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Comment by mads | Hacker News Reader

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

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Yes, insects are also vastly reduced. In my region, there’s an increase in ticks (and tick-borne disease) because there are less insects, leading to less birds, leading to thriving ticks. So, an annoying side effect of reduced insect count is that we have lots of ticks in our gardens.

BTW we have non-organic agricultural fields in 50m distance of our house, so that _might_ be a factor for the dying insects.

Oh, and organic agriculture also uses pesticides. They just use different („natural“) ones.

You'd think there'd also be an uptick (ha!) in animals that eat ticks, but maybe that takes a lot longer to correct itself. If it wasn't for the prevalence of pesticides, insect populations would restore due to a shift in balance - that is, less insects = less predators eating them, less predators = more insects, etc.

I’m afraid a couple ticks per garden are not enough for any animal to survive..

The dramatic reduction in insects on car windscreens could be "explained away" by technological advances in car design (getting windscreens covered in insects could conceivably have been a problem great enough for someone to have invested time and money into resolving with more efficient aerodynamics of windscreens or whatever). Not saying that is actually the cause, just that many people could rationalise it as such.

The earthworms on a path or road is slightly more troubling though. Not something I'd thought about before, but there is a path through a park where I grew up that used to be covered in earthworms after every rain when I was a child, but the odd times I've been back up since in similar conditions I've not noticed any at all. Being a park it wouldn't have been exposed to more intensive farming or anything else. Same park, just a different time.

Chilling thought that there could be significant and detrimental changes underway in nature, happening on generational timescales so slowly that no-one notices, a little like the proverbial frog in boiling water.

> The dramatic reduction in insects on car windscreens could be "explained away" by technological advances in car design

I have been driving the same car for 20 years with the same roof-rack. 20 years ago the roof-rack was crusted with insects after each trip on the autobahn. I had to clean them off with a bucket of water and a sponge after each trip. I remember this because it was a standard routine. These days, when I come back from a trip, there is nothing. I haven't cleaned the rack for years.

With the introduction of LED lighting and lighting becoming cheaper with it, the amount of artificial light at night has increased over the last decades and may be contributing to declining insect populations as has been noted in the UK and Germany.

Same car? Could improved aerodynamics play a part?

Might be it.. Ford Mondeo back then and an Opel Meriva today.

I noticed the effect motorcycling. With an aerodynamically unchanged helmet and headlight, riding mainly naked bikes.

Last time I saw this crop up in a thread another comment claimed they actually were using the same car.

Maybe 50 years of these rivers of metal boxes reliably taking out trillions of insects yearly has played a part too.

I also observe less insects on my windshield, same car as 25 years ago.

You drive too far. That's insane.

Time wise though, it might be a faster commute than in Silicon Valley.

Around 1.5 hours today each direction, but I am commuting to a different country and have to cross a bridge.

Back then it was 1 hour or so - maybe a little less if traffic was good.

How can you waste that much of your life? You've spent almost an entire year over the past ten years just moving your body around because other people want you to.

This would be considered a long but not especially noteworthy commute in the US.

1.5 hours each way gets you into the “supercommuter” level but 1 hour each way is fairly common.

I did just over an hour each way for three months and questioned what the point was. I was wasting my life just so I could live in one place and work in another, but for what? My "living" basically consisted if eating and sleeping and my body started to become fat and unhealthy due to not having the time to exercise. What's the point of transporting a fat, useless body 100 miles every day?

Oh, I'm 100% onboard that one of the quickest ways to improve your life is to lower your commute time. I'm just saying commuting that long is not a particularly odd thing to do.

Being overweight is not a particularly odd thing either. It's not good, it's just mundane.

I guess you eradicated all insects along your commute route.

More seriously, my car is full of dead insects just from a few trips to the airport and I live in a metro area with almost 2 million people.

Possibly a factor. I think it's quite likely insect numbers are declining but some amout of the windscreen affect could be accounted for by good old Darwin - all those insects you scraped off your windscreen found their reproductive success curtailed with extreme prejudice.

Could the design of cars be the driving factor?

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