Insect Apocalypse German Bug Watchers Sound Alarm | Hacker News Reader

Insect Apocalypse German Bug Watchers Sound Alarm

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284 pointsTakakiTohno196 comments

I wish that articles like these could end with at least some point of action that I could take to improve the situation. If the public should act, give them something actionable: Calling their local council, joining an organization, not cutting your lawn, whatever.

As anyone's who's been trained in crowd control during emergencies knows, you don't just sound alarm without at the same time telling people what to do. Journalists should take at least some kind of the same responsibility. Otherwise, people will either panic or stop listening.

Just because you can report a problem doesn't mean you have a solution. That doesn't mean the problem is not worth reporting.

I haven't seen panic. People can't stop listening since they haven't even started. Most people don't know about this, don't care, or can't see the big picture.

But repeating works.

We know it works, because that's how TV ads work.

So I'm all OK with repeating that again, and again.

People getting tired of it ? Meh, they still watch TV after the 1876th coca cola ad. And then they go buy soda.

I'll take the chance of repeating a wholesome message.

It's more complicated than this. I listened, I cared, for years. Then I stopped. How can I continue caring when everyone around me exploits the way things are and gets ahead because of it?

What we need is a mass awakening. We need everyone to care at the same time to see anything change.

We won't act unless we have role models acting before our very eyes. We won't act untile there is a problem directly in front of us. Until that time you may count on the status quo continuuing.

>It's more complicated than this. I listened, I cared, for years. Then I stopped. How can I continue caring when everyone around me exploits the way things are and gets ahead because of it?

Through the magic of principles? Life should not be about getting ahead, but about doing what's right.

What is right? How can a person know? I don't think that principles are much more than oral tradition. And many of us don't have that in the modern world.

>What is right? How can a person know?

We watch, we experience, we learn, we read, we ask around, we interact.

Same as with any other thing. If I stole your wallet you'd immediately knew it wasn't right, wouldn't you?

>I don't think that principles are much more than oral tradition.

Well, I don't think oral tradition is not a good basis to base principles on. It implies historical experience, communal values, the test of time, and so on.

It might not be perfect, but then again, it need not be.

I would know it was theft. I would assume it was right relative to the goals of the thief, albeit not myself, or the statutory codes. Right is a measure of social validation, or ideological compliance. (Both of which are transmitted via oral tradition)

I agree that oral tradition is not a good basis to base principles on, lol. Welcome to my world.

Well, I have principles based on logically reasoning backward from a subjective utopian ideal. No oral tradition or religious dogma here.

"What is right" and "what is wrong" are good questions - ask yourself that repeatedly, over years, and you can find your principles too. "Why is X right/wrong?" are also helpful :)

what is the utopian ideal? Did you read it somewhere? (Was it communicated orally?) With the utopian ideal being subjective... it does seem fairly arbitrary. I don't generally see right as being useful in any way. It's unnuanced. And seems to revert to a tradition of some kind or another.

My (not "the") utopian ideal is one that actively minimizes suffering of sentient life... aiming for zero socially inflicted suffering (war, famine, coercion, etc) and in harmony with the environment (sustainable environmental exploitation). Working backwards involves details of socioeconomic structures and so on... but that's my ideal in a nutshell.

It is subjective. I said that from the beginning. The value of strong principles is being able to make decisions with intent and confidence.

Unless you consult an RNG for every decision, you still live by a set of principles... emergent, unexplored, uninformed ones, but principles nonetheless. Why do you work? Why do you do that work? Heck, why do you do laundry?

I mean there's a whole book on the subject, it's just that most modern folk cast it off as fairy tales for ignorant superstitious people. But the more I read about it, the more I feel like we have the same problems and neuroticism as people did in Jesus' time.

>>Through the magic of principles? Life should not be about getting ahead, but about doing what's right.

What if our value system equates "right" with "things that help me get ahead"?

Yep!

My own personal change to a lower level of consumption is driven by a modified form of greed: spend less, invest more, retire earlier. Even if my investments aren’t as profitable as I’d hoped, my lower level of consumption is still going to be easier to sustain on whatever income I have than a stereotypical German one, let alone the middle-class American level I grew up with.

Practical example: the lawn of our townhouse looks awful. Instead of doing the very spendy thing of hiring a gardening service to fix it, or the still spendy thing of replanting with lawn grass, I’m doing a bit of research to find something that won’t require much ongoing maintenance, will improve the soil (nitrogen-fixing), and will make pollinating insects happy.

Clover

That’s pretty much the conclusion I’ve reached; now just narrowing down which species (or mix thereof) will make things better in a year or two but won’t be a complete PITA to deal with if I later want to take the next step and grow food.

I have had success growing veges in small pots then moving them to my clover garden after pulling patches of clover out where I want to plant. In my experience that slows it down for long enough for the plant to get established.

Clover provides enough benefits to your soil and ecosystem of your garden that I think it’s a net win in any case.

Another ground cover I am experimenting with is strawberries. I let them get established (planted January) then added some clover and wildflower seeds in March. The strawberry plants are still growing and haven’t been outcompeted at all.

That’s my experience anyway. I’m just a hobby “natural” gardener so I might be messing up without realizing it.

Clover is a good idea but it also needs to be cut or ate eventually. Worth a try though.

When I mow my lawn I avoid mowing my small but growing natural clover patches.

When I do mow, all the clippings become mulch for my veggies, or mixed with leaves to compost.

I have had success growing veges in small pots then moving them to my clover garden after pulling patches of clover out then mulching then where I want to plant. In my experience that slows the clover down for long enough for the plant to get established.

I think you just described the “tragedy of the commons”. It’s where people’s self interest is contrary to the groups intrest.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Exactly. That's why I don't think the "social score" idea from China is so stupid after all.

I hate this egoistic, pseudo-individualistic lifestyle that is sold here in the west just because it helps people to feel like they'd really be free.

It's a big lie that "the capital" uses for marketing purposes and a common sense seems to be on the loss here.

Consequently we'll all suffer from this egoism if we don't find a solution in this century (perhaps even in the 1st half of it).

But this criticism is always dismissed quickly with the "communism club" that indoctrinated people who don't think for themselves love to use.

Egoism is not bad - it's inevitable. Abrahamic values teach this literal self-hatred and "humans as innately evil" line but it has no basis in reality.

See the work of Max Stirner on a rehabilitation of egoism and why a union of egoists (differing from a society only in the voluntary nature of the association) isn't synonymous with "egoistic psudo-individualism"

> Abrahamic values teach this literal self-hatred

Have you actually ever read the "Abrahamic" scriptures? How about the Hindu scripture, say the Gita? Any Sutras?

Ego Sublimation is not "self-hatred". It is the next "inevitable" step.

I think so, too.

There's just not enough room and resources for a world full of egoists who all want to be snow flakes.

IMO forgiving yourself for your mistakes is much healthier than hating yourself for your mistakes, which is what I see out of secular people.

