Slashdot Mirror
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."
Cellphones killed them, every one.
When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn? /#
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I attributed it to climate change and loss of continuous habitat.
It's actually a week-old story, but I only spotted it today. (It wasn't pitched by any reader.) Apologies for running what seems like an old story, but we found it important enough to run it. Thanks.
It's nearly summer here, we got 23C today, and most of the leaves have sprung everywhere. But indeed - where are the insects? Yes, there are the odd bumblebee here and there, but this place (right in the middle of mother nature) is usually buzzing with insects this time of the year, but there is hardly any.
Of course - I can't say that I miss the Mosquito, in fact - it's my sworn enemy, but the rest of the insect hordes seems to be gone as well, I hardly see any banana flies, moths or any common insects here out in the wilderness any more. Maybe there is something going on here?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
"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"
In other news,:birds eating those missing insects are declining rapidly as well.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
The world's missing mosquitos are in my backyard. Everyone is welcome to them, just let me know when you want to come pick them up.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
This has some scary downstream implications - bird migrations will immediately change, and the ecosystem will have geographic pockets of abundance and scarcity due to that. Food pollination also comes to mind. Corporations do not react to emotional pressures [often] - so any link from pesticide/herbicide usage to lack of pollinators will require a round of market disruption. Even then, the answer may not be insects but something like humans or drones to artificially pollinate sustenance plants until unequivocal proof is found that insects were affect by these chemicals.
Insects thrive on warmer weather. The only potential cause that I can think of are pesticides.
/s
When I was a kid you could see tens of thousands fireflies at night in the country around here. In the early eighties the pine beetle started spreading through the tree farms around here. They started aerial spraying of pesticides to kill them and in just a few years you stopped seeing them at all. In the last decade or so they have reappeared, in very low numbers.
It's actually evolution in action. All of the stupid insects in the area are being caught by these traps, thus removing their lower intelligence from the local gene pool. Over time the insects that are breeding are only having smarter offspring, so they aren't getting caught in these traps. It's the long term results of the observer effect. I heard that in the areas that have been doing this the longest, many of the traps have been vandalized by what appear to be tiny stone weapons.
Because an alarming ecological story comes up, and without evidence or even a rational hypothetical cause, it's immediately blamed on climate change.
Most insects are herbivorous, so rely on plants for food. Global warming (increasing global temperatures, higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, shorter winters) are conducive to plant growth. So you'd actually expect temperatures increasing by a few degrees to lead to more insects, not fewer.
Loss of continuous habitat is possible, but I'd consider it unlikely. Larger species are more susceptible to that than smaller ones like insects. We would've noticed the loss of biomass there first.
My bet is on pesticides. You state later that Canada and the EU are eco-friendly, therefore speculating that they use less pesticides. But this map (pages 17, 47-49) shows the EU uses more pesticides per hectare than the U.S./Canada, and are only exceeded by China and some South and Central American countries. (The EU uses more pesticides than the U.S. and Canada because it has less arable land but more population. So to feed itself the EU needs to grow more food per hectare.) Pesticide use in kg/ha is down slightly since 1989, but I suspect this is more than offset by development of more effective pesticides.
When I was a kid there were always bees and dragonflies around. Now the only bees you see are the introduced ones (I live in Tasmania - someone solved the pollination problem way illegally importing them and releasing them). I miss the dragonflies though - as far as your average bug goes they were always the most exciting thing on the wing. We still seem to have wasps though - they seem to be thriving :-(
Because an alarming ecological story comes up, and without evidence or even a rational hypothetical cause, it's immediately blamed on climate change.
The article does not mention global warming or climate change at all. A much more likely culprit is Neonicotinoid pesticides. An interesting tidbit form the article is that they have been able to reconstruct some avian diets from the 40's round th etime DDT came into use. Possibly smoked the beetles pretty good, and after DDT was outlawed, thee beetles only made a small comeback.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Right. In the same way that every time a newspaper reports on a fatal car accident and mentioned the fact that the dead weren't wearing their seat belts, just proves how pervasive and devious the Newtonian Conspiracy is when promoting their liberal seat belt-wearing agenda.
Remedial biology fail. Every mass extinction in history has resulted from the environment changing too fast for life to adapt to new conditions. Guess what happens when humans change the environment faster than life can adapt - and that's before even approaching the subject of climate change.
But don't mind me. Go on back to spreading the gospel of Jenny McCarthy while giving lead-painted toys to your kids and feeding them oatmeal steeped in arsenic, sending them off to school with a pack of Camels in each of their backpacks. Because science is a Big Lubrul conspiracy.
So you'd actually expect temperatures increasing by a few degrees to lead to more insects, not fewer.
You misunderstand. There are not fewer insects, but fewer species of insects. Their number has not diminished, their diversity has.
No. TFA says explicitly that there is 80% loss of total mass of insects caught, so regardless of breakdown by species, there is fewer insects in total.