Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
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Butterflies: 50% reduction in 50 years. Beetles: 75% decline since 1985. Ladybugs: 50% reduction in 20 years. Across the border in Germany: a 75% decline in flying insects since 1989.
It doesn't take much of a scientist to see the trend. I've been hiking the forests here multiple times per week for 20 years. You can clearly see how some groups are disappearing whilst others remain.
There's several root causes but the primary one is a lack of native plant diversity. Since agriculture over here is done in close proximity to forests, the soil becomes acid due to the nitrogen disposition. This benefits the growth of a handful of plants at the expense of all others. In some of our forests, the soil is now so acid that snails no longer develop a case and bird eggs collapse.
In this plant monoculture, insects depending on a specific host plant disappear. Outside (protected) forests, things aren't much better. Even the tiniest of strips of grass that would normally produce wildflowers, are aggressively mowed down. People's gardens are designed to be as hostile to insects as is possible.
Secondary reasons are invasive species and light pollution.
It's a sad state of affairs and one we should be deeply ashamed of. We're not talking about some iconic predator requiring hundreds of acres of wild forest just to survive. We're talking about insects that require little space, healthy soil, a flower, and for it to be left alone. We can't even offer that.
It's pretty easy:
* Restore lawn areas to native plants: small (wildflowers), medium (bushes), big (trees)
* For areas that are kept as lawn, simply mow less. Allow plants to flower. Don't treat clover as evil. Support multiple grass types. Stop using chemical fertilizers and stop trying to feed the grass. Feed the soil with organic fertilizers and compost.
That's it! It reduces maintenance costs and time, reduces the use of gasoline, reduces noise pollution, and vastly improves soil health, insect and wildlife health, and increases pollination of our own food. It's a literal win-win.
And yet, no one does it. They turn their lawns into wastelands and never even use them. I've heard that lawns should be compared to deserts but that even that is disregarding the biodiversity that deserts have over lawns.
I'm annoyed by the climate change (CO2) narrative. It is far too narrow. Rather we should be talking about an umbrella of unsustainability that includes wildlife decimation, biodiversity collapsing, pollution, overfishing, deforestation, water and air quality.
We shouldn't just live in a way that expels less CO2, we should live in a way that doesn't annihilate the biosphere.
And yes, gardens are a great personal way to make a start. Mine too has native flowers which attract lots of insects, in turn attracting birds and bats. Plus some mini ponds. It's far less work compared to a sterile garden whilst much more fun.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where getting even the most basic policy changes to protect the environment is a herculean effort, so people rationally focus much of their attention on the largest or most urgent things.
If you had a friend who was playing with Uranium, smoking cigarettes and eating food with artificial colors, it'd be fair to say they should stop doing all of those things to avoid getting cancer. But it'd also be fair to focus mostly on the Uranium.
It’s kind of amazing that in the broad spectrum of groups you could talk about that are having a negative effect on biodiversity, etc. anyone would mention climate change activists and groups when not only is their fight broadly related, they’re almost completely in alignment with more biodiversity.
This dynamic where such comments attack people who support the commenter’s stance but support it maybe 80% are attacked by the commenter, but the people who do not support their stance, are actually in power, and are going out of their way to destroy what the commenter claims to care about are not even mentioned is fascinating.
Well... no. They're prepping to move to compounds in New Zealand. Even a global warming (and nuclear war, let's throw that on the pile!) ravaged Earth is vastly easier to live on than, say, Mars. Trying to escape that way would be a frying-pan-into-the-fire plan.
> and when the mass migrations really start and mid income countries start becoming failed states on their path, I hope you are in a place that can hold you safe for the remainder of your time here.
But yeah, that's basically the reason why, I reckon. Somewhere sufficiently stable and liberal that's also really, really hard to reach without a ship or airplane. Avoiding the various climate refugee crises and wars we're likely to see in the coming decades probably is their motivation. New Zealand's a clear front-runner in that race.
Depends. Yeah, much harder to grow food or breathe on Mars, but probably a lot fewer angry mobs trying to eat you, too.
The earth won't "care", it'll just be another of the many boom-bust cycles in the history of nature. We're part of it.
It's not going to be pleasant for the humans and animals that live through it, though!
While we have enough individual intelligence to see this is coming, and wish to avoid it, I don't think we collectively have the intelligence to do so. A crowd of humans has its own dynamics and kind of thought, and so far, these crowds are very short-sighted and prone to all sorts of irrationalities and hysterias.
The author writes on his experience with a group of elites who were seeking ways to protect their positions in the face of collapse (societal / ecological / etc.). Salvation will not come from the top.
original: https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0...
Immediately start restoring mowed lawns with native plants. Ban the use of chemical fertilizers.
It could be done, but we won't. Salvation is at our fingertips, but we close our fists.
Would taxing/banning plastic actually reduce waste/pollution? or would the shift to more expensive replacements (paper/wood/etc) actually increase pollution and waste?
Banning chemical fertilisers would almost immediately cause a massive famine, enormous drops in agricultural productivity, etc. People consuming "organic" foods that don't use fertiliser can only do so from the position of privilege wherin chemically-fertilised crops are feeding 95%+ of the population. We even have a real example of the consequences! See Sri Lanka recently :(.
