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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

It seems there are far fewer bugs in general.

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

Anecdotally, remember when you would drive any distance on a freeway and your windshield was just COVERED with smashed bugs?

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While insect population decline seems the primary cause, windshields are also more sloped and aerodynamic now. I suspect more bugs bounce off these instead of being splattered.

My one data point is that on a 2-hour rural drive with a friend my 90s SUV’s windshield and front bumper splattered a lot of bugs. While my friend’s sleeker more modern car with a sloped windshield had barely any.

> Anecdotally, remember when you would drive any distance on a freeway and your windshield was just COVERED with smashed bugs?

I do, now that you mention it. It's weird how much we don't notice those small changes. I remember I used to see Monarch butterflies all the time, as a child, and I, until this last year, would never see any in the wild.

For what its worth I got three monarch caterpillars on my milkweed now. They seem to be still kicking around bay area. Certainly, as you said, not as many.

Full face helmets were "required" for motorcycles, unless you wanted to eat a few bugs.

Monarch population health is a little easier to monitor, because they do large migrations to a few main locations, which can be evaluated, and (hopefully) protected.

Being able to monitor hasn't really helped us protect them at all:

"In 2017 the annual March count of monarchs "overwintering" in Mexico's mountain forests — where 99 percent of the world's monarchs migrate for the winter — showed that numbers had fallen by 27 percent from the previous year's count and by more than 80 percent from the mid-1990s.

That drastic decline was attributed in part to more extreme winter storms that killed millions of monarchs the previous March. Monarchs need a very large population size in order to be resilient to threats from severe weather events, pesticides and climate change.

In 2020 the yearly count of overwintering monarchs showed an even more dramatic decrease of 53% from the previous year’s count. The numbers are now well below the threshold at which government scientists predict the migration could collapse.

The western monarch population, which overwinters in California, is in even greater peril. Numbering some 1.2 million in the 1990s, it declined to fewer than 2,000 butterflies in the 2020 count. This is way below the extinction threshold estimated by scientists and has to be turned around soon if the species is to be saved. "

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/invertebrates/mo...

Yeah, but I also remember there being way more diesel fumes and soot. Cars and trucks have gotten much cleaner over the past 10-20 years, so why would this be contributing to a decline in pollinators?

Persistent pollution - there is a whole class of pesticides: herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, etc. That use complex chlorinated hydrocarbons, that stay in the environment, in various forms, and which often degrade into more toxic, and more persistent (survive longer) versions. For example there is more DDT in glacier runoff water now, than there was in the 70s and 80s, even though it hasn't been used since then. The story is complex, and goes on, and on.

The ones listed in the actual article aren't that, though. NOx is down dramatically. Remember acid rain?

Yes indeed. I think the whole air pollution question is a distraction to the bug problem. (Rather an addition to?) There are serious issues with modern gasoline, and it's byproducts of combustion, though. All together there are a lot of pollutants which we need to clean up, still ongoing. It's a huge problem.

The human population has exploded though, so presumably increases in other types of pollution have more than made up for decreases in diesel fumes and soot.

Diesel might be cleaner in dense cities leading to less smog but coal power around the world still belts out plenty of particulates, scubbers are not perfect and regulations are lax in some localities. One area is marine shipping where different countries have regulations requiring certain emissions standards in their territorial waters but out in the open ocean it's a race to the bottom burning the cheapest fuels possible. It's not just a matter of any ships that want to be able to travel to those ports being built with an exhaust system clean enough to meet regulations, they'll switch fuels going into and out of zones with stricter regulations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZZ591x0Ajs

Cars and trucks don't burn bunker fuel so thick you have to heat it with steam just to pump it into the engine. Local hotspots of pollution on land have gone down, but globally there's still plenty of heavy polluters out there.

Even electric cars pollute in the form of microplastics from the tires and toxic brake dust

More pollution from tires due to the added weight, less from brake disks and plates due to regenerative braking. Not sure if this has a measurable impact compared to the reduced CO2 emissions.

