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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...
They would have found the missing populations if they'd bothered to check my living room last Thursday.
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
You can have my bug zapper when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!
Have gnu, will travel.
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?
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.
Or ticks! Little cocksucers latch onto you and can even screw you up big time, via lyme disease and one even carries some disease that makes a person allergic to meat.
Tip - I don't know if you know about Picardin, but its a tick and mosquito repellent that is as effective as DEET. And it doesn't melt plastic or make you feel like a greaser - like DEET - either. I use Picardin all the time.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Girls, girls, you're both wrong!
AC, you're wrong that "The only mosquitoes that don't bother humans are the ones that are so remote that they can't reach us to do so". There's many species that don't SUCK BLOOD, or harm humans in any way. But they still pollinate. You don't see those that often, because they have no reason to track and swarm mammals, but there's a bunch of them everywhere.
And other AC, you're wrong that "You need to realize that the ecosystem of the Earth is like a pile of Jenga blocks, and by removing one you very well may send the whole thing crashing down."
There's actually a bunch of filthy vermin that should be expunged as soon as possible. For instance, the Asian Tiger Mosquito should be rendered extinct as fast as possible. It's role in the ecosystem can be met by non-shitty mosquitoes (some of which is has partially displaced recently).
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.
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.
glitch! wondered:
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.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that mosquitoes are an important food source for insectivorous birds. Hummingbirds, in particular. And Gnatcatchers. Bats are also major predators of adult mosquitoes. Their larvae are an important food source for fish, dragonflies, crawdads, and smaller water-loving birds, as well.
Insectivorous birds are also eager predators of ticks, which are particularly important to them in winter, when many other insect adults are absent from temperate ecosystems.
Note that, having said all that, I myself hate both of them, along with every other kind of parasite you might care to name.
Fleas, for instance ...
Check out my novel.
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?
Please name more than two ancient civilizations which disappeared because they depleted their immediate environment of things they needed to live.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.)