It's times like this I can't help but see why some people are so keen to keep the government away from things.
Comparatively, "the great dying" was a much more profound event, and quite beyond our capability.
Even pushing our planet out of the current icehouse will likely require much, much more co2.
Its actually difficult for me to believe that any elite would be stupid enough to think they could survive an earth environmental catastrophe in space.
I'm pretty sure at least some of them are dumb enough to think they can survive it on earth, though. And they might be right!
This was true for me for a long time. We had a lawn, and we had kids, and I believed that kids w/out a lawn was a travesty. Special lady friend was like, "dude we're surrounded by lawns," and it's true. There are 2 parks within walking distance of here and a big plot of grass at the local church. We killed the lawn, the kids didn't care, and I just haul them to the park. Still working on better habitat but it's coming along. And yeah as you say the exciting stuff going on in the soil and above ground is just amazing. Wild beans (not edible but pretty), edibles like dock, orach, dandelions & mallow ... just all kinds of stuff.
The petrochemical pesticides play a big roll.
Just forbid them.
This is a good read/listen.
The topic seems to come up here ever few months, and there's always a significant percentage of the discussion devoted to aerodynamic effects, or changes in insect distribution specific to roadside habitats. Those converstations often feel like "middlebrow dismissal": people who think the fact they can come up with a plausible alternate explaination for the data given a few seconds thought means it's likely that the studies are totally flawed and can be ignored.
Meanwhile if you dig in to the actual evidence, the studies based on vehicle data show a small negative correlation between vehicle age and number of impacted flying insects (i.e. older cars have slightly fewer splats, not more). More importantly, the general trends of declining biomass of (especially, but not only) flying insects reproduce over a wide range of methodologies and habitats. For skeptical readers, there are some links to studies in a previous comment I made on a previous thread on this same general topic [1].
Having said that, I think you've missed one of the big factors that's likely to contribute to the decline: the widespread use of insecticides (especially) and herbicides in industrial agriculture. Studies on bees show that even insects exposed to something much lower than the LD50 of certain insecticides experience behavioural changes that dramatically decrease their survival rates. And because "pest" insects typicaly have short lifecycles and rapid reproduction rates, they're often best placed to evolve tolerances for the insecticides, so there's pressure on farmers to use more and more to get the same effect.
For anyone who's interested in an introduction to this topic aimed at the general public (like me!), but written by a Professor of Entomology, I can recommend Slient Earth [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31278206 [2] https://bookshop.org/p/books/silent-earth-averting-the-insec...
A common manifestation of it is to find lethargic insects. Bodily fully intact and seeming healthy, yet barely able to move. Insects normally skittish that you can simply pick up. I'm not talking about insects at the end of their life cycle or them being very cold. There's something very wrong with these individuals, I believe studies suggest their brains are messed up from the pesticides.
Big if true. Sounds like it working as designed.
Maybe people like you should experience what a world without insects would look like. I can save you the time. There will be no world.
Even this can cause a collapse by removing a food source from other predators.
> I can save you the time. There will be no world.
This is true. Insects are food for a huge number of predators, and insect larvae are a really important component of having soil capable of growing plants.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you..."
At first, it seemed like a nice bucolic change. But soon, it took on a far darker aspect - this was a barren monoculture, as far as the eye could see, for dozens of miles. Where to the birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and insects live? The land is not only covered with chemicals to kill or repel any now-unwelcome residents, but there is simply no usable habitat (and a thin row of trees every mile or so doesn't count).
It was a truly dystopian experience, and more so by knowing that this goes on for thousands of square miles. This is not our grandparent's farmland anymore. This is not nature. This is one species becoming a literal plague on the planet. It is not sustainable.
Kind of like anti-trust enforcement for the land itself
It could have just as easily driven innovation towards efficiently working those kinds of plots, reduced topsoil loss and degradation (reducing fertilizer costs), reduced requirements for pesticides (lower costs again), and improved yields driving down prices.
Especially now with accelerating agri-robotics developments, mid-sized farms like that can take best advantage.
That kind of comment shows that you are using zero knowledge of growing, farming, or that complexities of soil chemistry and soil biology even exist. Not helpful. If you have some such actual knowledge, show some. Sheesh.
You're looking at poison and death.
Every once in a while, we watch a documentary like Planet Earth. It inspires even the most cynical stoic. And we feel terrible about our negative role.
But the next day we go on as usual. And as soon as a tiny thing is asked of us to better the course, we resist like a maniac.
My experience has been the exact opposite. Growing up in rural areas, most people seemed to treat nature as an endless resource to be exploited for personal enrichment. Any discussion of ecological regulation was met with harsh rebuke about "jobs" and "freedom" (i.e. the freedom to extract value by exploiting nature).
As I moved to more urban areas, people were more and more ecologically focused on the long-term impacts of natural exploitation. Today I live in a dense metro area (Seattle) where I've never been around a greater concentration of nature-focused people.
The controversial statement being that the issue extends into (many) indigenous communities. We have this pristine idea of them, as original peoples living in harmony with nature.
