Anecdotally, while driving along Minnesota's segment of I94 in the '90s, one would have to stop and scrape the bugs off the front window and grill. Today, this is no longer a problem.
Also one used in scientific study with seemingly dire results:
>The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-spla...
But I am one of them! I remember getting my first car in the late eighties and scrubbing tons of splattered insects off my windshield every time I went to the gas station.
Now I barely even notice them.
Antecdote is not data, but I certainly believe people when they say the insects are dying.
Anecdotes are misleading and they are always a huge trick.
Now there are some mosquitoes and crickets. Maybe a few moths sometimes. The walls outside are spotless.
Living in Asia now, I see insects about as much as I saw them back then. I have to wonder if there were even more back in the 90s, or if things are as good as ever here. But it's nice to see life.
They were saying, IIUC, that it could be that the same amount of bugs are splattered across a larger number of cars, so that if you look at any one car, then it looks like less bugs.
15 years later they no longer do that, just on that road in particular. I don’t know if it’s evolved behavior or learned, but they absolutely changed.
That said, it’s fun to imagine that we just selected against insects that hang out by the highway.
https://www.npr.org/2013/03/22/175054275/birds-evolve-shorte...
Insects still get hit with aerodynamic cars, but the blows are glancing and less likely to cause a “burst”.
(Although, TBF, the Lambo's wing and aero package adds a lot of drag in exchange for much greater downforce)
[1] https://ecomodder.com/wiki/Vehicle_Coefficient_of_Drag_List
"The research also found that modern cars, with a more aerodynamic body shape, killed more insects than boxier vintage cars up to 70 years old."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
On the other hand, in my back yard, I grow a lot veggi, strawberry with worm casting from kitchen scraps. I do still lot of insects. A lot of birds nested around my house. Produce 10-15 young birds. I found a very cool looking giant tomato worm a size of my biggest finger. It ate half of (7 ft height ) tomato plant in 2 days.
The Strawberry, cucumbers, other veggies grow with worm casting taste SO much better than from anything store .
Edit: it was a Hyundai Excel
In according to the more usual explanations I've been working if lights along the road might be part of the problem.
Really weird
But I've noticed a big change in Texas in recent years. The last two years I haven't had to use pesticide in my residential vegetable garden. I've had to control for mold/fungal infections, but not for insects. And I live up against a nature preserve and try to keep most of my property as natural as possible.