I didn't say that "all egoism is bad". A little bit helps you to stay healthy when helping others for example (if you're sick and weak you cannot help others anymore).

What I very much dislike however is this artificially pushed ego that a lot of people in the west have to force upon the people they deal with.

Personally I am not friends with people who don't manage to restrain their ego to benefit the happiness of the group and let others a chance to take part in it - we want to enjoy a good evening and not do whatever this one person thinks everyone "has to enjoy" or listen to his "heroic stories" all night long (do that on your birthday or with your sports team if they like that).

Also there's people who don't dominate groups as soon as they see one and it's weak empathy skills, ignorance and just rude behaviour to act like that. A lot of intelligent people notice that and though some women are sexually aroused by males who behave that "alpha way" it's not necessary to do that all the time (also some women are turned off by that so it depends on who you want to impress and if you have other qualities to show off).

I'm not familiar with the Abrahamic teachings afaik. This is no self-hatred, I love myself! I said I hate how I see things going on here in the west considering ego, individualism etc.

Also I don't say that humans are all evil starting from birth - I think many are just weak. They aren't strong and disciplined enough to be the best the could and IMHO a government has 2 possibilities here: a) help them to be better by giving them education etc. (at some level important for democracy to work at all) OR b) set constraints and punish those who don't respect them (money fines, jail,...) and/or incentivize good behaviour (give them some kind of credit which is useful for them to achieve goals or get something/somewhere).

Here in the west I know we have credit bureaus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_bureau) who already do such a thing. If you behave "good" (in their definition of course) you can lend money easier to buy a house. If you live in the wrong place for some time, have a criminal record or didn't pay back money in the past as you promised you are punished with a lower score which prevents you from lending a certain amount of money or anything at all.

So there is not that much of a difference here between China and the rest of the world - I think it's important to acknowledge that. China just went a step further and it's, well how should I put it, "China". Many people think they can judge their (govt's) behaviour and that the western civilization does a better job. Some even believe it's a communist country, which just isn't true but it helps to increase the old "C-fear" that still lingers in the brains of many westerners.

The Stirner example seems very constructed and I don't think you can see that condition in nature. Have you ever seen a group of egoists? I tell you something from work with young people - in the process of groups most of the times a leader-figure stands out of the group. When there are 2 people with a "big ego" and both won't accept the other one the group will either be split or one of the "alphas" will be pushed out of the group. That's just my experience. They don't get along well with each other because everyone thinks his opinion is the most valued and his well-being is the goal he tries to set as the groups goal but it just doesn't work like that.

Human history has shown that cooperation is the way to go and that implies finding a common goal and putting one's egoistic feelings and wishes aside to help the group achieving this goal.

I could go on like this but only will do that if you really want to discuss it.

> I listened, I cared, for years. Then I stopped.

Please don't take my comment as a personal attack. I am really wondering if you could elaborate on what you mean by "cared" and "stopped"?

From my own experience, once you make some profound (permanent) changes to your lifestyle it's not even that easy to just stop and go back any more.

> How can I continue caring when everyone around me exploits the way things are and gets ahead because of it?

Nice guys finish last. The tragedy of the commons. Etc.

Guys, people won’t give up eating meat unless you give them alternatives that are as good or better. The Impossible Burger might do more to save the world than all journalists put together.

Now we need alternatives to non-biodegradable plastic, and fossil fuels. We have them! We could have had them much earlier if goverment got involved. Other kinds of plastic. Electric cars.

We need alternatives to the lazy pesticides we use. We are all for the short win. Our culture is likened to instant gratification children, and we are borrowing on a credit card that our children and grandchildren will be stuck with. The bill always comes due!

Exactly: The Coke ad is actionable and makes you feel good. I at least want the first part to be true for alarmist journalism.

Repetition alone does not work. For most people it is just noise that their brain filters out a few seconds or minutes later. There are key differences between very few ads that really stick vs regular ads.

If actionable items aren't important how do you know people aren't listening

Stop using pesticides. Gardening uses more chemicals per area than farming by at least an order of magnitude, as people don’t care about cost. It’s not something that will solve everything, but it’s a thing you can do, now.

> Stop using pesticides.

That. Though I'm very skeptical about the rest of your message. Do you happen to have any source by chance?

And also try not to buy (or at least avoid it as often as possible) products that come from those that use pesticides to reduce the impact of farming.

OTOH going all the way to organic farming means more area needed for the same output, exacerbating the biodiversity threat due to land use change.

Similarly, no-till farming has environmental benefits, but probably needs more herbicides.

> And also try not to buy (or at least avoid it as often as possible) products that come from those that use pesticides

That's not possible unless you grow all of your own food. And if you do you'll realize how much of your crops are lost to insects due to not using pesticides.

While I don't use any pesticides, farms and cities use high amounts of pesticides. Farms apply pesticides by crop-dusting and with tractors. Cities drive trucks up and down every street fogging the entire city with mosquito pesticides.

If enough people complained to the cities about the harmful effects of spraying, they may stop. Convincing agriculture to use less pesticides would be much harder and likely involve powerful lobbies at the state and federal level.

put plants in your garden that feeds insects and stop tilling the land https://www.growveg.co.uk/guides/no-dig-gardening-an-easier-...

Also, dig a small pond. An old bucket sunk in the ground will do, just an area of standing water. This will rapidly become a breeding ground for insects.

That sounds like a bad idea if you don’t like mosquitoes.

Also illegal to do in some communities

Interesting - I've never heard of that, can you point me to some specific instances where that's banned?

I want to say most counties down in the Phoenix area have rules against it. I easily found Maricopa county rules and with time could find more

Chapter III, Regulation 2, of the Maricopa County Health Code states:

"No person shall cause, maintain, or within his control, permit any accumulation of water in which mosquitoes breed or are likely to breed. The owner, occupant, or person in control of any place where mosquitoes are breeding, or which constitutes a breeding place for mosquitoes shall take all necessary and proper steps to eliminate the mosquito breeding and to prevent its recurrence . . ."

The problem is "we don't like mosquitoes" so we have eliminated their breeding areas, consequentally we have eliminated the breeding area of a host of other insects. So, now we have no insects, so either we put up with mosquitoes or we put up with environmental catastrophy, or we come up with $newidea that solves the problem. Do you have an instance of $newidea to avoid mosquitoes?

Fair point.

After a small web digging, here are few ideas:

- making tiny green spots on your balcony / garden (enough to let insects live)

- guerrillagardening

I’m not sure that there is a meaningful action to solve these problems that the public would actually take. It would require reducing our agricultural output, which would mean producing less, more expensive food.

I think there are too many people. Problems of loss of habitat and the use of pesticides and fertilisers to increase food production are all solved with <less people>.

The problem will solve itself, unfortunately.

Even if we had cold fusion and unlimited free energy, we'd still have the problem of too many people.

Unfortunately the people who will and are suffering from this, are the ones who did not cause these problems in the first place.