That's not the reality on the ground. I've traveled to a lot of remote areas where we frequently encountered illegal activity by locals and even park rangers. Poaching...anything and everything, including rare flowers. Logging. Gold mining. Hunting critically extinct species even when alternatives (for food) are widely available.
You can't explain it by poverty alone, there's a general sense of total carelessness. A very clear example of that is people dumping their trash in the river, in forests, everywhere. Many good faith reforestation attempts soon are gamed and corrupted.
So yes, pretty hopeless.
Well, I also see a lot of people who do the tiny thing but not the big thing. Plenty of people around me are reducing their meat intake (and are vocal about it), because climate change, but still fly on airplanes, some multiple times a year. It's so incredibly frustrating that many people are just green washing their lives, but are oblivious to the fact they're not really doing much at all.
I do have massive respect for the people I do know that have quit eating meat and are now doing all their travels by train.
If before you have a frequent flyer that regularly eats meat, and next they stop eating meat, that is to be celebrated. It's still massive progress. Further, their footprint from flying may improve over time as airlines are investing in sustainability.
From flying 3 times a year to 2 times a year is big progress. From eating lots of meat to somewhat less, is progress.
By implying footprint perfection, it all becomes very reductive and people will reject it. With that mindset, you'll be able to find "dirt" on anyone. I mean, how very polluting must David Attenborough be?
As for bettering the course regarding insects, I wasn't even suggesting CO2 reduction. Just introducing some small spaces where wildflowers can grow, and they will come. It takes almost nothing.
I'm not sure why that's surprising. Our food supply depends on using nitrogen at the moment. You can't just ban it cold-turkey without transitioning to an alternative that doesn't threaten the food supply. Particularly with inflation issues, further destabilizing the food supply is insane at this time. The whole climate change agenda will be in jeopardy if this isn't handled well.
And it always will, since all plants require nitrogen for growing.
Despite that they get offered millions to stop their farming activities.
Despite that they dump asbestos on highways and threaten politicians by visiting their homes.
And despite that our politicians cheer them on.
It really is the worst of times.
Instead they get offered millions. And in response they terrorize our society.
Or the government can just stop giving them subsidies and they'll just seize existing. I think buying them out is a neater solution.
Fortunately, on the other side ... I have the head of the groene commissie (neighbourhood gardening enthusiastc) and a beautiful tended garden. Mine is the most natural: a barely-tended jungle which gets trimmed and brushed once a year. We have hedgehogs!
We installed ~200m^2 of green roofs in the neighbourhood and there are bug hotels all over the place so we are doing relatively well. Quite a few different varieties of bees.
All this green absorbs a lot of heat, and manages rainwater which is important at 0 above sea level and 2m below the nearby canal.
In the UK, you can buy perennial meadow seed mixes from https://www.scotiaseeds.co.uk , https://wildseed.co.uk , https://www.wildflower.co.uk, and several other companies.
Elsewhere, there should be equivalents.
While this works, an alternative if you have a lawn already is to just stop cutting it every x weeks but mow once or twice a year. Mow paths where needed. More often than not there are already seeds/plants in the soil which just never got the chance to grow. And if not, depending on where you live, fauna and wind will transport seeds to your garden. The end result (mind you, takes years) will usually be similar: of the seed mixes bought, a bunch won't grow, others might but won't thrive. Whereas starting from 'scratch' this also happens. And what's left are those which happen to thrive best on the local soil type and circumstances, which usually is what works best for the local ecosystem.
Article from today, “let fallen leaves lie”
Are people really so detached from nature these days that the smell of wet wood puts them off? I do despair for humankind some days when I read this sort of thing.
I let them lie on the rest of my 1.6 acres. And the 1 acre that's forested, we're working on trying to de-invasive-ize the forest and try to help rehabilitate it. Its just 2 of us, but we're trying.
That lacks an important nuance: in most circumstances (regarding soil type/nitrogen deposition), not mowing at all would lead to those patches being overgrown by fast growers leading to less plant diversity. Can happen in as little as a year or 2. So the mowing itself is not the problem, it's the amount, how and when.
You really cannot talk about this in statements like they apply everywhere. Here's an example: around where I live, the number 1 activity by nature preservation groups when it comes to restoring grasslands of all kinds, is mowing. For a couple of reasons, but the main one being that nitrogen deposition fertilizes the soil too much, so it gets countered by removing biomass via mowing. Not doing that results is fast growers. Not because the'yre indicating a recovery process, just because they outgrow what was there originally. Which is the opposite of recovery.
leading to a much more healthy ecosystem than when you mow it all down to hell.
When I say "it's the amount, how and when" that implicates 'not mowing it all down to hell' is not the right way :)
Where I live the native prairie was naturally mowed by the bison roaming around, and so not mowing leads to a number of problems as the plants around here depend on that regular mowing. Various lightening strikes and the like ("Indians") caused regular fires as well, which took care of overgrowth. Mowing simulates that without the fire. (this is both good and bad - it makes for cleaner air, but those fires also put charcoal into the ground and so made the prairie net carbon negative over the long term which is something we desperately need)
I also think it’s important to put it into context.
