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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.
They would have found the missing populations if they'd bothered to check my living room last Thursday.
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.
so they don't
Butterfly collectors will cause the biosphere to implode. Seriously.
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?
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?
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!
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.
That... that is a good point.... I enjoy seeing more raptors and large birds than when I was a kid, but the windshield does stay cleaner on long drives... you used to have to scrape it off every fillup on road trips. I wonder if it is the bugs or the aerodynamics of the cars, though?