Where Have All the Insects Gone? (sciencemag.org)

Entomologists have been assessing diversity and abundance across western Germany and have found that between 1989 and 2013 the biomass of invertebrates caught had fallen by nearly 80 percent. From an article on Science magazine: Scientists have tracked alarming declines in domesticated honey bees, monarch butterflies, and lightning bugs. But few have paid attention to the moths, hover flies, beetles, and countless other insects that buzz and flitter through the warm months. "We have a pretty good track record of ignoring most noncharismatic species," which most insects are, says Joe Nocera, an ecologist at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. [...] A new set of long-term data is coming to light, this time from a dedicated group of mostly amateur entomologists who have tracked insect abundance at more than 100 nature reserves in western Europe since the 1980s. Over that time the group, the Krefeld Entomological Society, has seen the yearly insect catches fluctuate, as expected. But in 2013 they spotted something alarming. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by nearly 80%. Perhaps it was a particularly bad year, they thought, so they set up the traps again in 2014. The numbers were just as low. Through more direct comparisons, the group -- which had preserved thousands of samples over 3 decades -- found dramatic declines across more than a dozen other sites. Such losses reverberate up the food chain. "If you're an insect-eating bird living in that area, four-fifths of your food is gone in the last quarter-century, which is staggering," says Dave Goulson, an ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, who is working with the Krefeld group to analyze and publish some of the data. "One almost hopes that it's not representative -- that it's some strange artifact."

Comments

# Where Have All the Insects Gone?

[Hognoxious]

Cellphones killed them, every one.

When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn? /#

Re:# Where Have All the Insects Gone?

[Oswald McWeany]

That's why I don't let my pet fruit fly operate a cell phone whilst flying.

Part of a massive eradication programme

[hAckz0r]

Somebody told Trump that the Chinese were making better "bugs" than the US.

/s

Re:I've noticed it too

[PsychoSlashDot]

You can make broad-brush statements all you want, but:

This was ONE SITE, not the entire country, the EU, or the world.

ONE SITE. You need to know about the ONE SITE because that's where the data lays.

The rest of the sites have had linear and mercurial declines. But the article isn't a broad, or even area-wide statistical analysis. ONE SITE. This is why science journalism gets a bad name.

From TFS, "found dramatic declines across more than a dozen other sites."

Now, maybe my math skills aren't what they once were, but I'm pretty sure that one and a minimum or thirteen are not the same. Perhaps if it's in upper-case it's closer than if it's in lower case.