1. These insects weren’t really robust to begin with. Take the monarch butterfly in the North America. They actually needed primarily milkweed to survive. A single point of failure (milkweed) can cause the population to collapse. When we put up houses and converted land to farms, you’re correct we killed many of the native species, but those species were HIGHLY tuned to a particular niche. In 100-200 years it’s likely the insects that survived will re-occupy new niches.
2. Insects typically need a much smaller range to survive, so hikes in the same woods as when you were a kid doesn’t add up. Unless there was another massive environmental issue - such as pesticides or chemicals like DDT which have a secondary impact. Personally, that bird egg analogy sounds exactly like what the US saw with DDT and the collapse of the eagle population.
3. In the 1950s in the Midwest there had already been farmland all over for 50+ years. Same with Ireland (for hundreds). The insect populations have only noticeably declined in the last few decades. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough historical data to confirm what it is exactly. Even in the 1970s you’d have solid layers of bugs on windshields driving between cornfields. Now, nothing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_population...
To me, this indicates a chemical or set there of, as the most likely culprits.
EDIT: DET -> DDT
The words "specialist" and "niche" are incredibly misplaced as it comes to insects. Consider butterflies, many depending on specific host plants. The host plant is in decline hence the butterfly disappears.
Weak species. Not "robust". The point that is being missed here is that the host plant is supposed to be widely available in any half-decent ecosystem. It isn't rare, would normally be widespread, and it has very low needs. Just a tiny bit of space and healthy soil.
We're not wiping out specialists, we're wiping out the underlying habitat and ecosystem altogether.
Were big cats such as mountain lions and bobcats not robust enough in America? Because they've been eradicated due to habitat loss.
Is it really a surprise that animals that have evolved over millions of years to fit within the balance of nature are having difficulty adapting in just decades to humanity's technology destruction of that balance? The fact that some are able to make it through that imbalance is not a justification.
It's weird that you basically seem to blame evolution. And it's not just about specific populations. It's all about their interactions and relationships. We do not fully understand how all these things tie together as a system. So much of it is disappearing, we really have no idea what could happen to our ecosystems. For the most part, it cannot be good.
I am in general seriously concerned about soil and insect health. We take leaves and grass and native plants off of land and then instead needlessly dump water and fertilizer in their place because what's left is not self-sustaining. It's literally the most wasteful process you can think of for managing land, and yet we do it in full force.
I planted native plants and let things grow up in my yard this year, and it's amazing how popular the areas get with insects. This is just one year. Next year, I am hoping for much more, especially now that I know what I'm doing for the most part.
This assumes that farming methods have remained identical since the 1950s or 70s, but they haven't. I don't know if the parent poster is correct, but I don't think is a good argument unless you also account for changes in agricultural practices in the last 50+ years.
Do you have any data to back this up?
Also, the problem is that not many insects ARE going to survive.
> The insect populations have only noticeably declined in the last few decades.
This is probably outright misleading, since you don't have the data prior to those decades. The common mistake is that people use their own lifespan as a measure for things.
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Everybody talks about the gender pay gap and ethnic diversity these days, but biodiversity is not on the radar :(
Pesticide resistant insects are another example. Now, this assumes we don’t keep altering pesticides, but we do. If we keep trying to reduce insect populations we can, so I don’t think it’ll happen unless we allow it to happen.
As for the other comment, my point is really we have records showing massive amount of insects all throughout history until the introduction of pesticides. Even during the Great Depression in the US we had massive swarms of insects. Once pesticides were introduced at scale we noticed a decline in recorded swarms until now we don’t even see them on windshields.
I wonder how common this sort of thing is. Insects evolve to feed on certain plants, and not feed on others, but invasives could screw that up.
This a horrifying sentiment.
The modern monarch butterfly as a species is two million years old. In less than 200 years, we have mostly wiped it off the map, and the excuse is, "They weren't really robust to begin with"?
Speaking of those that remain, I can say beyond reasonable doubt that there is an insane percentage increase in stinkbug populations in recent years. Fuckers get absolutely everywhere.
Making agriculture unproductive will just push the demand outwards like a beaker of toxic reactants boiling over. We can't impose more trade restrictions on foreign agricultural goods either, for fear of a trade war.
This hopeless romanticism of small organic mom-and-pop farming is misguided. The only solution I see is huge, highly efficient, automated, but also highly regulated farms. That, and veganism.
Small farms are more productive per acre [1] even before considering the increased fossil footprint of 'efficient' farms.
>we can't pay for the additional labor small farms need, or food inflation will explode.
Additional unskilled jobs might well be worth the tradeoff, particularly for the most vulnerable members of society.
>This hopeless romanticism of small organic mom-and-pop farming is misguided.
Russia's Dacha model produces something like 60% of the country's food through hobby 'farms' that regular people mostly go to on the weekends. It's not a hard model to replicate, I'm planting a food shrubland in my suburban home. It won't produce a large part of my food budget but it'll certainly be resource-positive as opposed to a lawn. My labour inputs I'd spend at a gym otherwise. As work-from-home becomes more normalized, the average garden size will probably increase. The problem isn't economic but cultural.
>huge, highly efficient, automated, but also highly regulated farms. That, and veganism.
There seems to be a correlation between belief in factory farming and veganism. Those stances align on pathos but diverge on logos and ethos.
