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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.
Fuck bugs.
Too bad the reduction in bees hasn't translated to a reduction of mosquitoes.
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.
Nuke em all, and let the god of flying bastards sort it out.
Neonicotinoids
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Used to drive 150 mph all the time. I'd clean the windscreen every day. Today, I drive 150 mph all the time. I NEVER clean the windscreen!
The TSA!
Quite the coincidence isn't it?
They would have found the missing populations if they'd bothered to check my living room last Thursday.
copyright t. swell
Bugs!
they counted them,
you know;
took 'em ten years, using
airplanes
with nets and special
radar.
that's what they do;
scientists
from Israel, China and
Britain.
count bugs.
short ones tall ones big ones
small ones
tasty or otherwise, bugs
dominate.
they surround us, they live
on & in us
they crawl, squirm, hop
and fly
by day, by night, while
you sleep...
bugs
are bigger than we -
total weight greater than
all humanity.
7 trillion bugs fly over
your head
every year; spring
and fall;
far above your head
up to a mile
dropping tiny deposits
on your head
moving in wind at up to
35 M.P.H.
7 trillion bugs weigh
6,400 tons.
as much as, try to
imagine,
1,272 elephants
flying over your house
every year.
if you could eat only half
those bugs
you would be well fed.
but birds & bats would be
deprived.
Bugs!
...omphaloskepsis often...
Fake news! The only sure cause is that people are preying on them to add to their "entomology" collection, thus reducing the populations. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Did they even consider that 25 years ago they had an unusually high density of insects and now we are back to normal? I think they did not!
As anybody knows who isn't so stupid they'd drown from looking up if they went out in the rain, climate and weather are not the same thing.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I've read that the popularity of housecats creates tremendous predation of small animals in urban areas. I wonder if the prevalence of birdfeeders creates similar booms of insectivores.
insect population in Germany only was studied
might be happening elsewhere, but let's not go full alarmist yet eh?
so they don't
It’s both.
Butterfly collectors will cause the biosphere to implode. Seriously.
We're good for another 4 billion people. Then the population will balance out and mother nature will live harmoniously with our industrial farms and floating plastic continents and if you all know what's good for you...lots more coal power plants...god bless 'em.
You get snow in winter time? We don't where I live any more. Used to be about every 8 years. And we'd have about 6 weeks of freezing temperatures (lasting into March sometimes) too. Not any more. No snow for over a decade. Down to a few days freezing temperatures and mostly only at night.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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?
Not sure what the prediction is that you're referring to, but I', approaching 50 years old and saw *no* raptors when I was growing up unless the family was driving through very remote mountains.
Today-- there are large birds everywhere.
Banning DDT had a very clear positive effect of allowing large birds to live.
I swat one every few days or so.
Look at your car windshield if you want to see where a big chunk of them are going. I've lived in areas where it sounded like rain at night, there were so many bugs being smashed as I drove down the road.
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.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
7B is just too many, no matter how we try to live.
I heard the same thing at 6B, 5B all the way back to 1B, in fact I think the Romans may have even voiced concerns when there was only a few million.
Assuming we do want to scale it back, the easiest method is peace and prosperity. There's a direct correlation between wealth, happiness, and smaller families. I recall seeing something where most of the west is already in stable growth mode (eg Japan is already negative) and that most population growth is from the developing world and immigration.
So we ended up with the lose-lose of banning DDT and still ending up with the outcome she predicted.
Now what?
Umm, no we didn't. Neonicotinoids are almost certainly the cause of this, has nothing to do with DDT. DDT, which for some halfassed reason is championed by some as the holy grail of insect killers, a majick chemical that no insect will ever develop immunity to, because majick!
DDT was retired because birds were susceptible to it, laying thinner and thinner shells until they would crack under their own weight. Not sure how old you are, but when I was a kid in the early 1960's, it was so rare to see a hawk or other raptor, to the point that if we saw one while out in the car, we'd often stop because it was exciting. Hellava price to pay for a chemical that the insects will develop resistance to, just like weeds have developed resistance to Roundup.
Under some emergency stopgap circumstances, we can use DDT. Just not regularly. Don't want resistance built up to it. Just like old school penicillin, we're saving it. Because once those two are no longer effective, we are well and truly fucked. Just not in the fun way.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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!
Immigration may cause the number of people on planet America to increase but on planet Earth it jus means people move around.
-- Cheers!
Does it ever seem like no matter what we do, it's wrong? From so many directions our impending doom approaches.. from nuclear war, climate change, and other ecological disasters, like this and bee colony collapse.
Maybe we should all watch more of Primitive Technology on Youtube, seems like we're going to have to learn how to live like that again sometime sooner than expected, if at all.
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.
Immigration to the West, not just the U.S. Lighten up.
The flapping of one butterfly's wings can effect changes on the other side of the world. Once the butterfly collectors have caused the biosphere to implode, nothing will ever change again.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Ditto on that. Ospreys in Oregon, Eagles in Big Bear.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Regardless, while the downward trend is clear, the 75% figure is bullshit. There was 50% variation over the first two years, and these major changes continue over time. The overall fall is still dramatic, just less than what is stated.
As anybody knows who isn't so stupid they'd drown from looking up if they went out in the rain, climate and weather are not the same thing.
Well, that''s a relief. I was concerned that with the climate changing, weather patterns might not stay the same from year to year.
There are fucking mosquitoes all summer long, wasps everywhere, flies, box elder bugs, gnats, and those little fruit flies always get in my house.
