Flying Insects Have Been Disappearing Over the Past Few Decades, Study Shows (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists. Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is "on course for ecological Armageddon," with profound impacts on human society. The new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany but has implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture, the researchers said. The cause of the huge decline is as yet unclear, although the destruction of wild areas and widespread use of pesticides are the most likely factors and climate change may play a role. The scientists were able to rule out weather and changes to landscape in the reserves as causes, but data on pesticide levels has not been collected. The research, published in the journal Plos One, is based on the work of dozens of amateur entomologists across Germany who began using strictly standardized ways of collecting insects in 1989.

Comments

Good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck bugs.

Re:Good.

[PPH]

You can have my bug zapper when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!

Flawed research

[Presence Eternal]

They would have found the missing populations if they'd bothered to check my living room last Thursday.

Re:Flawed research

[hey!]

*help me*

some insects are on TSA's no-fly list

[turkeydance]

so they don't

It's all my friends fault.

[grep -v '.*' *]

He works for a chemical company. A few decades ago on one fine, hot summer day he and a friend were out there (for more than a week) with a few crickets, an air hose, and a windshield or fifty.

He and a friend spend their time having fun blasting crickets from the hose onto the windshields, each treated with a different mixture to test, thus imitating a car driving thru a (?cricket storm? It's the same idea as having a teeny tiny mouse process 10,000 gallons of aspartame so see what happens. The mouse finally dies in the bathroom of boredom I think.)

It was fun for the first 30 minutes or so, I hear. They started cracking jokes and whistling. After a few days they started watching "The Fly" with Vincent Price on a TV they bought. On Repeat.

One fine day they put pictures of their boss behind some of the windshields. Their accuracy and attention span greatly improved that day.

Nowdays he just sits in the corner and chirps slightly. (I exaggerate. He actually stomps on every cricket he sees, even if it's on the ceiling -- he's a pretty good shot with a shoe.)

So, kids, you've a choice between depressing old Emily Dickinson and weird e eEEEEE! Cummings or STEM research with bugs and fire and electricity. Personally, I'd stay in the theoretical physics side of things -- where no one expects understandable results anyway.