[1]1https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
This is very much not like how farming is done in developed nations or even most developing nations today. And unless you want to force people to live like dirt poor peasants of the past, hopefully won't ever be done again.
Well, the hard part to replicate is destroying economy to force people to use those collective gardens. Shops were next to empty. Commercial variety was non existent. The rigid command economy didn't allow enterprise to address needs. Thus you had 2 ways to have good food - relatives in countryside or your own collective garden lot.
It's both economy in culture. Here in Lithuania those gardens survived well into 90s. During the transition, many people went on to do substance farming in addition to day job. Or, if they were unemployed, in exchange of it. But now people work cushy jobs and less and less people do that. It's down to gardening enthusiasts in the young generation. And even then the pattern is completely different. More about trying out exotic stuff for shit and giggles. Rather than aiming for good amount of food and then conserving it for the winter. Energy costs probably make it cheaper to buy jam rather than cook it too...
Only discussing the land statement here, but we have loads and loads and loads of unused farmland.
At least, that is true in Canada, and I suspect the US, and I know in the EU some are paid not to farm.
In Canada, we have quotas on some things, to prevent over production.
There are two real issues:
* drought, or summers with few sunny days, reducing yields
* random new diseases
So we need that fallow land, just in case, which is why people are given inventives to have farm land, but not use it.
Yet we still have so much farm land, that we sell the best of it to developers, who then create housing.
We have loads of unused farmland.
One last thing. China's population is going to almost halve, over the next 15 years, Russia will have a major population decline, and the most industrialized nations are the same.
Canada has solved this top heavy, old age die off, with immigration. More than 30% of Canadian citizens, for example, we not born in Canada.
But for those with lower immigration numbers, and low birth rates (basically the entire industrialized world), populations will plummet by 30% to 50% in the next 25 years.
China had the one child program, and the birth rate in Canada is less than 1 for every 2 adults, for Canadians boen here. The rest of the West is the same.
So worldwide, our population will plummet very soon.
To me it seems like the ethanol production part would be the easiest to put towards human consumption.
More people working on farms. More people living close to farms. More animals on farms.
Should lead to healthier lifestyles and diets. Better environment for people and the planet (and all the creatures including BUGS).
Time to make the old new again, and stop building suburbs on farm land.
All of this is possible and logical, but there is a massive propaganda machine that is convincing people otherwise.
Currently you have most of the California central valley planted in high margin crops like almonds and pistachios because they maximize farmer profits (despite their unsustainable demands on the water supply). If the goal was to maximize human nutrition the land use would look very different.
With capitalism there can never be enough of any natural resource. When there is enough, it will be put to more extravagant and wastefull purposes.
The original purpose of a lawn was to show that you are so rich and have so much land that you can dedicate some of it to just grass.
The purpose of a tough guy wearing a massive golden chain in a bad neighbourhood is to show that noone dares touch him
And the purpose of a yaht is to show off - the yahts dont even cross the ocean, billionaires hire special ships to lift the whole yaht and move it across atlantic.
So whether its yahts or aingle use plastic cups, or bitcoin mining, there is never enough.
They've been visiting politicians their homes with torches, threatening them and explicitly their kids, blockading highways with burning rubble, blocking highways with asbestos, using their tractors to rip out doors out of government buildings.
What is most aggrieving to me is that the police is pseudo on the side of the farmers. The head of the police said that he 'fully understands the plight of the farmers' and will keep on a policy of de-escalation. Scant few fines too.
Meanwhile a couple of climate protestors that tie themselves to a bridge get their head bashed in and then get fines of €300-5000.
Clown world.
I've watched recently a conference[1] by several renowned scientists. They affirm that neonicotinoids / neonics are responsible of at least 80% of the decline.
They also affirm that the "merchants of doubt" are working their best to muddle the evidence with things like "there are multiple factors", "it's complicated", "we need more research" etc.
But just like the overwhelming majority of lung cancer comes from smoking, the overwhelming factor in insects decline (and its consequences like birds decline) is PESTICIDES and neonicotinoids in particular.
[1]: sorry, in French : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FQT7b2ExP4 Another one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLQKs1KBw9Y
Other articles:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/neonicoti...
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
This is true.
It's also true that less than 30% (in Europe as low as 15%) of smokers get lung cancer. [0]
I point this out b/c I always believed that "if you smoke, you will get lung cancer" whereas the data was "if you get lung cancer, odds are it's from smoking"
I wish that more information was presented this way but I also get that if your goal is to stop smoking then saying "smoking == lung cancer" is a better persuasion play than "odds are you won't get lung cancer if you smoke"
0 - https://www.canceraustralia.gov.au/resources/position-statem...
My neighbour looked like just out of a zombie film complete with rotting, stinking lumps of flesh hanging from the side of his jaw and slime / pus dropping from his mouth for two frigging years (throat and jaw cancer, got fed by catheter for 18 months too). He had to get sure no child was around before getting out, because the view would have traumatized them.
My sister-in-law died three months after retiring of a blazing-fast brain cancer, just a couple of days before Christmas. First symptoms mid-November. At least it was somewhat fast.
Just don't smoke. Don't.
The 5-year survival rate of lung cancer noticed due to e.g a sore throat is below 10%.