It's less brake dust only if you use an old school automatic I'd assume. On a manual engine braking does the same in practice as regenerative braking: slowing down without using brake pads, only it does this with the force of a vacuum rather than friction in the EV motor. Coming up to a 25mph stop or an uphill offramp, its actually possible to come to an almost complete stop (assuming you'd clutch in to not stall) by engine braking in a manual without touching your brakes at all. Newer automatics seem to have some engine braking capability baked in rather than just kicking you into overdrive and coasting when you lift off the throttle.

and from the power stations which generate the electricity they run on.

EVs are certainly a step in the right direction, but if we are burning fossil fuels to generate the electricity to power them, then the EV has just shifted the point where the greenhouse gasses are produced, not lowered the total amount of greenhouse gas

(exceptions for people who use solar power to charge their EV)

EVs are more efficient than ICE vehicles even when using electricity generated using coal.

Probably the most efficient thing is to cut out using a car for commuting and use it as sparingly as possible, and keep the car you already have and is already here as long as its possible. Any car represents an enormous amount of spent energy just in the form of converting those raw materials from where they are found naturally, forming it into a 3000lb car somewhere, and ultimately delivering it to you where it currently sits in front of you. Its going to take a lot of fuzzy math to negate that massive energy cost as well as the energy cost to bring this new car built from resources found around the world to your door, and the cost to do away with the old one. Limiting personal consumption imo means getting the most out of your existing materials and tools, or those found immediately locally, versus spending energy to bring in ever more things from around the globe.

That change may also be related to the fact that modern car front windows have much larger angle to normal than the cars a few decades ago. Maybe insects will just be carried by the flow now.

I just returned from a weekend trip away (in Australia) and both thankfully and unfortunately my car now resembles a Jackson Pollock tribute to insects.

I've spent time in the wilderness in various parts of the world and Australia still seems fairly full of insects and birds. Much, much quieter in Europe and the US, for example. Still see a lot of monarch butterflies here in South Australia.

What about the impact of improved vehicle aerodynamics?

Here's a mini-discussion on the topic from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003766

> It seems there are far fewer bugs in general.

it's amazing the effect these words had on me. i fully knew the context here but still did a double take.

I wonder if that's why birds are trying to get in my house. No more insects to eat.

I'm certainly not an expert but food chain collapse sounds like a very difficult event to undo.

Discovering we're unintentionally doing a domino style wipe out of ecosystems sounds like a "stop everything now" level problem.

Yet here we are. I'm going to go to work tomorrow on stuff unrelated to these urgent society collapsing problems we're facing. Pulling a salary from some company as if these crisis don't exist.

It's totally insane

I don't think many problems are ever "every single person stop everything now". The problem is it should be "those people who are disproportionately responsible, stop them right now, and start funding solutions".

In theory we just need a system to organize our free time and act on these urgen5 matters.

I don’t know how people came to believe they could just plaster their car with dead animals and it would turn out ok.

In an otherwise healthy environment, even killing billions of bugs on car windshields probably doesn't even dent the overall population. It would just free up that amount of resources in their carrying capacity in their ecological niche and they'd get replaced. The real problem comes when you start destroying the carrying capacity of their ecological niche itself with chemical pollution, and/or damaging each and every member of the whole species with ubiquitous chemical pollution, not just even a large number of unlucky individuals that end up in front of car windshields.

We splattered them on windshields incidentally, but the stuff coming out of the tailpipes probably did more damage.

I often wondered how much of an effect it has had all the bugs hitting cars. How fast do they reproduce? At what rate were they dying on cars? If an average drive remembers their car being plastered with hundreds of bugs a trip surely they don’t reproduce faster then all the cars combined kill. It has to be a net negative, right?

Taking mosquitos as an example: a female mosquito can lay ~100 eggs each time it feeds, and those eggs take < 10 days to mature into adults. Assuming each female only lays one batch of eggs (conservative), A single female mosquito can spawn over 125,000 other females per month.

I'm not sure that every single bug is like that, but the exponential growth is pretty crazy. As your parent said, the carrying capacity of the environment is all that really matters. If a population can multiple 125,000x per month, it is basically guaranteed to fill the environment's carrying capacity no matter how many you kill.

https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/resources/factSheets/MosquitoLife...

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