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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.
The standard complaints about drugs, antibiotics, and surfactants will certainly be suspect, but I wonder whether migration patterns might be affected by roads. It certainly must at least be putting some evolutionary pressure on the beasties what with the slabs of hot, dangerous pavement blocking things off every which way.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Ever since 1976, scientists have been running exhaustive studies to track the loss of insects that involve trapping and killing millions of bugs. Scientists now believe running constant sampling on that scale may have affected the bug populations.
is out. What then are we going to eat when we run out of food?
Oh, I know. Soylent Green.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
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.
You are lying.
From the study:
climate warming is the major driver of reductions in arthropod abundance, indirectly precipitating a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web
I don't respond to AC's.
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?
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. I guess modern insects and mammals are just too wimpy...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Don't be dense. This severity only occurs after catastrophic disasters and in the immediate vicinity that is destroyed. Otherwise it takes thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to see change in this short a time period. The fact that it occurred in what should have been pristine or undisturbed forest is a horrible sign that we have in fact underestimated the impact of human activity on the environment that we depend on for survival.
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.
There has been a massive increase of diversion of the water from that rainforest.
https://www.fs.fed.us/global/i...
Lets not confuse the issue though ... it's all climate change.
Indeed.
"Given its long-term protected status (59), significant human perturbations have been virtually nonexistent within the Luquillo forest since the 1930s, and thus are an unlikely source of invertebrate declines. "
"Water diverted from the forest ranges from 7 to 17 percent of average flow throughout the year, with up to 54 percent of flow diverted from individual watersheds (table 5). A much higher percentage of average flow is diverted when intakes outside of the forest are considered (table 6)."
These assertions are not mutually compatible.
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)
You're forgetting several things.
1. When it was hotter, there was twice as much oxygen and no higher lifeforms.
2. The rate of change is greater than that from the asteroid strike that took out the dinosaurs. Rate of change, not magnitude, is what matters, as climate scientists keep pointing out.
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)
Different insects prefer different climates.
Plenty of insects in Britain need the cold, which is why they're extinct in the south.
You're also assuming only one variable changes in isolation. Higher temperatures mean fewer plants suitable as a good source due to both higher temps and the consequent reduced rain.
Less rain means fewer puddles for eggs.
Rapid change, and this is the killer, means less time to migrate to a suitable new location.
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)
The rate of change was slower, so more time to migrate and adapt.
Rainfall patterns due to more forest and thus lower albedo meant less impact on the environment.
More forest and more open grassland meant a larger reserve of insects, so greater genetic diversity, so greater capacity to endure.
More wildflower species in existence meant alternative food sources.
Don't look at one variable, if you want to understand anything
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)
Most insects can only survive in a very narrow band of temperatures. Anything above or below will kill them.
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)
Agreed. While possible that a centigrade shift in temperature played a role it seems unlikely.. More likely would be agriculture in the area and the accompanying use of heavy amounts of pesticides and herbicides. We keep a lot of bee hives where I live and I know we try to talk to the surrounding farms around us to ask them not to spray over the fields when plants are in bloom. One careless farmer within a few miles can kill half our bees. Seems pretty lazy to attribute to climate change when there are so many other likely factors. It's also the least desirable contributor to the problem because if it is the primary reason... there's nothing those poorer countries can do. I would want to be very sure before attributing it to climate change because it seems to me almost an apologist position.
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
It has been reported before, I think also here on slashdot. It would be interesting to estimate if the missing insects (their body is made of carbon and other elements) had a significant role as a carbon sink. A back-on-the-envelope calculation gives me roughly 1% or less of the world CO2 production, but I am not very expert in this field.
For all that is good and holy just SHUT UP. You're just guessing bullshit and trying to use your opinion to disprove scientific study!
A "small" variation can cause a cascade of effects to ripple through a complex system. Some years, because of a slightly less harsh winter, you have earlier hatching of bees, bigger colonies, and yellowjackets are a bigger pain in the ass. If you have rain at the right points during the season it can suppress honey bees and you'll have less yields of both crops and honey.
If you have a continual shift year after year even small changes add-up and flow through the system. It's the butterfly effect writ large. Go read about colony collapse disorder in bees and how complicated and confusing it is.
Read about how DDT passed through the environment.
Read about how heavy metals filter through the food change in increasing quantities until they finally settle in different species of fish - which we are told NOT to eat because we've fucked it all up so bad.
Seriously. Do really conflate your messed up opinion with science? Do you put forward conspiracy theories and hate on vaccines because of the evil Autism?
Where's the study of the actual effects, in a controlled lab environment, of a 2C temperature increase on the creatures they're saying are so negatively impacted? There are none? Really? I'm shocked. (No, I'm not actually shocked).
What they're basically saying is my dog will die if I raise the temperature in my house from 20C to 22C. Or if I take him outside in the summer, I guess by their logic he'll spontaneously combust and start a forest fire.
There is so little science or scientific method being applied to "climate science." You get some people who claim to be scientists who will go observe something then jump STRAIGHT to a conclusion of "climate warming." And they wonder why they have such a credibility problem.
You're forgetting several things.
1. When it was hotter, there was twice as much oxygen and no higher lifeforms.
2. The rate of change is greater than that from the asteroid strike that took out the dinosaurs. Rate of change, not magnitude, is what matters, as climate scientists keep pointing out.
Both of these statements are myths. Even the MWP was hotter, and the change was just as fast.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Cheap shots are like bad whiskey - they only look good on the outside.
Climate scientists technically do not believe in evolution because science is not a belief system. They do, however, accept evolution - on the scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The speed everyone else accepts it as being for all higher lifeforms.
Climate change due to humans is taking place hundreds, maybe thousands, of times too fast for that. That matters.
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)
During the Carboniferous, oxygen was 40%. Last I heard, 40% is twice 20%.
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)