Maybe you should open the window once in a while, to let those pesticides in that kill the insects everywhere else outside your house.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Get out of your mom's basement.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
PESTICIDES
PESTICIDES
You can't drop tons of chemicals engineered to kill insects into a biosystem, and NOT expect it to kill insects.
- Jason
But you don't see anybody raising the alarm over the disappearing honkey population
Insects don't have guns to go on a rampage ^w^w^w^w defend themselves with.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
OK, I'm sorry, but I have serious problems extrapolating from one highly industrialized country in the middle of a highly industrialized continent to the entire world. The results they found in Germany are a basis to justify funding to see if the same holds true in the rest of the world, but not a very solid basis to draw a conclusion about what is happening in the rest of the world.
Personally, I am somewhat skeptical of their conclusions because the number of bats and insectivorous birds which I see are significantly higher than when I was a child. While that is anecdotal evidence, I also remember reading a year or two ago about a significant drop in the number of bats as a result of disease...in the article it mentioned that this was devastating because bat populations were finally returning to what was considered near optimal after a low in the late 60s, early 70s.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Human population is stabilizing. If anything it's declining in the developed world with birth rates around 1.8 per couple. Overpopulation turned out not to be a thing.
As the population declines the strain on the planet combined with our need to get resources out of it will drop. The only question is if we can keep this trend up. To be honest, it comes down to whether we can mellow our religion. That's the main driving force to increase population and oppose birth control. Specifically the notion that God made the earth for us to exploit and so there won't be any consequences if we do so. That and most religion's concepts around 'fornication' and birth control.
Mellow out religious zealots and you'll gradually see a developed world where the only real problem will be under population. I'm not sure if that'll happen or not. On the one hand we've had a resurgence in America as our right wing leans heavily on religion to get voters to the polls but on the other hand statistics show that mellowing out is happening. I'll be dead before it's a problem though.
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40% - 50% of all food produced is thrown away.
Most of it does not even reach the super market, and plenty of it is not even used as food for livestock.
The planet easily can hold up to 50B people with nature intact if we would get rid of "greed capitalism".
Poisoning the planet with CO2, because it is cheaper than renewables ... by what metric? Dollars?
Exploiting the Oceans instead of sustained fishing and "working" sea farms. Yes, we have sea farms, but "greed capitalism" makes them more harm than good and the food from there is close to unacceptable.
However it would be easy to farm the sea without destroying everything.
The idea that we have to scale down the population to 2B is utter nonsense. And if you ask "who", the answer is obvious: USA, Qatar, Kuweit ... ooops, my mistake. The later 2 are so small, they had no effect.
Anyway, it is probably just 20 years till the population on the planet will be on a plateau and then decrese slightly.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Germany is one of the most intensively human modified environments in the world. The current goal of the Germans is to have 2% of their country be wilderness area by 2020 (it's currently 0.5%).
Doing a wildlife study of Germany and extrapolating globally from that is fairly ridiculous. It might apply to a few other countries in Europe and maybe New Jersey in the US, but otherwise is useless.
Population control. All these problems will just worse the more people there are.
DDT also accumulated in the food chain. ...
And is super dangerous for humans in the end
DDT is basically a variation of Dioxin(s)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I know an old lady like that.
Heh, and here all this time I thought it was because it doesn't break down easily and builds up in the water table and therefore is potentially harmful to humans, well that is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry, but it's not the main reason. Thanks, I learned something new today, I can go home now :-)
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
"gathered in nature reserves across Germany"
Couldn't the fact that it's in a nature reserve affect the outcome?
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for the Northeast, especially Maine and Massachusetts. We're not bug scientists, but a lot of us noticed that something's been wrong for a few years.
The states don't appear to be interested in funding any studies though. On guy actually said - I kid you not - if we don't study it, it doesn't exist.
Looks like I was a bit too subtle. We banned DDT but then created a bunch of replacements that still ended up wiping out the lowest layer of the ecosystem, which if this study is even remotely close to accurate will now shortly end up working its way up the food chain. Birds still eat bugs, last I checked.
DDT also accumulated in the food chain. And is super dangerous for humans in the end ...
DDT is basically a variation of Dioxin(s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I cringe when I see the videos of people being dusted with that stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... And there is a video of San Antonia Texas being swamped with DDT in some kind or weird attempt to combat Polio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Which disease is spread mostly by fecal matter, not bugs.
A nasty poison that has a weird cult following, of it's mythical status. I wonder if these folk would like to go back to using Paris Green, a mixture of Copper II acetate and lead arsenide?
We obviously are tied to our insecticides at this point, but a story about a friend of mine might serve as a warning A great and otherwise brilliant guy, he was a fan of DDT, and was pissed by "those liberals" that got it banned. He used Seven, and sprayed his fruit trees and garden every year with it, and didn't use any protective gear, he just wore a shirt and pants and shoes. Amazing the trees got pollinated, because Sevin is hell on bees. I told him that pesticide toxicity doesn't know politics, and he guffawed at that. He told me the only effect it had on him was "some diarrhea", but that was gone a day or two later.
Well, Sevin is a broad spectrum insecticide, a carbamate that targets nerves and muscle tissues. Today, he has a hella case of Parkinsonism, and is a shell of his former self. They don't even want you de-tasseling corn for the better part of a month after using that, and he was essentially showering in the stuff. That really sucks.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I saw an article about this somewhere else recently, saying that here in the UK you just don't get the same amount of dead insects on your windscreen in the summer as you used to, although that was more anecdotal than evidence-based..
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it