I think both problems will be solved with <less oil>. Population (of any species) is a function of available energy. Every since we humans learned to supplement our food supply using fossilised energy stores our numbers have skyrocketed. Take that energy away (hello Peak Oil) and our numbers will, inevitable fall.

If we had unlimited free energy, we'd certainly still have too many people, not to mention cooking the biosphere with the waste heat from fusion processes.

> ... cooking the biosphere with the waste heat from fusion processes

Yes!

Waste heat from thermodynamic process is something that I've never seen mentioned or discussed, only greenhouse gasses. Almost all the energy we use ends up as heat.

I'm not sure it's the population that's the problem -- there are a number of factors.

If we globally stopped eating meat then a large portion of the land used for agriculture to produce livestock feed would not be needed and could return to forest. And we'd all live and be healthier for it (yay less heart disease and cancer). The amount of land used to grow food to feed cows is a large portion of the total agriculture output.

Organic farming seems like it could be sustainable even if portions of our stocks are taken by insects. It'd be manageable without pesticides. And if we invest more in genetically modified vegetables we could grow them to be resistant to pests without filling the environment with pesticides.

We humans used to be pretty good at permaculture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

Population is ultimately the problem.

All land will either be used for housing or food production, there will be none "spare" for wildlife or environmental purposes.

> I wish that articles like these could end with at least some point of action that I could take to improve the situation.

See this comment for an idea:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20335198#20336220

The actions taken should be quite obvious and around here I can see a bit of those: keep more areas natural. Just today I noted, how public grass stripes are not mowed this year - while usually they were mowed weekly. A wide selection of flowers are growing there now, this should benefit all kind of insects a lot. There was also a public referendom recently here in Bavaria. It successfully required more areas set aside for insect population, where no agriculture is allowed and no pesticides.

There is no solution to species being extinct. They're just gone. No coming back.

And even reducing the rate of loss is likely impossible. Our food supply basically depends on killing insects. Although it's possible to change practices, to kill less insects, that would be logistically impractical.

Through this lens it seems obvious we should switch to cultivating and consuming insects.

> And even reducing the rate of loss is likely impossible.

This is far too pessimistic. We put a person on the moon, but we can't improve our agriculture practices to stop ravaging the insect ecosystems?

That was far less complicated. There were just two competing countries, both throwing money at it, and both wanting military spinoffs.

There have been efforts, off and on in recent decades, to transform US agricultural practices. And also in many other countries. But agricultural lobbies are strong, and resist measures that reduce profitability. And governments resist measures that reduce production, and increase risks of shortages and famine.

There are maybe a few sectors where need for insects is recognized. Bees, certainly, and some soil dwellers. But mostly they're just pests to be killed, or at best irrelevant.

This is much like climate change. And it's all part of the Great Anthropocene Extinction that we're in the midst of. Tragically, efforts to reduce impacts will begin at scale only once it's too late for them to do much. It's like me and that liter of ice cream in the freezer. All the knowing in the world won't keep me from eating it, if I'm tired and hungry enough.

We have online one course of action: make companies accountable to their impacted communities.

And there is only one reliable method of accomplishing that: industrial unions.

Call to action should be SOP.

I stopped attending book tour events for this very reason.

What better time to rally and organized concerned (self-selecting) citizens? How hard would it be to give a shout out to relevant local orgs? Or to invite local experts up to the mic during the Q&A.

But the times I've tried to organize local tie-ins with national authors, the authors have been oblivious (eg hadn't occurred to them, seemed disinterested) and the host facilities actively thwart it (eg don't distribute literature on our property).

It's maddening.

As a counter point, Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! makes the effort to connect their audiences to the local orgs.

* Look into permaculture and its many low tech DIY solutions to support your local habitats.

* Do guerillia gardening a throw seed bombs ever you can.

* Reduce your waste output. Try worm composing when you live in a flat.

* Use a bike or public transport instead of a car.

Find out who's responsible for destruction of hay meadows and similar in your country, and start a campaign to get this habitat restored.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0128fk5

> When we hear about the threat to some of our precious and important habitats, our minds often turn to the polar ice cap or the rainforests of the Amazon. But one of our most threatened natural environments is right here in the UK and that is the traditional upland hay meadow - fields packed with grasses and wild flowers, alive with bird song and the buzz of bees. Sadly these meadows have almost disappeared from our landscape. There are less than 4 square miles of this habitat left in the UK and around 40% of that is in the North Pennines. A lot of hard work is currently being undertaken to protect and preserve what we have left. [...]

https://www.plantlife.org.uk/uk/about-us/news/real-action-ne...

> over 97% of our meadows have been eradicated since the 1930s

The German parliament had two interesting votes last week:

(1) Recoginze the ongoing climate catastrophe - propose measure to counter act [1]

(2) Stop using coal power stations [2]

You can guess how the ruling parties voted. It makes me furious in the light of recent devastating news (No permafrost in Candian arctic, melting Greenland ice, hottest June in Germany since record keeping, Anchorage seeing unprecedented temperatures...)

===

[1] https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimm...

[2] https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimm...

What alarms me even more is that the insect apocalypse is MORE urgent than climate change.

Humans ability to adapt will be tested in the near future I fear. Not only due to tensions among humans but the disasters we are creating in nature.

And almost infinitely easier to stop. All we need to do is ban a relatively small number of insecticides and insect populations will rebound in a very small number of years.

You should probably write up your findings so you can gather a lot of research money and fame. /S

If only things were that simple...

I am not sure if pesticide usage has increased in Western Europe since the early ninetees. But I am certain that agriculture has been de-intensified as a whole in the former GDR. And it's not an insect paradise here...

In France in 2010, they signed some "green pact" promising to reduce the quantity of pesticides by 30% before 2020. Reality check: pesticide use grew by nearly 20% since this "pact".

They play us like violins.

To me this reveals three possibilities:

1. There is confidential information that the damage is irreversible at this point (e.g. permafrost is melting three times faster and 70 years earlier than expected) and any attempts to break the layers upon layers of prisoner's dilemmas are completely futile.

2. The political caste does not care about more than 20 years into the future because most of them will have died by then (avg. age of the conservative parties is 60(!) [1]).

3. The dangers of a manmade climate catastrophe are being overstated.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/192255/umfrag...

Sorry the same people who peddled "Its not happening" for years, don't get to switch over and start with "its too late to do anything about it" as a new excuse to not act.

Sure they get to, as long as they control politics.

Anybody can do a little bit to help insects. It ranges from planting a pot of some flowers, to building an insect hotel, to switching to a more natural lawn or talking to your city council to replace parts of the lawns in parks with more insect friendly meadows.

However, I don't see how I as consumer can choose agricultural products that are friendlier to insects. Organic agriculture also uses pesticides and monocultures. Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea, but other than that how can I judge the impact my food choices have on biodiversity?

