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Comment by horacemorace | Hacker News Reader

I know I’m not the only one alarmed by the fact that we used to have to clean bug splats off our windshields weekly during the summer and now don’t. The downstream and parallel effects must be massive.

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I saw lightning bugs and dragon flies for the first time in a long time this year. Our county banned pesticides for residential and recreation areas.

I left a lot of the leaves on my lawn this year and only thinned out the spots where they were thick enough to kill the grass.

Huge increase in lightning bugs this summer.

I reseeded my lawn with clover and saw a huge increase in all kinds of lightening bugs, bees, etc. Alos rabbits which surprised me (I'm in the middle of a dense urban area... there is a park nearby, though)

Nice! I forgot to mention that I also added microclover the the mix last fall. The bees love the little clover flowers.

lawn grass massively harms the environment, as do topiaries

I'd be willing to bet this has more to do with more aerodynamic designs of cars than less bugs in general.

I believe the same decrease is visible when driving older (less aerodynamic) cars, but I don’t have any studies on hand

...or just ask a bus driver, van driver, euro truck driver, etc.

They've all seen the decline too.

Yep, that observation is discussed frequently in the book "Insect Crisis". Highly recommend!

This one is weird to me because lots of people claim that they don't get as many windshield bug splats as they used to, and I haven't noticed a difference. I kind of wonder if there's some form of mass misremembering a la the "mandela effect where people have splatted (heh) one or two memorable instances of a bug-covered windshield across their entire childhood's memory range.

Yes, I know there are some "studies" about this, but I find their sampling size and methods basically inconsequential.

I still get a large amount of bugs on the front of my car, makes me wish I had applied PPF.

Aren’t modern windshield coatings awesome?

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

The reduction in windshield bug splats has more to do with the decline in insect populations.

EDIT: I originally said 75% decline over 30 years. Those are the results for studies in parts of Germany. We don't have solid data on global loss in insect populations.

There's a degree to which aerodynamics play a role in the number of splats but the numbers are also definitely way down.

We switched from a sedan with a very sloped windshield, to an SUV with a suprisingly upright windshield (one of the cartoonishly offroad mall crawlers). I've never had to scrape bugs off my windshield in my life before we bought the SUV but we go through a lot more windshield wiper fluid now than we did a couple months ago despite keeping the same driving patterns.

Some of that design is about keeping pedestrians from going head-first through your windshield if you hit them. With the SUV the top of the hood is above the center of mass of the hypothetical pedestrian, whereas the sedan is below, and so they have to encourage the flying human to slide over the roof instead of go teeth first into your back seat.

That it helps with bugs is more of a happy coincidence.

The worse case with the sedan, of going teeth first through the windshield and into the back seat, sounds a lot better than the SUV alternative for pedestrians!

I know you're not making a comment either way regarding pedestrian safety with sedans/SUVs in your post, but there's something that caught my attention about the graphic description for the sedan, with just a hint hanging there that the SUV would be worse.

Full disclosure: I'm biased against SUVs. Something about the sheer size seems wasteful. They also make more sense to be common in some places than others, and I haven't lived anywhere recently that I think they make sense.

People do not go "teeth first through the windshield into the back seat" when hit by a sedan. They go up the hood and up the windshield.

Euro-NCAP crash standards are specifically designed to "help" this by means of hoods which crumple and/or shift position in such a case.

That is infinitely preferable to hitting the flat face of most American and Japanese SUVs and specially pickup trucks, which are designd primarily to look "aggressive" and "angry" because that's what pickup truck buyers want.

There are old vehicle designs were the grill causes the pedestrian to rotate 90° into the windshield. Your assertion of how collisions work is predicated on changes to hood and front design that already account for pedestrian collision physics. But you’re implying this has always been the case and it has not.

This is, for instance, a big part of why the Mini Cooper is no longer mini. They had to lift the hood profile to reduce angular momentum.

Also why the forward raked grill designs of the seventies are gone never to return. Those suck pedestrians under the car, which is almost always fatal.

Anecdotally I also feel like I’ve notice a decline in windshield splat. But wouldn’t we notice severe bird population declines as well?

But we do notice severe bird population decline:

https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/agricultural-intensification-dr...

https://trends.ebird.org/ that's exactly what we do (and have been since we started poisoning with pesticides etc)

It’s also possible some insects have learned to avoid certain corridors at certain altitude to avoid getting splattered.

Animals do adapt behavior to avoid new threats. Now, admittedly it’s just conjecture but I would not rule it out nor am I saying it would account for all windshield spat decline.

This is actually due to evolution. Insect populations have evolved generation by generation such that the ones who avoid flying over roadways survive more often, and in time we end up with less bugs getting killed. Because the lifecycle of insects is very short, this can happen easily over the course of decades, enough to witness in one human lifetime.

Seems hard to believe but I want to believe

While this claim is plausible, it’s (admittedly pleasing) conjecture until you provide evidence.

I saw it myself, we did high speed off-roading and smashed a ton of bugs. But on the highway? Little to no bugs.

That doesn't prove anything. Disturbing burrowing bugs or bugs in grass and bushes with rumbling and lights is easily enough to account for a vast difference alone...Then consider the environment was more wild with more habitat space for bugs compared to a road...

I think it casts a reasonable doubt on the simple theory that wide spread use of pesticide somehow killed off enough bugs that we no longer have them hitting our windshields. If bug populations were dwindling you wouldn’t encounter them in the wild this way.

It’s more likely I think that most successful reproduction for the past century has increasingly been done by bugs who avoid flying over roads. There could be many reasons why they do this. Perhaps some sense the vast asphalt plain and prefer to stay in greener areas. Temperatures above roads in full sun are much hotter than above grass. Turbulence encountered by cars may encourage some bugs to seek calmer airspaces.

It’s not so simple as “pesticides”.

I really don't think it does. Especially since it'd be an entirely different set of bugs. You'd be hitting crickets and other bugs you wouldn't find on a road.

Bugs… that prefer to… fly above roads!?

You really dont understand bugs and their behavior at all do you? Bugs that live in fields dont live by the roadside.

So just to be clear: your theory (which has absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support it, and is entirely your personal anecdotes of which there's no causal relationship established whatsoever) refutes both broad evidence of how much damage pesticides do to outside of the target species (and to humans, and birds) but also refutes extensive scientific evidence that we are living through a time of massive ecological die-offs of species?

Let me guess, you live in rural America?

I would bet they don't live rurally or havent been alive very long. Anyone rural alive over the last 30 years shouldve noticed a decline everywhere around them....would also expect them to notice bugs are different by the road to in the fields to by the ponds, and that different times of year, weather etc, changes which bugs are out and how many are out...its harder to notice these things in suburbs or cities.

That's a neat possibility. Do you have any sources to share that go into more detail?

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