Same goes for the argument that bugs have evolved to migrate away from the roads - the 5 has been a busy thruway for a long time with lots of cars and trucks.
The article is short but says scientists have clear data that populations have plummeted and the larger vehicle consumer trend + more people on the road means that there’s fewer bugs to encounter per windshield on top of that.
Just because people might be knowledgeable about certain technologies doesn't make them knowledgeable about anything else. In fact I'd argue that it heavily biases them to making more mistakes in other fields, especially considering that many tech problems are 'solved' by going to a search engine -- that's not a good way to do science.
See also this tale: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2376002/
There are many studies in all kind of environments, even in the middle of the woods, in natural reserves; insects are going down both in term of diversity and numbers everywhere
They're being evolved away by pollution
I forget the exact %, but they'd seen a 50 or 60 percent reduction in mass since the 70's, some depressingly high number.
Hasn’t California had extremely climate events over the last decade (wildfires, ongoing drought)? Given that bugs tend to be sensitive to air quality, this would likely local population decline which would then lead to the effect you’ve observed.
I welcome anyone to come to Prince Edward Island and enjoy the many, many mosquitos and midges our Island has to offer. They can be heard as small “pops” while driving.
I too notice changes in the amount of bugs having driven that route periodically for about 30 years. Due to economic and weather conditions over decades, there are very obvious changes in whether you are driving by grassland, irrigated crops and orchards, defunct and desiccated crops and orchards, or graded and developed human environments. The road has also widened and gotten much more traffic.
The general trend is more human presence year over year, but the agricultural activity is more cyclic. As I understand it, these areas are only viable to irrigate in wet years, because the senior water rights are held and used much further north and east along the CA-99 corridor. In droughts, these more recently developed farms dry up first.
It's also of course very seasonal, with bug populations booming and then disappearing much like wild flowers and migrating bird flocks along the same route. In the heaviest bug carnage periods, driving this section of I-5 can be like driving through the US midwest during a grasshopper or cicada boom.
I do not claim that evolution is the reason for the reduction in dead bugs, but if "go near road" has a increased risk of death due to automobiles, there absolutely is selective pressure to not "go near road". Bugs that get killed by cars don't procreate (again) after all.
Also, decreased road side windshield bug smashing coincides with measured loss of insect biomass:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
Disputing that feels more and more like disputing global warming being a thing.
There's a reason I started my comment with "I do not claim that evolution is the reason for the reduction in dead bugs". I was just nitpicking and not trying to be the devil's advocate.
Link in Swedish, not sure how scientific this is but…
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/mQQWbO/algarna-overlist...
Do you mean "more likely"?
> This is why these studies often use license plate splatters to get a better count -- that really hasn't changed
Do you claim the amount of license plate splatters remains consistent today as, say, 30 years ago, or some other time frame? I think this claim really needs to be sourced, can you produce these studies you allude to? Thanks
As for the license plates, they are no more aerodynamic than they were 30 years ago, which makes them a better source for insect measurement.
Edit: relevant discussion from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31275879
I agree with this, but not the claim that there are studies showing this number is consistent with the past. The linked discussion also seems to imply that sampling rate corresponds with the decline in insect populations, unless I missed something.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1704949114
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
"The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate"
"the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth."
"There is widespread consensus among scientists that human activity is accelerating the extinction of many animal species through the destruction of habitats, the consumption of animals as resources, and the elimination of species that humans view as threats or competitors."
If we want a natural world around us, we have to leave a lot of it natural. Sometimes it reminds us that's not really an option, but a requirement for survival. One thing we will learn from space colonies is that humans cannot thrive in a monoculture surrounded by sterility.
> "the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth."
an accurate statement when there have been a few mass extinction events that were (apparently) caused by sudden changes?
Is this assuming that the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event was caused by gradual changes instead of an impact or volcanic event? Same for the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction? I think there are also a number of extinction pulses in the record that could be attributed to sudden events although I'm unsure of how they compare in terms of the number of species affected.
Sometime around 2018 I started noticing a lot of fireflies, in a park in the middle of a major city. Which was not normal to me. Since then I've noticed them almost every summer.
And on vacation in Denmark it's the same thing, the air is alive with life. It has its downsides too because there are more ticks than ever too.
A lot of cities here have started leaving grassy areas uncut, they just cut a path through it for people to walk on. Also Copenhagen has started building "walls" of twigs, encased in a wire mesh. These walls act as safe havens for all sorts of insects and small creatures.
I saw very few last year. I saw zero this year. I'm glad I got to experience them before they were all gone, I guess.
I think this is real, I'm traveling and borrowed a relatives car which is much lower profile and more sleek than my old Jeep. I was driving through the countryside the other day and there were a lot of critters flying about, I was surprised that often, they'd sort of just get "pushed" over the top of the car. Not sure what happened to them after that but yeah!
> Not sure what happened to them after that but yeah!
One thing I did find is that for aerodynamic purposes the one place cars want turbulence is right behind them in their wake to disrupt a vacuum.
So I expect those bugs get smashed into the ground or even sucked into the radiator of any close behind cars as that air seems quite stagnant right behind a car.