Local councils in England are reducing the amount of grass cutting they do on verges of roads - so more flowers (presumably good for insects) and cheaper!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-48772448

More vegetation at the sides of roads also helps to hide all the litter.

Around here they only mow when there's an election upcoming, and every week for the last 6 weeks for some unknown reason.

> Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea

Actually, areas used for grazing usually have more diversity, more flowers and thereby more insects, compared to something like a similarly sized wheat field.

Unfortunately most meat does not come from grazing animals. And if we were to convert the whole meat industry into grazing we wouldn't be able to produce meat in the same quantity, which would mean exactly reduced meat intake for everyone.

That's definitely true. Factory farming is definitely an issue, and in more ways than one.

My point is that we need grazing cattle too, since we (as a species) took the liberty of wiping out most of the naturally occurring grazers and thereby wrecked the balance.

The "easy" way would be to limit the spread of humanity in order to reduce the load on the ecosystem, but that would result in numerous demographic issues instead. Fun times ahead!

Buying meat from animals that actually saw the sun before they were killed is usually a good way of drastically reducing your meat intake because it's much more expensive that what you usually find at your local supermarket.

It's not that difficult or expensive in Germany (and most of Europe), though.

Wouldn’t consuming dairy products still be a better choice than meat in that case? (atleast if we are talking about cows and sheep, since I don’t think more climate friendly meat like chickens and pigs adds that much to biodiversity)

Meat from grazing animals has a lot of additional positive effects re. biodiversity, and preventing desertification. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI (How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change | Allan Savory)

But how much meat comes from grazing? Factory farming livestock is a major consumer of monoculture crops.

A lot. Large parts of the world’s «farm area» is land used for grazing and may not be suitable for monoculture farming. I don’t know if this applies to the meat found in your particular neighbourhood, though.

That just means a high percentage of the area is used for grazing, but I believe OP was asking how much of the total meat produced (by weight?) comes from grazing.

You can feed ten times as many people with the wheat that grows on a similarly sized wheat field.

Or keep feeding just one person and turn the rest into a meadow with flowers, bushes, hedges and trees.

Imagine that.

For the ones interested, here's something in Wikipedia about this topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...

You can't, because "man cannot live off bread alone". Wheat lacks many basic nutrients that meat contains. Calories are not fungible - you can live off meat essentially indefinitely (especially if you eat the organ meat), but you'll rapidly a nasty case of iron deficiency and scurvy if you try to live off wheat.

I feel this fact is often omitted from naive assessments of food efficiency. It's not nitpicking, it's a fundamental law - bioaccumulating reasonable levels of nutrient density will always take more energy that just building up raw calories. Vegans need to eat fatty, nutrient-dense plants like nuts and avocados to survive - these foods invariably have a much worse environmental footprint to wheat. I'd be interested to see comparative estimates of the impact of a "careless vegan" who eats exotic, problematic foods versus a "conscientious meat eater", who only eats locally sourced pasture-raised livestock.

Given that chicken is reasonably good from a CO2/calorie viewpoint, my guess is that avocados flown in from the other side of the world are worse, but I'd also be interested in sources.

I'm very sorry to disagree, in my opinion this is nitpicking. Yes, you cannot live from wheat alone, insofar you are correct. But that was not the point of my reply.

The point of my reply - to flesh it out - was that you need only use about 10 percent of the area required for cattle if we instead consume these calories directly. That doesn't have to be wheat, it can be peas, beans, nuts, beets, potatoes, celery and on and on.

If you are concerned about nutrients, there's always chickens. Chickens are so vastly more efficient when it comes to land use than cattle, it's not even funny anymore. I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.

Thanks for your reply!

Edit: I'm not a vegan, by the way. Not even a vegetarian. I enjoy the taste of meat and especially beef. But I'm convinced that the amount of resources we spend on meat - especially on beef - cannot be justified by anyone in good conscience.

>> I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.

If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please.

So I think that what you are proposing, in good will I have no doubt, is not a solution to the problem of feeding many people healthy and nutritious food. It's one more way to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps.

At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.

> If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much beef as they please.

Yeah, so what? The rich have always done as they pleased. This will only change when the revolution comes.

> [...] to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by throwing them scraps.

Protein is protein. I happily eat heart and intestines and liver and brain and tongue and whatever parts of an animal there are. Just as almost all my ancestors (and yours, for that matter) did. As long as it's free of disease and contaminants, I'm fine with that.

You have to understand that this picking of choosing of "better" or "worse" food is only possible because of an incredible, unsustainable exploitation of our natural habitat. We are killing our own biological support system. This has to stop.

> At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces, rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.

I don't propose we let any food go to waste. I propose we use more efficient means to produce enough calories for everyone on this planet, so we can all prosper without the predatory exploitation of the ecosystem that is required nowadays.

That said; beef and mutton and pig is way too cheap. How about we actually include all the externalized costs in the price and let the market work it out?

I'm sorry, I didn't understand your comment about my ancestors eating hearts and livers etc. I am Greek and we don't consider offal to be inedible, quite the contrary. For example, we make an absolutely heavely dish called kokoretsi that consists of the heart, lungs, liver and spleen of a lamb wrapped up in its long intestine. I've made a couple of them myself (although it's a bitch to clean the intestines properly because they're full of shit). We make soups from the same bits of the animal, and/or its stomachs, as well as a kind of sausage with its organs stuffed into its intestine, and so on.

We also eat snails, in a red sauce with garlic and parsley (but not any kind of insect).

All these are considered delicacies, to be enjoyed in special times (religious feasts and the like), and with some good wine to accompany them, it goes without saying.

Perhaps this is a reason why I see the matter differently than you do? My people are used to the idea of it not being right to throw out anything when we slaughter an animal to eat it. If (further) Westerners did the same, meat consumption would significantly improve in efficiency.

I also don't understand your comment about "the revolution". What revolution is that?

The comment about ancestry was mainly intended for perspective.

For most of humanities time on earth, we didn't have the luxury to throw away perfectly fine food. We'd eat offal and insects and everything that came our way just to get by. People nowadays tend to forget that.

I quite enjoy snails, although usually with french-style herbal sauce. I also like eating insects, although (I mentioned that before) they are much to expensive.

And they'll have to get cheaper if we want to feed any significant number of people with healthy protein. Because, let's be clear about that, we're not going to do that with beef or mutton or pig. There's not enough land to go around for that, if we want to keep any semblance of an intact ecosystem. Anywhere on earth.

Feeding the whole planet with beef or mutton or pig would mean to strip down every last acre of forest and turn it into pasture or giant monocultures for feeding livestock. And that's not how ecosystems work.

All in all, I don't actually think that we see things that differently.

Have fun!

Edit: Ah, yes. The Revolution bit was a reference/joke with regards to "The Rich". ;)

I'm not poor and I think crickets are tasty. I've had them fried I've had them as flour and I've had them on pizza. All they really need is their Impossible Burger moment to go viral because it's not the taste it's the idea of eating bugs that's unattractive here.

