two predator species were similar enough that no one knew there were two of them. Even though this predator species played a major role in keeping a major agricultural pest at bay, there was only one or two scientists who actually studied them, and they weren't very well funded. There had simply not been enough research put in to notice that they were dealing with two species.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Life-Little-Known-Planet-Biologists/d...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

Unfortunately not market ready, yet ...

edit: bat boxes, water-fish traps and having birds around will certainly reduce mosquito population ... but there will be still lots of them around. A laser can take them (allmost) all out ...

Oh and about the water: if you just have open water around with no fish in it ... then the mosquitos will love that, btw.. So taking care, that there is no open water around, when it is hot, helps also a lot ... but I still want my laser turret.

(Some lady gave herself leukemia from spraying down her basement with DDT to kill the spiders. A doctor poisoned himself spraying his rosebushes.)

The problem is growth without care for the consequences. Making some people wealthier at the expense of killing the planet is a bad plan.

But I think that it goes too far the other way to turn around and say that growth itself is the problem and should be eliminated. We should strive for sustainable growth, not stasis.

The story of the African tribe with external wealth is nice, but doesn't seem like a good goal. What happens when some change in the climate (which can happen even without human intervention) wipes out a plant they rely on, or a long drought shrinks their food supply by half for a couple of years? Heck, what happens when somebody gets cancer, or cataracts, or an abscessed tooth?

IMO, one of the biggest myths is the myth of the primitive but efficient savage. Its almost always a "obscure tribesman" of some kind, be it a native American, or maybe an African tribesman... but the myth is always the same.

Apply the "Mythical Efficient Tribesman" to real life, and things start to go awry. The mythical Tribesman poops in the river when he needs to use the bathroom for example... if a city of 1-million+ people poop in the river however, it creates contamination and disease... and probably isn't good for the general environment either.

IIRC, the most efficient places on earth, as far as lowest environmental impacts, are generally cities. Cities with central sanitation to clean up sewage BEFORE it enters rivers for example.

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A sustainable economy is about closing the loop, keeping track of trash and doing something about it. Landfills and recycling centers are actually hugely efficient in the USA, especially some materials like Aluminum.

Waste Disposal centers have huge bins for a wide variety of items: textiles, metals, electronics, plastics, paper, oil, bio-wastes... each of which can be efficiently turned into new products.

For a lot of people, simply being aware of your local waste disposal center and their services would greatly improve your environmentalism. Don't throw away old Jeans, send them to the "textile" center to be recycled. Purchase "Plastic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5", but not Plastic 6 (which is harder to recycle and very few centers actually recycle it). Etc. etc.

Know what your city can offer and use their services. You don't need to run your own compost pile, just send your leaves / eggs / food waste to the landfill for it to be composted into mulch.

In my experience: rural areas of the USA have very few waste disposal services... and may even be running local "septic tanks" as their primary means of treating sewage. But even these more primitive means of sewage treatment are far superior to "primitive tribesmen" who resort to effectively dumping their sewage untreated in a river.

Oh come on. There were no investment banks in Soviet Russia yet the Soviets drove economic growth as hard as they could.

If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%.

So what? You can easily grow an economy without consuming more raw materials and a simple thought experiment will prove it: consider that you buy some paper and a pen and write a book. What is the economic value? Well it could be zero, or negative because you've wasted perfectly good paper and the time of everyone who read it. Or it could be billions because it's the next Harry Potter. But the raw materials consumed in the process are the same either way.

1) Legislate frameworks for market based solutions to externalities i.e. tragedies of the commons such as air pollution, water quality, etc. Cap and trade would be one framework for addressing CO2.

2) Eliminate mercantilism, where government policies are used to interfere in market forces, usually for the benefit of wealthy business owners. I.e no more subsidies, of any business, no more "incentives" to overbuild, overproduce, etc.

Boom done. For those of you who say yea, but it's impossible that those 2 things could ever be legislated successfully, I say, yea, your right. But that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge the solution. And for those of you who say, but capitalism bad! I say, yea but those two things are just as impossible to implement under socialism, communism, marxism or any other system you can devise.

In reality, the only solution is to have a Julius Caesar conquer the known world, declare himself or herself dictator for life, and then say, you idiots, we need to have a sustainable planet, and just implement those changes by edict.

Unfortunately the new Caesar would then drop by the senate for a session, and senators backed by the dozen biggest corporate welfare recipients would stab him or her to death. And the senate would immediately repeal the new laws.

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...

That's called a subsistence economy. It has downsides, such as very high rates of violence and other preventable deaths (like death during childbirth).

One could imagine trying to solve these problems, but all the solutions sound more like dystopia rather than utopia.

In any case, there is a fair amount of unsettled land. You can probably buy some or even squat, and try to make your own tribe.

Wow. From an article about insects you arrived to banks in three sentences. Kind of impressive.

That is the dark side of going back to some mythic close to nature society. It will make inequality many times worse than it is now.

If one actor grabs the bigger share of economic growth that puts it in a position of power over others. Nation states that can grow their population, resource extraction and have export surplus can use those things to exert political power over others. This means that states have a strong incentive for growth.

Likewise, if a population is dependent on money for their necessities, and there exists a limited stock of it, those who command a large fraction of it have defacto leverage over those with little.

The measurements took place in protected areas in Germany. Have there been similar studies for other locations?

Edit: It appears that almost all the measurements took place at locations in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany's most populous state ...

> S1 Fig. Map of study area.

> Insect trap locations (yellow points) in Nordrhein-Westfalen (n = 57), Rheinland-Pfalz (n = 1) and Brandenburg (n = 5)

On the other hand, I'll still be deploying my organic mosquito control based on plant oils injected into a mister system. I really don't think mosquitoes fulfill any role in the ecosystem that can't be filled in by other species; but the difficulty is in avoiding messing with any other insects.

More precisely, too few care, and only a fraction of them are really doing something about it.

I think in many ways the apparent environmental crisis we've been experiencing is a profound moral failure, on the part of individuals, governments and whole societies.

It's actually worse than that. Capitalism cannot on its own deal with negative externalities even when they are quantifiable.

You solve that through government regulation. But when government is bought and sold by businesses who would prefer costs be externalized as much as possible, the outcomes are... less than ideal.

I don’t know; but I wish they would be able to adapt so rapidly. Think how after thousands of years they still don’t understand they can’t fly through transparent glass.

[0] http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/harvard-zika-expert-naled-... [1] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-keys...