Ecologists horrified as nature reserves emptied of insects

theguardian.com

32 points·anigbrowl··4 comments

Meanwhile the local “eco friendly” pesticide company is knocking on everyone’s door, showing them pictures of scary looking bugs, offering to treat their entire yard from the foundation to the pavement. I don’t get it

It’s very easy. Insects are annoying. Nobody wants them near.

> It’s very easy. Insects are annoying. Nobody wants them near.

Insects are an enormous class. (Well, I had to look that up, and maybe insects are just part of the class Insecta? Anyway, they're an enormous whatever they are.) I'm not a big fan of mosquitoes or ticks, and I try to shoo wasps away from building nests on my porch, but, for example, bees and butterflies are marvellous creatures whom I welcome to my garden and enjoy watching and having all around me.

> Puerto Rico, where insect biomass dropped up to 60-fold since the 1970s. These declines are occurring in ecosystems that are otherwise protected from direct human influence.

These numbers are absolutely horrifying. And it's happening in "protected ecosystems", not just those places we've paved over or sprayed poison on.

And it's not just the insects; according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction :

> Current extinction rates are estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates[13][14][15][16][17] and are accelerating.

while humans and their livestock account for 96% of global mammal biomass.

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