Sorry. I eat crustaceans, which are basically sea insects. But, crickets? Yew.

That said, I've seen some insects that are traditionally eaten. I seem to remember a kind of big, fat, white grub that is eaten in Mexico? Pictures I saw looked quite appetising.

But, crickets? Yew. They're like cockroaches with little violins. No thanks.

Well, that's very similar to what most people thing about eating liver or lung or snails!

I tried fried crickets at a local agricultural fair and I got to say they're not half bad as snacks. As an actual food source, well, I think we need to find other ways of eating them than just eating them fried with various spices.

The day someone creates some kind of mince-meat substitute using insects will be the day insects end up on the menu of the general populace in developed countries. We do love our burgers! :)

I'll just drop this here...

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-think-we-should-star...

I'm having trouble squaring the received wisdom on this with the numbers on this[1] page. Beef is 6 times less efficient than wheat, yes. But it's up to half as efficient as soybeans. Pork is actually a more efficient use of land than soybeans (and almost identical to celery[2], while containing vastly more nutrition). Chicken's nothing special.

[1] http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Calories_per_acre_for_vario...

[2] ((1/(6 inch)) * (1/ (2 foot)) plants/m^2) * (8 stalks / plant) * (64 grams / stalk) * (17kcal / 110 grams) = 3.448 million kcal / acre; planting guidelines from https://harvesttotable.com/vegetable_crop_yields_plants_p/ and nutrition information from https://recipeland.com/ingredients/celery-stalks-13931

Maybe the unsourced numbers on the page you linked to are plain wrong? I know, it's the first hit when you google, but let's do some more "research". I raise you a Wikipedia!

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

According to these numbers, soy beans produce about 16 times(!) as much protein for a given plot of land compared to beef. That's quite a difference.

Thanks for the reply!

Edit: I hope this doesn't sound condescending or suchalike. I'm really interested what the real numbers are, but the page you linked to (while honestly very intersting; permaculture! No-till-agriculture) is somewhat lacking in credibility. I hope we can find a tabulation that satisfies our curiosity and our purpose.

Oh, it's not condescending - like you say I just googled quickly and the beef one seemed close enough to be plausible, so I took a gamble that they were roughly right - To be honest I did the numbers manually on the celery first, then I got impatient. Thanks for the Wikipedia link - although it bears noting that edible protein is distinct from calories, and a good example of the complexity that calorie-focused "bioefficiency" metrics miss.

Glad I didn't offend!

And thanks for the nice exchange - much appreciated!

I generally agree with you - I don't think that you can survive well on just plants. At the same time I think that modern people eat way more meat than people used to eat in any other period of history, and probably much more than is necessary.

For example, the way I understand it, how people used to eat where I'm from (Greece) in the past is that they fed themselves very well on pulses, legumes, vegetables, fruit, plenty of fish, metric shittons of olive oil, and then only ate red meat in religious feasts, where a lamb or an ox would be sacrificed in ancient times, or just roasted on a spit and eaten whole, offal and all, in more modern times.

To be sure, I wasn't saying it was impossible to survive well on just plants (though it's certainly a bit more challenging and risky). It's just that naive comparisons of food efficiency don't tell the whole story. You need a lot of trace vitamins which you can only obtain by 1) taking a lot of a low-density source and concentrating it (like cooking an entire bag of spinach into a souffle to get iron), or 2) eating something which has done the concentrating for you, usually over a period of time. Either way, living off plants is considerably less efficient than "meat vs wheat" would suggest.

"Plenty of fish" is a problematic addition to the diet you describe - that's meat, plain and simple, with all of the bioefficiency loss and ecosystem disruption that entails. It's just less visible because it's underwater.

Depends where you are. What organic allows varies a fair bit around the world. UK's Soil Association is still stricter than the EU. I think US has one of the loosest. Not certain of how they all differ though.

I know Soil Assoc try to promote interculture (two crops at once), field margins and what not, but have know way to know how that translates to reality or just pretty words on a website entirely ignored by the farmers, though I can probably guess. Pesticide use does come with limits on what and how often so they can legally keep saying low pesticides.

I think that's about as low impact as it gets unless you have a decent sized garden as just about nowhere does it the old way any more.

Beyond that I just don't know, which is frustrating for all shopping - we're given no idea of the impact of choices so have to basically guess. It needs to be on labels, but producers would fight that tooth and nail.

The USDA publishes their list of approved chemicals.

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1...

I am fortunate in that I have a few acres in a tiny town in Central Europe and I don't need a financial return from the land. I now keep the back lot as a meadow garden instead of the giant cut lawn that it used to be. I made sure that the surrounding farmers were cool with it as I was worried they would hate a "pest farm" on my land, but they understand.

I own an additional 6 acres of farmland which I currently let a neighbor grow wheat on, but they spray all the normal ag-chems. I am looking at options for what to do with that as far as co2 mitigation and pro-bug land. My brother suggested that he could buy trees to plant as a carbon offset for every flight he takes out here. Maybe I could put the land in a trust, and open the tree purchasing to other folks that are looking for carbon offsets?

A large meadow and growing the forest seem like the best options at this point. I would love to hear any other suggestions.

> buy trees to plant as a carbon offset

I know you mean well, but unless you mean planting saplings - isn't buying trees just pushing around carbon offsets to change local figures while worsening global figures due to the cost of moving them?

Yes, sorry, that’s more or less what I mean. I was thinking of getting a few dozen 4-6 foot tall trees to start. But I really need to do a lot of research here and consult some people who are educated in this domain.

Try to create some wetland - a pond, or if there is a stream dam it and flood some of the land.

Unfortunately I don't think that's too much of an option. This is all on a decent grade and pretty dry.

dig a hole and line it to capture water? Honestly, from my anecdotal observations this single intervention will drive insect populations north fast.

You could plant some fast growing trees, turn them to charcoal and bury it. That's good for the soil and captures the carbon for a few millennia.

Why not directly buy the charcoal? It's not that expensive and you can get it done quicker than waiting for trees to grow.

Is there an advantage to turning it to charcoal? I mean the process would expel co2, right? Does charcoal sequester co2 better than raw dead wood?

>...how can I judge the impact my food choices have on biodiversity?

You can't, and neither you nor anyone else in this thread has any idea what to do about the insect apocalypse. Seems like insecticides, but we really don't know! Has insecticide use really increased that much since the 80s across the west? Doesn't seem likely. Maybe it is one specific insecticide used in growing X? Maybe some other chemical? Could be monoculture, disease, something that's already in the environment we can do nothing about; maybe it's solar panels and windmills (seriously -it's possible, and it would be ironic), maybe it's a change in drainage patterns, suburbanization, some chemical now commonly used in housing (or for all we know, skincare), changes in automotive shapes (maybe streamlined cars are more lethal to bugs somehow), or maybe insects are all "eff you, stupid apes, we're leaving before the Vogon constructor fleet gets here."

