https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-...
In 1991 they could have reported "insects numbers drop 50% in two years!!!!".
I mean there's a definite decline, but it doesn't look like an imminent collapse.
Anecdotes aren't helping anything.
If you look at the graph you can adda trend line for poor years and one for good. Both point steeply downwards, say -30%/decade. Extrapolate to human lifetimes, and you get a 96% drop in one human lifetime. Wow.
This. When I was a kid in California a quick trip in summer and it would be carnage on the window and grill. Now I can drive for hours and not get a single bug. Part of this could be increasing traffic. But it is really dramatic and scary.
I only ever remember swallowing an insect twice. It probably happened more, but it definitely wasn't a regular occurrence and tended to only happen on hills when you were going really fast.
Also the having to clean screen thing was a thing that happened certain years, not every single year. We used to go on trips to France that we drove to, from East England to France, 10 hours of driving, and some years it needed cleaning a lot, some it didn't.
Again, I totally realise that there definitely is something happening, but the way people are talking is that there used to be a swarm of insects every year, when that wasn't the case. It was different year to year, and it looks like 1989 in Germany was definitely a 'heavy' year and not a great baseline.
There even used to be spandex covers you could out over the front of your bike on the roof rack, but I haven’t seen one in years.
But memory is unreliable, and anecdotes are not data
It would be worth a test - an old-style incandescent on one side of the house, a contemporary LED on the other, see which one attracts more bugs!
There's already a surprisingly lot of solid info on that out there [0] The gist is pretty much: Most LED don't emit UV and produce less heat, as such they are generally less attractive for flying bugs.
LED ability to change color is an extra advantage, as flying bugs prefer some colors (cool white) over others (warm yellow) and some they supposedly can't even see (red).
I've played around with what color of light to use in my office at night, where the window is pretty much always open due to heat and monitors tend to "collect" all the bugs.
Using only red light really reduces the number of bugs coming in, but then you are sitting in red light all the time, feeling like you are hunting for Red October.
Still happening to me every time in Germany :( That's why I usally were glasses (otherwise small flies get in my eyes).
I remember thinking the same last year and the year before, but it gets visibly worse without question.
And yes it's not only bees
Someone send all people at Monsanto who hid the evidence to jail.
There's variation between years but a clear downward trend that leads to a significant reduction overall.
Intuitively, if that was money, someone would be pulling their hair out by the handful.
It is like being in a silent city; wrong.
They measured a number of variables during the study (different aspects of weather and climate and land use), but failed to find a single explanatory variable to match the trend they were seeing. They proposed that the cause was something they weren't measuring.
Abstract: "We show that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot explain this overall decline."
Results: "There was substantial variation in trapped insect biomass between habitat clusters (see Materials and methods), with nutrient-rich grasslands, margins and wasteland containing 43% more insect biomass than nutrient-poor heathland, sandy grassland, and dunes. Yet, the annual rate of decline was similar, suggesting that the decline is not specific to certain habitat types (S5 Fig)." "On average, cover of arable land decreased, coverage of forests increased, while grassland and surface water did not change much in extent over the last three decades (S3 Fig). Overall, adding land use variables alone did not lead to a substantial improvement of the model fit..." "These interactions, which were retained in our final model (Table 4), revealed higher rates of decline where coverage of grassland was higher, while lower declines where forest and arable land coverage was higher."
Discussion: "In light of previously suggested driving mechanisms, our analysis renders two of the prime suspects, i.e. landscape [9, 18, 20] and climate change [15, 18, 21, 37], as unlikely explanatory factors for this major decline in aerial insect biomass in the investigated protected areas." "Agricultural intensification [17, 20] (e.g. pesticide usage, yearround tillage, increased use of fertilizers and frequency of agronomic measures) that we could not incorporate in our analyses, may form a plausible cause. The reserves in which the traps were placed are of limited size in this typical fragmented West-European landscape, and almost all locations (94%) are enclosed by agricultural fields. Part of the explanation could therefore be that the protected areas (serving as insect sources) are affected and drained by the agricultural fields in the broader surroundings (serving as sinks or even as ecological traps)."
i.e., they're finding that habitat type is insufficiently correlated with the observed effects, and suggesting that some other effect related to nearby agriculture is the predominant cause.