[0] https://eu.seacoastonline.com/story/special/2017/01/09/cars-...
AFAIK, the effect of these pesticides on humans is limited, but it's been absolutely devastating for insects.
There is not much profit to be made on insects (aside from bees), so research and bills are getting lobbied into limbo by the big four neonicotinoid companies and agriculture organizations.
Today I find 1 or 2 snails after rainfall, if at all.
Every summer evening the house and surrounding garden were filled with fireflies, it was mesmerizing.
Thanks for making me remember this :)
I collect snails from my garden to eat and numbers are fairly similar despite my occasionally trying to control them with pellets some years.
Similarly with the original article I only got half way down but clearly it's more to do with cars than insect numbers.
When 0.1% of humans dies of a virus, we call it a disaster. When 50% of insects dies, we don't give a damn.
The only reason I care is because of the broader ecological effects. I don't care whether my gut microbes live or die either, if it wasn't for the health effects it would have on me.
The scene is very well done. His imagination of the insect anthropomorphized is absolutely fascinating...
Why wouldn't they?
Ants also have a complex range of psychological responses. (Not sure I'd call them "emotions" since we're obviously too distantly related to them to have a meaningful reference here, but whatever.)
If we're going down the road of human introduced chemical toxins (like pesticide pollution) I think a fair bit of blame also deserves to be laid at the feet of the state (and by proxy voters) for poisoning the soil immediately adjacent to roads (and to a slightly lesser degree, the watersheds) with various salts.
I have mixed feelings about this: Night lights do add a bit of security, but insects such as moths rely on natural darkness and moonlight to navigate.
We can have a bit of compromise, at least if we had dark sky compliant lights there would be a lot less of an issue. Where I live the streetlights seem to intentionally point upward and it's frustrating that this isn't a priority even when refiting them with LEDs (at least here they put in warm lights instead of cool ones like where I used to live).
Very much unlike their incandescent and florescent predecessors, LED lights emit practically no ultraviolet wavelengths, and therefore have a drastically reduced attractive effect on insects. Whatever effect outdoor lighting may have on insects, should be showing precipitous declines over the past several years, as LEDs have become the dominant artificial light source.
Just less so, which is why the recommendation is to use “warm” led to minimize insect attraction.
Also, light usage hasn’t remained constant. LED’s lower power usage means that it enables more lighting, including solar powered (day charged) landscaping lights.
So whereas owners would formerly only have one or two lights at low watts before, the reduced energy usage means that they sprinkle in another magnitude more with LED.
Second point: the windshield splats proxy is too confounded to be useful. Use actual measurements or reasonable people will discount the claims (as I have done).
Possibly some strain of Wolbachia?
There are many areas that have cars but aren't in the middle of cities or in areas with high traffic.
And, we could always keep a pristine population of the peat locked away in some vault if it turns out making them extinct in the wild was a bad idea.
Side note: recently moved to the northeast and it has been fascinating seeing the city collectively come together to kill an invasive bug species. You will witness an adult randomly stomping on the corner of the street. I wish we had the same energy when it came to protecting existing bugs.
It was entertaining watching the old man (easily 85+) from my neighborhood walking around with a broom brushing them off trees and smashing them with his walker.
No time to read a whole book? Hostetler's son, Bryce, released a free iPhone/iPad app in 2018 [2].
[1] https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig1997
[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/that-gunk-on-your-car/id135275...
Gotta say it's a bit scary. Together with air temperature in Bosnia being 27 degrees celsius, definitely rings some bad alarms.
Totally a gut feeling, but those can be correct often.
Anecdotally, I hardly had to clean my windscreen when I was living in a city. I'm living in a small town with fields all around it now and I never have a clean windscreen anymore. However nothing like the one in the first picture of the article. That's how my front license plate looks like.
If you've never lived through the lovebug season here, consider yourself lucky
A mild winter with an early spring, followed by a cold winter relapse, will also do in a lot of bugs.
The modern, sleek, aerodynamic cars we have don't pick up any bugs at all.
When I've towed a caravan it picks up a lot of bugs while the windscreen is relatively clean the entire trip. I drive a 7 year old vehicle.
If we were to blame anyone, we should blame ourselves. But I'll return to that in a moment.
We live in a complex system, so we can blame the political/financial system for providing wrong incentives, loans and subsidies to the big agriculture, based on profitability alone.
We can blame agriculture companies for sprayng millions of tons of poisons all over our countryside to keep profits up and costs down. When you're planting monocrops, and spraying it with pesti/herbicides, you're propagating environmental equivalents of deserts. Deserts leaking poisons not only on itself, but through whole nature (through wind & water cycle).
Both pesticides and herbicides are inbelievably poisonous not only to plants and pests, but also to other bugs (we all know at least about bees), to all other animals, the animals we feed with the produce, and in the end, even to humans. Those poisons' bioaccumulate and their neurodegenerative and hormons-altering effects are causing havoc not only in bugs, frogs and mice, but also in humans (parkinson, etc.).
The solution is something we're actively killing with our current agricultural practices. Biodiversity.
For example, we don't need to kill the mice with poisons. We can interplant trees into our fields to provide living space for predators (e.g. owls and foxes) to manage the mice population and not use the poisons to keep those predators alive.