As for individual choice; as difficult as it may be for people to believe after a century of "do your bit" propaganda starting from the first world war; your actions may have no bearing on the matter. Telling people what to do when you don't know doesn't help, and acts as a sort of psychological purity ritual. Like the recycling that ends up shipped to Indonesia and dumped into the ocean; you may be making things worse. FWIIW this kind of crap was often used to give people something to do and distract them from real problems: most of the WW-2 "scrap" campaigns for the war effort were useless.

FWIIW I'm pretty sure the insect apocalypse isn't happening in northern Spain. The last time I was driving around there, the number of bugs on my windshield reminded me of when I learned to drive in the 80s. It is anecdata, but it was striking enough to be worth looking into.

>> Seems like insecticides, but we really don't know! Has insecticide use really increased that much since the 80s across the west?

The amount of insecticides used doesn't need to increase, to cause a mass extinction. A constant dose is enough, if it kills more insects in a given period, than are born in the same period. Over time, this will cause the number of insects to decrease steadily.

I don't understand how reducing meat intake benefits insects. Is there a connection?

I just know : my mom has a garden and in winter she used to feed the birds. Since 2 or 3 years the birds are not stopping eating this food when spring comes - my mom now feeds the birds all year. At the same time insect have become noticeably fewer

Your comment and this article are the first I noticed mentioning the birds as a second indicator. It means the cascade has started. Somewhere else, it's probably already acting as well: the soil, the plants, or stuff we don't know about.

I noticed last year and this year again when i drove ~800 km to a vacation. 10-20 years ago i had to wipe loads of sticky insect parts of my windshield. Not necessary anymore. I'd guess back then my windshield whould have caught ~200 bugs/hour and now it's more like ~10. So my highly subjective statistic says: insects are fucked and maybe so are we.

Maybe your modern car windshield glass is less sticky. Maybe your modern car aerodynamics is better and insects just fly around.

The problem may or may not exist, but your subjective statistic tells nothing.

There's plenty of proof it's true if you bothered to look. Here's but one example:

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/why-are-fire...

https://www.firefly.org/why-are-fireflies-disappearing.html

Something which I've also anecdotally noticed long before I researched it to confirm it's not my imagination. You can see it in action at my cousin's farm. Their prairie is a hive of activity and lights at night. The neighboring soy farm is dead.

As I said, it might be true. I personally believe it's true.

But the argument about windshield proves nothing.

If I say "don't open the door, there is a dangerous thing behind it, I saw it". Will you open the door or trust anecdotal evidence ?

The thing is, we need balance between facebook mum faith and requesting studies, numbers and white papers for every single little opinion.

I noticed fewer bugs on my windshield and called it _highly subjective_ statistics, already implying it proves nothing.

By coincidence I drive the same car as my mother did back then. And the same route. I will call it a standardized test then and wait for further peer review.

A hundred cars, helmets and various transparent windows accross 20 years of a travel life, cross referenced with your friends and family experienced may not be scientific. Hell it may not be a representative sample.

But it's a damn good hint.

I don't remember much more insects 10 years ago.

(Actually, I don't remember, because I moved from the countryside to the city centre, and rarely visit countryside, but that's the point).

But I remember that the number of insects varies significantly depending on how much rain was that year, how far is the forest, how hot it is, and even what time of day it was what I was spent time outside.

I don't know, maybe it's very local climate change in your town, because the forest was replaced with high-rise buildings. Maybe you and your friends grew older and started waking up later/earlier.

So, no, random people on the internet opinions are interesting but do not contribute anything significant to the climate discussion.

And these personal experiences only give more confidence and more arguments to climate change deniers.

Unlike pointers to scientific research.

As lightgreen pointed out this anecdote doesn't mean anything alone. Many things could have shifted bug populations to other areas or changed their season.

As a counter anecdote my vehicle is covered in bugs. I should probably power wash my radiator.

Yes, this is a thing that I noticed, less bugs, less birds. In summer at 5am it used to be a real concert in my garden to the point that you got a natural alarm clock. Now? With my window open, there is quite quiet, an occasional bird song every 2-3 mins.

And yes, I live in Germany. It is alarming, and I fear the worst, a real threat to the ecology cycle.

"Bird populations in steep decline in North America, study finds"

> North America has more than a billion fewer birds than it did 40 years ago

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/report-fi...

And then, "Lyme and Other Tickborne Diseases Increasing"

https://www.cdc.gov/media/dpk/diseases-and-conditions/lyme-d...

It's crazy how disconnected from nature we have become to not notice in our everyday life an extinction event happening at this very moment.

I think it's more an issue of awareness. I do remember walking across a lawn in my childhood, and I do remember having to watch out not to step on any bees etc., as they were legion.

Nowadays, I am happy to see a few bees around.

I think we are just too "busy" to step back, open our eyes and actually watch the world we live in.

Some of us are noticing. I was discussing last year with my friends and family how clean your bikes helmets and cars windshields were compared to 20 years ago: no insect on it.

It's just that people carry on. They don't build their life. They don't make conscious choices, orientate their actions or try to think about the society they live it.

They just go through it, going from one small short term objective to another, most of the time motivated by a small pleasure or to avoid pain.

That is why people get fat, get stuck in traffic going to a job they don't like, going back to TV eating unhealthy food and indulging some kind of addiction.

Believe it or not this is also a big cause of couples staying together, marrying, making children. Not the grand idea of love. Inertia. Status quo.

Nature doesn't exists in the modern city, I wouldn't even be surprised if some people born after 2000 haven't seen stars in their entire life.

It's like when you have to do your homework but postpone it until the very last moment. Your profs tell you to work, your parents too, even your friends, and you know deep down that you're wrong, but you don't give a shit until you get the grade and think "if only I ...".

First world countries won't wake up until it gets bad (famines, war and mass immigration bad), until then it's just insects, birds and slightly warmer climate, surely people have bigger problems in their daily lives ...

https://timeline.com/los-angeles-light-pollution-ebd60d5acd4...

> Nature doesn't exists in the modern city, I wouldn't even be surprised if some people born after 2000 haven't seen stars in their entire life.

I live in London. The stars are still clearly visible here.

This one scares me. No one seems to be doing anything about it, and the results could be massive.

In 1958 Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows to be killed, as part of the famous Four Pests Campaign (Chinese: 除四害), because they ate too much grain. This caused one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Without birds, the population of insects grew massively and ate most of the plants, grains making one of the one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine.

So... We should kill sparrows?

Maybe we should control the predators of the insect species who are struggling.

How do you think this relates to our present crisis?

My large, extended family, notes this every year when we go to our family reunions in Northern Ontario: each year, our cars have fewer bugs than the previous year.

We've had the family reunion the same July weekend for 45 years now and our cars and trucks used to be just plastered with insects. Now there may be none at all.