The paper is free to download and very readable: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
There hadn't been many investments in mechanization up until 5-10 years ago (I'm talking about my parents' village), which meant that the seasonal agricultural works were carried out by 30- or 40-year old communist-era tractors or by actual manual labor by the local people. That meant, for example, that there was usually a time interval of at least a couple of weeks between the land getting plowed and the seeding operation (not a native English speaker, too lazy to search for the exact technical terms). That in turn meant that there was a time window of at least 2-weeks for birds like crows to hunt and eat the insects and mice that the plowed terrain would "reveal" to the open air.
But, as I said, that started to change in the last 5 or so years, when, after some capital-intensive investments, the local farmers started using GPS-equipped state-of-the-art tractors which only leave a day (at most) between when the plowing and the seeding operations happen. So, that means that the crows now only have one day (at most) to hunt and eat for insects and mice, while previously they used to have at least 2 weeks. And the new tractors and combine harvesters are also a lot more efficient, as in they don't leave that much grains on the ground during harvesting (the old communist-era combines were not as efficient) which also means less food for mice and crows, which means less mice and crows, which is bad.
And there are countless other stories like these, all negative when it comes to the ecosystem that surrounds us.
[E: if you ever wanted to know how data and anecdote differ, dive into that thread]
I don't get why people go crazy with poisons. I just do some minor house perimeter treatment but try to make sure it wont run off. I keep everything else natural.
Most people seem to know about it but not how serious it is.
I just heard this in a recent TED podcast that this is what some people were doing :)
http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature21709
It had a measurable impact when planting "wild"flowers on 2% of the land alongside English fields, with a little more searching there's probably a study on gardens.
(From the paper: "Here we show that the survival of family lineages from the summer worker to the spring queen stage in the following year increases significantly with the proportion of high-value foraging habitat, including spring floral resources, within 250–1,000 m of the natal colony.")
However, the jury's out on "insect hotels": http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
> but it quickly visible to you Definitely measurable in that it gives them more options which is probably better for them with proper care.
Doesn't have impact on the main problem though.
We've got a little wildflower patch, maybe six square feet. Was covered in all kinds of bees & insects last summer.
If you've called your representatives, you gain my sympathy and concern.
If you've assumed ten minutes a month isn't worth it, these arguments are not persuasive.
I thought of a thing that might have at least a little.
edit: I know I strode a little from the mandate part cause mandates may differ in relative importance for everyone.
Person A: voting helps
You: How do they know why you're voting on this?
Person B: You have to tell them
You: But others spend more money and thus count for more
Me: That's an excuse unless you've actually tried it (and if you have, yeah, that sucks)
If I misread, my apologies - based on on your response it appears I have.
I didn't make the connection "these arguments are not persuasive" => "its an excuse" and rather read the part as "not persuaded by the argument" and so I tried to clarify.
(Didn't look so good did it:) Thanks for taking the time to clarify ergothus.
Obvious recent example in the US; the dramatic shift in Democratic Party support for single-player as it became clear that that was something that constituents were extremely concerned with. Obviously that’s a big issue. But this can happen with smaller issues, too.
Right now, your representatives don’t know what’s important to you. Telling them will at worst do nothing, and may well help.
As a start, I'd encourage you to choose different news sources, because I've no idea what you're referring to here and your comment on HN is the first I've seen of it (and thanks for that).
I'm not being facile here; we need more people to stop consuming pop-culture "news" as a good first step towards solving important and difficult problems. Media will report on the subjects that people read, watch, and talk about. So, avoid the garbage.
(I was about to praise them for not writing more about the latest celebrity baby, but they have, damn them. I was trying to go as long as possible without learning his name, and there it is in the "most read" section.)
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/e3/00/48e300bd908c68932c86...
(The building and wall looked very British to my British eyes, but a Google image search by the URL brought that article straight up.)