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'Hyperalarming' Study Shows Massive Insect Loss (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), the study found, and the forest's insect-eating animals have gone missing, too. The latest report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that this startling loss of insect abundance extends to the Americas. The study's authors implicate climate change in the loss of tropical invertebrates.
Bradford Lister, a biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, has been studying rain forest insects in Puerto Rico since the 1970s. "We went down in '76, '77 expressly to measure the resources: the insects and the insectivores in the rain forest, the birds, the frogs, the lizards," Lister said. He came back nearly 40 years later, with his colleague Andrés García, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What the scientists did not see on their return troubled them. "Boy, it was immediately obvious when we went into that forest," Lister said. Fewer birds flitted overhead. The butterflies, once abundant, had all but vanished. García and Lister once again measured the forest's insects and other invertebrates, a group called arthropods that includes spiders and centipedes. The researchers trapped arthropods on the ground in plates covered in a sticky glue, and raised several more plates about three feet into the canopy. The researchers also swept nets over the brush hundreds of times, collecting the critters that crawled through the vegetation. Each technique revealed the biomass (the dry weight of all the captured invertebrates) had significantly decreased from 1976 to the present day. The sweep sample biomass decreased to a fourth or an eighth of what it had been. Between January 1977 and January 2013, the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold. The study also found a 30-percent drop in anole lizards, which eat arthropods. Some anole species have disappeared entirely from the interior forest. Another research team captured insect-eating frogs and birds in 1990 and 2005, and found a 50 percent decrease in the number of captures. The authors attribute this decline to the changing climate.
Bradford Lister, a biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, has been studying rain forest insects in Puerto Rico since the 1970s. "We went down in '76, '77 expressly to measure the resources: the insects and the insectivores in the rain forest, the birds, the frogs, the lizards," Lister said. He came back nearly 40 years later, with his colleague Andrés García, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What the scientists did not see on their return troubled them. "Boy, it was immediately obvious when we went into that forest," Lister said. Fewer birds flitted overhead. The butterflies, once abundant, had all but vanished. García and Lister once again measured the forest's insects and other invertebrates, a group called arthropods that includes spiders and centipedes. The researchers trapped arthropods on the ground in plates covered in a sticky glue, and raised several more plates about three feet into the canopy. The researchers also swept nets over the brush hundreds of times, collecting the critters that crawled through the vegetation. Each technique revealed the biomass (the dry weight of all the captured invertebrates) had significantly decreased from 1976 to the present day. The sweep sample biomass decreased to a fourth or an eighth of what it had been. Between January 1977 and January 2013, the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold. The study also found a 30-percent drop in anole lizards, which eat arthropods. Some anole species have disappeared entirely from the interior forest. Another research team captured insect-eating frogs and birds in 1990 and 2005, and found a 50 percent decrease in the number of captures. The authors attribute this decline to the changing climate.
Nah, must be climate change. It can't be the human population doubling every 40 years. We need to ignore the elephant in the room.
Double the human pop = more forests need to be cut down for roads, farms, housing, businesses, etc... Climate scientists pretending to be dumb, because talking about birth control in the 3rd world is inconvenient.
Try local pollution and continuous habitat loss. When you destroy habitat (especially continuous habitat) you lose. Much more of a threat than climate change.
Double the human pop = more forests need to be cut down for roads, farms, housing, businesses, etc... Climate scientists pretending to be dumb, because talking about birth control in the 3rd world is inconvenient.
No, I would be willing to put money on the majority of climate scientists being absolutely for promoting birth control.
It's "Christian" conservatives who are against birth control like condoms and abortions. They are also the ones against doing anything about climate change. Strange that isn't it?
That's an interesting question. I don't mean to attack you personally, but it does show the very kind of thinking that got us here:
Are [any other creatures] worth anything in comparison to:
* Human life
* Human goals ?
Sadly, for the majority in the West the answers' NO, if they even consider the question.
How could the life of a mosquito compare against homo sapiens?
How about a thousand?
How about an entire marsh's worth?
They always lose out.
And people that act on those calculations end up doing irreparable damage to the ecosystem, and in a slow, roundabout way, to people.
I'm super glad I don't have kids. Our rapidly changing ecosystem is going to make planet Earth really, really nasty for humans in the next century.
We're already starting to see mass migration due to climate change. That's going to get worse because currently habitable areas are going to become uninhabitable, and because of exponential population growth.
If we have some food systems collapse, as these insect studies seem to indicate is already happening, well... that's pretty scary.
Humans have grown technology much faster than than they have the ability to think about the repercussions of using it. This isn't good at all.
I don't respond to AC's.
Rate of change is different. Insects can move, just not fast enough when the change is hundreds of times faster than anything natural outside of an asteroid strike.
And even there, the great dying took centuries, and that was an asteroid plus the entire Siberian flats turning into a magma pond.
Here, we're still seeing change maybe twice that rate
That's pretty unusual.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not really. Those doctors will be frankly terrified by the news. Maybe you'll understand why, maybe not. If you don't, and are interested, ask. If you aren't interested, I can't help.
However, expect people including people you know and care about to die of malaria and other tropical diseases in higher latitudes in very large numbers over the coming decades.
And that's not good news.
I
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So what's different this time? I mean, the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Minoan Warm Period - all were hotter and longer than the current burst.
Well, the evidence suggests that you're probably wrong about the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Minoan Warm Period being hotter and longer than the current warming.
I guess modern insects and mammals are just too wimpy...
Or, I guess you could ignore the evidence and invent your own explanations...
Fanatically anti-fanatical
This shows the severe disconnect from reality present in nature in many of the green activists.
1. Humans vs nature dichotomy is the norm. Humans as part of nature never even enter the thought. Something only someone utterly disconnected from nature, only someone who lives in modern city could think.
2. "West is uniquely anti-nature and pro-human". Reality is, it's the most anti-human and pro-nature. You need not look beyond how shamelessly people outside West dump their waste, or where the plastic garbage filling the oceans comes from to see that "think of the nature before yourself" attitude is utterly absent outside the West beyond a few village idiot types.
3. Strange empathy towards other species that assumes that other species can be more valuable than their own. Not a single creature on this entire planet follows this philosophy in their actions. Nor does overwhelming majority of people, luckily, as this attitude is self-exterminationist. This mindset is almost uniquely locked to the certain parts of modern Green movement, which can commonly be described as "medieval nature worship" - worship of idealized view of nature as something beautiful, that human tarnish. Without ever realising that nature in reality is the bloodiest, most brutal, most amoral and unethical state of being, by definition.
This mode of thinking iss utterly absent outside West, and represents a tiny and vocal minority among even the Green movement itself. It's unfortunate that it's increasingly taking over the movement, and its various forms ranging from deranged animal activists from PETA to vegan extremists violently attacking people eating meat dishes in restaurants are increasingly taking control over the movement that used to be quite close to nature and very much pro-"humans as a part of nature" narrative rather than "humans against nature" one that is advanced here.