The older I get, the more guilty I feel of even squashing an ant in my home -- they are living forms like us and we should be treating them with respect and give them space to thrive as well. And if this means setting up protected reserves for insects and to ban certain types of chemicals then so be it.

If it's an argentine ant and you're not in that part of the world, you should eradicate with prejudice as they're an invasive species.

Can someone explain to me why this is a bad thing? We used to go out of our way to kill insects in past decades, presumably because we'd prefer them dead. Now they are dying off and I'm not sure why I should be unhappy about this.

What are the bad consequences of this?

Because these insects are eaten by other animals which are eaten by other animals which are...

You get the point. The food chain can collapse and some animals are doing good things for the environment.

Add pollination to the equation and we're even more fucked =/

Insects also are primary processors of rotting biomass. Without them we will soon find that corpses last longer.

They are also the primary source of crop pollination. Without them much of our food won’t be pollinated and reproduce well.

We need them.

That's an interesting point.

Does that mean that projected times of death based on decomposition (As seen on the pseudo scientific scenes in CSI) could actually be drifting over time due to less decomposition agents?

Is their any data to back this hypothesis?

Anyone that tells you a time of death beyond about 20 hours is lying. And the estimates below that are usually based on processes that haven't changed (loss of body heat, chemical changes in blood, and bacterial processes in the gut).

So CSI was actually a lie! On a serious note, TIL.

This short video about wolves in Yellowstone National Park gives a good intro to the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

Sorry, I still don't understand what the bad consequences of some animals dying are. Aren't all animals we need kept and fed by us? What are these good things some animals are doing for the environment?

The term in the field is "Ecosystem Services" if you want to do some googling. We rely on nature for the air we breathe and the water we drink, we haven't figured out how to be independent yet.

Animals, insects, and plants all support each other to become flourishing ecosystems. Larger animals keep the population of smaller animals in check. Smaller animals keep the population of insects in check. I'm not an expert on specifically which animals and insects do what, I just know that a dense, varied ecosystems keep the planet running smoothly.

My favorite writer on the subject right now is 'Charles Eisenstein', who even proposes that ecosystems have a stabilizing effect on the weather -- it might not be that carbon dioxide / higher temperatures produce more chaotic weather systems, but that the ecosystems we are so careless to destroy have regulating effects on the production of clouds and precipitation. The less life there is on earth, the more chaotic the whole system becomes.

Like flowering plant species all dying?

We tried to kill the ones that were bad for us, like mosquitos, cockroaches, locust s, etc. But i the process, we ended up affecting the ones that are beneficial (bees) and the wild ones that are neither.

The consequences are a collapse of the food chain, like others already mentioned.

Not to sound overly optimistic, but I can imagine that a trend like this is less difficult to reverse than, say, climate change.

The scientific consensus about climate change seems to be that even if we can muster the political courage and will and do our darndest, we may already have passed the tipping point and will boil anyway.

As to the insect apocalypse: given a fighting chance, life has a way of veering back. This is of course if viable numbers of populations survive and keystone populations have not been extinguished. (Maybe this is just a complicated way of stating that ecological systems work on other timescales than the climate.)

Species loss is irreversible though.

You are so right. Insects are mass breeders, and it's common for the numbers of any given species to veer wildly from year to year. We may or may not be seeing a serious setback for insects in general, but given a chance, they will bounce back within a few short generations. And so will their predators, albeit over a longer stretch of time. For what it's worth, nature seems remarkably unperturbed up here a little north of Germany. Some counts up, some counts down. Two years ago, we had mice everywhere, this year hardly any. But then a recent infestation of butterflies, and the bats are doing extraordinarily well this summer, as are the spiders apparently - hardly indicative of any extreme dearth of insects.

The intriguing aspect is: This phenomenon is indeed observable everywhere (windshields) yet there is no obvious reason. Pesticide use should have gone down across all of Germany in the last 30 years. So should have general pollution. Warmer weather should actually help insects. Large natural reserves have been created (e.g., former military training grounds, depopulated areas in rural Germany).

So either this is caused by an as of now unknown agent, or we see some form of delayed effect.

> unknown agent

The only thing that comes to my mind besides the climate change is the increased EMF/RF radiation levels.

Yeah, that would fit the timeframe very well.

Wouldn't it be easy to find location correlates if this was the case? Strong EMF/RF radiation is rather spatially confined. If it was affecting insects, we should expect negative results in sparsely populated areas.

I'm doing everything I can in my own yard: growing vegetables without pesticides/herbicides, growing wildflowers/natural fauna in the majority of our gardens, etc.

And I'm growing sympathy for insects in my children! My daughter is obsessed with ants and we're getting into my childhood hobby of farming ants.

Etymology is almost as cool as mycology. I love insects, arachnids, and all of our crawly little friends!

I thought it was ironic that an advertisement for exterminators came up in the middle of the article. Another triumph for add algos ;)

This is also easily observed by anyone old enough who drives in the suburbs or rural areas, and it really jumped out at me a decade or more ago.

When's the last time you had to clean your windshield of a bunch of dead bugs (or a few large ones)? I remember when every gas fill up also meant using both the mesh sponge side and the squeegee side of a windshield washer, and you knew which gas stations kept those buckets filled and had good squeegees. How long since you used one of those to clean off a filthy windshield, or since you noticed if a gas station has good ones?

On a somewhat related note, how long since you had to do the same for bird droppings? And when you're parking at night or walking back to your car, do you have any issues with walking through the huge clouds of bugs around the lights or are there no longer any such clouds?

Edit: expanded and mobile corrections

i love in tokyo, and when i graduated school in 2011, i used to get bitten every summer like mad by mosquitos, you could see bugs everywhere in the spring and summer

for probably the past 5 years i haven’t been bit once, rarely see a mosquito or other bugs... something very strange has has happened in the past 10 years

Is there no pattern at all to the locations where the greatest decrease happened? If it’s pesticides then the traps nearest an active field of crops will show the greatest decrease. It doesn’t sound like they’re finding that. If it was road deaths then it would be near the roads. If it’s temperature then you would expect to see decreases in hot years, increases in cold years. If crawling insects are affected differently than flying ones, that tells you something. If it’s everywhere at once with no pattern whatsoever, well thats just baffling. It would have to do with the composition of the air or maybe the solar cycle or something else that affects everywhere at once.

I'm surprised to read no one seems to know what to do about this. There's a simple thing you can do and that is buying organic produce. Sure, it still uses some pesticides but not all and a lot less (at least in Europe, not sure about the US).

Off topic, but capitalizing words in titles in English really bothers me. Every word in the title are nouns, but some are here ment to be verbs. In German for example, only the nouns would have been capitalized, making the title much easier to read.

It's the standard (albeit inconsistent and undefined) for headlines, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Title_case

> "Since 1982, the traps we manufacture ourselves have been standardised and controlled, all of the same size and the same material, and they are collected at the same rate in 63 locations that are still identical," explains Sorg.

Do I believe that something, likely humans, is doing damage to nature? Yes.

