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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.
Neonicotinoids
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I would gladly destroy every bee on earth if I could sit outside without spraying a ton of chemicals on myself to prevent mosquito bites carrying disease.
I agree that mosquitoes are despicable vermin. Most bugs have some purpose in the grand cycle, and I leave them alone so long as they stay outside where they belong. But I have to ask, just what the hell is the place of mosquitoes in the scheme?! Yes, if the price was agreeable, I would support the 100% elimination of this bug forever.
A dingo ate my sig...
Rachel Carson was concerned with the adorable songbirds and how DDT was not only killing insects but causing direct harm up the foodchain. Local scale problems, there were always more insects out there...
Now we are killing all insects, with less direct harm up the foodchain - except: there's no more food. Global scale problem, like the fish stocks in the oceans.
7B is just too many, no matter how we try to live. Everybody becoming vegetarian just won't cut it. I think if we could scale back to 2B, we'd be just fine. Next question: which 2B?
I hate mosquitoes but I found I solved that problem by moving far away from the Gulf Coast.
I was chased out of a park once by a swarm of them. And some people are trying to get me to move back there. Bad timing. I told them you just had a hurricane and your homes are flooded and I don't even want to imagine what the mosquitoes are like. I think I'll stay up here in the mountains far away from any bayou.
In between living in the swamp and living in the mountains I lived in the desert for a couple of years and I don't believe I saw a single mosquito in the desert. And I've only seen one palmetto bug (roach) since I moved out of the swamp and I'm pretty sure that one just hitchhiked its way across the USA- just like in that Lou Reed song.
I hate most bugs especially roaches and mosquitoes but I made a mistake a few years back. When I moved into my current home I killed all the wasps with chemical weapons and they never came back. Some might call this a successful victory over stinging insects but I realized after the fact that I had done wrong. Unlike mosquitoes, wasps don't want to sting or bite humans. They just wanted to pollinate the plants. I regret killing the wasps.
One type of bug I've never killed though is spiders and they've been good to me. One spider rid my house of some kind of tiny fly infestation - they weren't gnats or fruitflies - not exactly sure what they were but the spider built a web and caught them all and when they were gone the spider went away.
Supposedly there are mosquitoes around here but I can't remember the last time one bit me.
I was sitting outside a few days ago and thinking about how bugs aren't nearly as bad as they used to be. Just sitting there drinking a glass of iced tea enjoying a beautiful day, and nothing buzzing my head. No gnats flying in my ears, no flies trying to light on my glass. I thought maybe it was just me but the last 2 or 3 years I had wondered why bugs weren't so bad anymore. Now this makes me wonder, are they really dying off?
Most ancient civilizations disappeared because they totally depleted their immediate environment of all things needed to live. Nowadays our immediate environment is the whole planet. We're doomed.
-- Cheers!
Of course we have a huge drop in insect populations. What did you expect was going to happen?
One of the genetic modifications done to corn in 1995 was the introduction of genes from bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). These genes make plants themselves produce toxic crystals which destroy insect guts. Thus, farms don't have to spray insecticide anymore, the plants themselves ARE insecticide.
Bats, purple martins and other insectivores get a vanishingly small amount of their calories from mosquitoes - less than 1% of the stomach contents of bats. Mosquitoes are quite small and therefore not very calorically rich. Unlike midges and gnats, they don’t really swarm in a way that would allow insectivores to get a whole bunch in one swoop, so generally mosquitoes are providing fewer calories than the expense required to fly at them. Bats, martins and the like mostly end up eating moths and midges. Some species of dragonfly are mosquitovores but, again, not as a large percentage of their caloric intake.
There are a handful of species that target mosquito larvae, which bunch up enough to be worth it. The aptly named mosquitofish is one such creature.
But the saving grace even among mosquitofish is that they don’t care what species of mosquito larva they eat - getting rid of the handful that target humans will leave space for the hundreds of other species that exist in the US (let alone the thousands worldwide). There are approximately 3,500 species of mosquito and only about 40 that target humans. Most of the human targeting mosquitoes are invasive species in nearly all of their range, brought by humans. (Aedes aegypti and the Asian Tiger mosquito, for instance, shouldn't be found in the Americas...)
Contrast that with the enormous chemical inputs we put into our lakes, streams and rivers in order to just control mosquitoes - we are surely inadvertently killing off other species of insects just trying to control mosquitoes. And when we drain a wetland because of mosquitoes, we impact far, far more species than even the worst case scenario of mosquito extinction.
There have been a number of discussions among ecologists and the consensus is that wiping out human-targeting mosquito species is fine. Even E.O. Wilson, the famed biologist and campaigner for biodiversity, wants to kill them all. (He’s actually slightly more cautious, but basically wouldn’t spill any tears over eradicating human-feeding insects.)