We can't reasonably expect the return of an army of small farmers, providing local communities with poison-free grown food, not in a reasonable time frame we have until environmental collapse and/or extinction of key animal kinds (no pollinators, no birds, no small predators, more mice, more bad bugs and diseases, famines ...).
But what we can do, we can change our habits. We don't have to eat meat/dairy, which is incredibly land/resource/poison intensive (we would need 4+ earths to feed the world's population same diet as americans have). We don't have to feed other animal 20x more food than we would need only to eat its muscles. We don't have to cut down forests to grow meat (we would need 1/4 of the land to feed the population if everybody were to switch to a plant based diet), if we eat the plants ourselves and let the nature be and let it repair itself.
We can then change the political/financial/agricultural system through our own actions (buying/cooking/eating). When enough people do, there won't be the pressure to produce a much as we currently do, then we can legislate the change in the agriculture , forbid use of poisons, protect the ecosystems, reforest the earth, live in sync with the nature, stop exploiting everything (and living beings) with our need for financial gains.
Sorry for my bad english. Also, I'm in the system, it's monday, no time to write shorter comment, and no time to incorporate everything-that-is-wrong and everything-that-should-be-done. It's a complex system. But it can be solved in our own kitchens.
Here is an interesting breakdown of how much of the world's surface (particularly the part that includes habitable land) is used to grow crops: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use (TLDR: it is a very small percentage)
Oh, I know. It's not looking good for bugs globally because of a lot of reasons.
This is way too general: in some countries and alongside specific highways, the state of grasslands is actually really good. Like: good enough to grow rare orchids and having >10 or >20 plant species/square meter. Because of correct mowing regimes for that vegetation type.
It also lacks nuance because as explained in another comment already: not mowing at all can make things worse. Which brings us to the tall grasses: meadows featuring a lot of tall grasses but hardly any other flowering plants have can have much less insects that meadows with a coverage of only like 20% grasses where the rest is taken by a diversity of flowering plants.
Jokes aside, I don't think we take into account how many bugs we've killed with windshields, are we?
I only have to look outside at my neighbors winter wheat field to find one of the reasons. It’s been sprayed 3 times already this fall after sowing.
> But when we called experts in the arcane art of computational fluid dynamics, they sounded skeptical. Yes, today’s sleek sedans can have half the drag of the land boats that ruled the road just a generation or two ago. But that improved airflow won’t do much for a bug.
> For starters, many aero improvements happen on the rear of the car rather than the bug-hitting front. Consider the optimally aerodynamic teardrop shape, with its blunt, round front and long, sleek tail. But more importantly, it’s just surprisingly difficult to use air to push a bug out of the way of an onrushing Buick.
> If it were possible to design a bug- and debris-proof car, then Kevin Golsch probably would have done it by now. An auto-industry veteran, Golsch has spent decades around wind tunnels, both real and simulated, and is now vice president for strategic fluid design and simulation at Altair, a global tech company that makes simulation and AI software. Altair’s customers include massive automakers that would be thrilled if airflow could protect both windshields and the delicate sensors on self-driving cars.
> “From an aerodynamic standpoint, I’ve done a lot of studies on contamination of sensors, especially for autonomous vehicles,” Golsch said. “And I think most everybody’s given up on trying to influence what happens at the vehicle level for dust and particles and rain.”
> Consider raindrops. They’re about the size and weight of a larger insect, but nobody thinks fewer raindrops hit our windshields these days. Any forces that cleared our windshield of bugs would presumably do the same for rain and road debris, Golsch said.
> To be sure, one element of modern auto design could be reducing bug spatter. Windshields today often have a lower slope than the more-vertical front windows of yesteryear, and while the broader shift to SUVs and trucks with bigger, steeper windshields will negate some of that, it might reduce splats for people who are driving similar vehicles.
> “If the windshield was laid back slightly more than another windshield, that bug may have a chance of just skipping off and going up over the windshield rather than hitting the windshield,” Golsch said. “It might be a glancing blow at the last second rather than a splat.”
> But we also saw 60 percent declines in insects between 2004 and 2021 in a British study from the Kent Wildlife Trust, which built on a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds effort in which thousands of people used “splatometers” to measure bug splatters on license plates, which aren’t much affected by aerodynamic advances elsewhere.
I remember the story of a species of moths living in German industrial cities.
These were normally brown like tree bark but evolved to look like sooty brick in a few years.
Insects have ears (although highly varying in capability) which could lead them to avoid dangerous zones.
Anecdotally i would say i see fewer insects circling around lamps too.
Because the brown ones got eaten. But that's different from evolving to recognize where a road is, which is maybe possible but probably would take thousands or millions of years.
No.
This could also be a function of bugs flying less over busy roads, and decreasing in volume at the places where most cars drive. If so, that would explain the precipitous fall in splats. I do not think that this is very far-fetched, since most animals instinctively begin to shun areas when predators are introduced.
Insects that spend time on the open road have less chance of survival and reproduction than those that stay in their natural habitat.
People don't realise nature is very resilient and it will move into every area that is not polluted with toxins. Even with toxins or radiation (like the famous Chernobyl exclusion zone) nature evolves to deal with it.