However, give the above, I have to ask: couldn't the argument be made that collecting less samples is natural selection at work? That is, the insects that aren't trapped - for whatever reason - will pass those traits on and so on. The survivors breed more survivers. Those that are trapped and die, well so does their DNA.

The conclusion that this will lead to the eventual extinction of insects as a whole also does not pass scrutiny. Even if 99% of insects are extinguished, the remaining 1% that are adapted to the new conditions will populate the now-vacant ecological niches and diversify. That's how evolution works.

Depends how fast it happens. Cascading failure/collapse is a real possibility.

63 traps is a statistically insignificant cause of insect death over the area of an entire countryside. Not enough to drive natural selection.

That doesn’t really pass scrutiny. It’s not like they are mass collecting insects and it’s not like someone else is using insect traps to mass trap insects. As such there is practically no evolutionary pressure to adapt to not being caught in insect traps.

Insect traps are a rare sight for any one insect.

I'm don't follow.

Let's take bug species Foo. We have two Foos. One has DNA trait Y the other DNA trait Z. Zs are more prone to be trapped. Ys are less.

Over time Zs die off. And Ys prevail. Therefore, over time the traps will capture less Foos.

You're (falsely?) thinking in terms of traditional evolution. But natural selection is not the same thing. I'm suggesting that - at least in theory - natural selection can be used to explain why they are catching less insects.

I'm sure there is math for exactly how much trait Y needs to benefit its host and for how many generations for trait to fix itself and dominate Z. Those traps are likely insignificant at population scales and even at local scales.

I read this as a direct attack, although the parent's argument is clear.

Let's say you trap 2 in 10k insects, which sounds high. If 50% of those insects had a slight evolutionary advantage against traps (which sounds a lot), that the two that did get caught didn't possess.

Great, they now have a 0.02% evolutionary advantage.

My point is: I assumed a lot of things, yet came up with a tiny advantage. I don't think (didn't compute) this is going to do much difference in the short term (although long term, it could have a bigger effect). So yeah, as in your argument, Zs die of, but very slowly, and there might be other greater pressures fighting against this.

Assuming the rates of my post, I'd be curious to see how much time it would take to achieve a meaningful difference in terms of population. (These catch rates are very high, and insects tend to reproduce quickly, so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't much).

In theory I completely agree that insects traps could lead to evolution through natural selection. There is no disagreement here about it being possible.

All I’m saying is that insect traps are too rare to have any influence.

"Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades."

This is almost certainly false. The paper released earlier this year only looked at other studies which reported insect populations in decline, a methodology certain to find a problem.

in my country right next to germany, within 'protected' natural areas, insect life declined by as much as 85%. If you have a garden which is friendly to insects you get swarmed as there are literally no other places to go.

people need to be aware of this and stop just paving their gardens. create a nice home for some bugs :-) it will be good for your children and their children. So no excuse not to put some flowers outside and keep at least a few insects fed and happy.

This worries me way more than warming itself.

Brain dump:

Reading V. Smil's "Energy and Civilization a History" has made me realize that the Applied Ecology (Permaculture) epoch would be a fundamentally new form of civilization.

Cf. Hemenway's lecture: "Permaculture can save Humanity and the Earth but not Civilization"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo It's about an hour. Here are some notes I took:

He reframes "sustainable" as the midpoint of a spectrum with "degenerative" on one side and "regenerative" on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.

He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing "culture" (group activites, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it's roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.

    Five culture types based on food getting technology:
        Foraging
        Hunter-gatherer
        Agricultural (cities)
            Pastoral (Animal herding)
            Industrial

Then follows a great deal of the "dirt" on agriculture. Old hat to those who know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don't. Hemenway sums it up, "Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people."

(Oil => Food => People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be trouble...

Holmgrin's scenarios:

- Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it.)

- Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.

- Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) "Earth Stewardship" "Permaculture" I don't know where the people are supposed to have gone.

- "Atlantis" - i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but I'm okay with being proven wrong on that.

"Peak Wood" - no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a close. Wow.

Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.

The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these subjects. https://fertilefuture.blogspot.com/2011/05/toby-hemenway-vid...

- - - -

OMG: Obvious ways that we are out of whack with Nature:

Glass windows kill millions of birds.

Windshields kill billions of insects.

Rain brings out earthworms that then die on the sidewalk.

Asphalt covers n% of the Earth and vulcanized rubber particles are continously emitted into the ecosystem.

Plastic collecting in the Oceanic Gyres and beaches of the world, as well and in the bellies of animals, and coating and fusing with rock.

Gas-burning, noise- and air-polluting leaf blowers that are inherently wasteful (each item is typically blown about 2~5 times before arriving at resting point. Compare to vacuum cleaner.)

In fact, all the pollution.

Lawns are everywhere. Intrinsically wasteful, deliberately stunted and impoverished ecosystems, massive applications of chemicals.

Agriculture. Literally counter-productive: untouched ecosystems are orders of magnitude more productive. Doing nothing is more productive than farming.

We wear shoes that insulate us from contact with the Earth (lit. grounding). We do this because we have poured concrete all over everything.

Where the meat comes from...

And so on.

- - - -

Part Yay: Humans are Nature's turbo-chargers!

We can increase the productivity of natural system by an order of magnitude again over baseline untouched ecosystems. (Example: WPA built miles of massive swales across the western states, and years later (with no maintainence) there are plants and animals there where before there was desert. TODO: look this up.)

(Cf. Yeoman's Keyline techniques. Draw water out onto ridges to gte more use out of rainfall. http://www.keyline.com.au/ )

Broadly speaking we can corrugate terrain and systems to get more surface area and interaction and create more niches and therefore more life. Recall that life exists in the thermodynamic flow from the Sun (and yes, the oceanic heat vents) to ultimately the rest of the sky, and that we are nowhere near the physical limiting factors. It's relatively easy to add niches to an existing garden. Especially if you're able to make modifications! I have a whole DVD about Permaculture water harvesting where they bring in a backhoe to dig out a new little lake and some canals! A one-time expenditure of fossil fuel to make a vast change in the water/energy flows of a local system to ultimately increase the ecological robustness and yield makes sense. And in theory, locally grow alcohol fuel could be used to power land-shaping machines.

There is also a possibility to use Bucky Fuller-style Tensgresity (or merely geodesic) structures to create "3D" gardens.

With Permaculture techniques you can revitalize salty desert in a few years ("Greening the Desert" Geoff Lawton) and there is plenty of desert. All of the necessary factors are themselves organic and therefore capable of geometric increase. We could green the deserts from Southern CA to Texas and accomodate several hundred million people in an ecologically (climate proof!) way.

"He and an army of volunteers have over the years gathered as many as 80 million insects that are now floating in countless ethanol bottles."

Ah, that's where the insects went!

who would have thought that ichthyology could be so sexy?? :3

Dang it you guys, I posted this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339865) yesterday. Things are getting so bad so rapidly...

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