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Comment by jboggan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the insect die-offs that have been reported lately are linked to a nutrient deficiency such as this.

It's amazing to think about the scarcity of various metabolites and how they might become concentrated in different populations and species over long time scales. I wonder if these phenomena are long scale oscillations that we are just scientifically observant enough to begin noticing.

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It's quite possible. There is mounting evidence showing that higher atomspheric CO2 leads to loss of protein and certain micronutrients in both crops[0] and wild plants[1], and it wouldn't be a stretch to think the same thing is happening to other secondary metabolites required by species up the food web.

[0]:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-global-warmi... [1]:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

One very striking thing I noticed is how this nutrient density decrease correlates with the observed obesity epidemic in mammals. There is a meta-analysis that came out of David Allison's¹ lab that examined studies of increasing rodent obesity: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/11...

There is roughly a 1% decrease in nutrient density for every 6.25ppm increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere. From 1945 to 1985 atmospheric CO₂ increased by about 35ppm, so there should be about a 5% decrease in nutrient density. According to the meta-study, rats increased their calorie intake by roughly 6%.

¹ Caveat: Allison is a notorious "PR scientist" whose career has been made out of helping the fast- and processed- food industries deflect any blame or accountability for the health and safety of their "products." The hypothesis of the paper is that the obesity epidemic is being caused by viruses and pollutants (without offering any evidence), and has nothing to do with McDonald's. This "viruses and pollutants" fairy tale can then be used as a deflection in fast-food PR and expert testimony in class-action lawsuits and government investigations.

That meta-analysis only looked at animals living among humans.

Is there any evidence of wild animals living far from humans getting fat as well?

If the latter are not affected, it would be reasonable to think that the former are fat because they are exposed to human junk food.

Junk food itself is a natural consequence of a food sector that has to grow in order to please its investors. Sell as much food as possible to whoever will buy it.

It can't shove food down people's mouth, but it can produce food that's deceptively tasty and manipulate our instincts.

One of the studies in the meta-analysis was about rats in agricultural areas ("From 1948 to 1986, male rats trapped in the rural area gained 4.5 per cent in body weight, while females gained 5.2 per cent, and the increases in the odds of obesity were, respectively, 19 and 26 per cent"). They are not eating junk food.

There is a paper from 2010 about obesity in marmots: https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/news.2010.366.h...

I'm still unconvinced.

"Feral rats. Our sample consisted of 6115 (2886 males, 3229 females) wild Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) that were captured in the central alleys of high-density residential neighbourhoods using single-capture live traps, while rural rat populations were sampled from parklands and agricultural areas in areas surrounding the city [12,13], between the years 1948 and 2006."

I can't cross-check the methodological validity since neither articles are available online (the second one appears to be, but if you follow the links you end up with a n unrelated 1975 article on beach voles :-). No info is given on the distance between the traps and human habitations. Also, no idea on how comparable the sample from 1949 is with the one from 1989. They were not written by the same authors, and the 1989 authors don't cite the 1949 paper (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1484756086713821658...).

Had they compared rodent populations from places that the obesity epidemics has yet to reach (read: poor countries), it would be more convincing.

For marmots, the proposed hypothesis was that the longer summers let them eat more food and shortens the hibernation period during which they usually lose weight.

If you want to know whether atmospheric CO2 has an impact on rodent weight, you can devise a controlled experiment where they live in, and are fed with plants grown in controlled atmospheres. No idea if such a study has been performed.

It just occurred to me that even for domestic animals, the "fast food" hypothesis cannot be true. There is now an obesity epidemic among horses: https://www.paulickreport.com/horse-care-category/obesity-ep... No one is feeding their horses human junk food.

No, but the perverse market forces that gave us human junk food also apply to pet food.

There is no horse "pet food." Horses are fed hay.

If only...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equine_nutrition#Types_of_feed

There's a study - unless I'm misremembering - about controlled diet groups getting bigger, which should't happen. But the articles are vague (all Allison related) and no concrete study pops out on Google :/

Getting to the root cause/s of the global insect absence is important because as the bottom of the food web goes in Holocene extinction event, so might we starve due to lack of pollinators and other vital insects and fauna that we depend on for raising crops. I hear it frequently on Thom Hartmann and just the other day on Paul Beckwith's YT channel about truckers and travelers not seeing bugs on their vehicles on long trips across Canada, US and Europe. I wonder if Russia, China, Brazil, Argentina and India are the same: do they also not have to clean their vehicles of bugs from long trips as was the case 30-40 years ago?

Someone on reddit dug up nutritional information on insects and found that they do in fact have a lot of B1:

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/ahpwqe/see_below_...

Birds have been observed to eat each other's brains. This article blames it on climate change, but nutrient deficiencies make much more sense: https://www.popsci.com/great-tits-murder-climate-change

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4oEM0W6mhM (possibly NSFW/L)

It could be both, no? Climate change leading to change in the nutrional makeup of their regular diet?

Well, yes, but there is no reason to assume that climate change is the only, or even the primary cause of the decline. It's likely a specific nutrient that is yet unknown and thus its intake is not monitored.

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