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Insects Could Vanish Within a Century At Current Rate of Decline, Says Global Review (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems," according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century. The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are "essential" for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.
Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: "The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet. The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanization and climate change are also significant factors. "One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects," the study says, noting a recent study in Puerto Rico where there was a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years. Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit.
Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: "The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet. The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanization and climate change are also significant factors. "One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects," the study says, noting a recent study in Puerto Rico where there was a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years. Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit.
By the time this whips back around to fuck humanity, the denialist will be spouting off how mass extinctions happened in the past without human influence. Perfectly normal part of the lifecycle in Earth.
Is it really necessary to talk about extrapolation?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Insects are a keystone species in many food webs. Without insects, many plant waste products (wood logs, dead grasses, fallen leaves, etc) would not break down fast enough for the carbon and nutrients to be recycled into the food chain, or otherwise returned to the ecosystem.
Add to that, that insects are essential pollinators for many plant species, including (and especially) those that are valuable human agricultural crops, (or are otherwise essential to other macrofauna), and you end up with bad juju very quickly.
The loss of insect species at this rate is alarming. Very alarming. Making quips about mother fucking donald trump, or wasting everyone's goddamn time with pointing fingers at one political group or the other to preserve their complacent lifestyles and personal peace of mind--- rather than being mindful and alert about this problem, and going for the needed fixes to prevent the looming catastrophe this represents--- It is fucking damning as hell about why this catastrophe has happened in the first place; It's part of the problem, not any solution.
I slept in a half hour today. At this rate I'll be sleeping for nearly 200 hours per day this time next year.
No it will not, XKCD links are actually a source of the problem.
I like XKCD and all, but let get real for a minute, problems can hardly be summed up as such and are tantamount to nothing other than mudslinging. Unless someone is 100% in lock step with your beliefs on something then XKCD articles are mostly used to imply that dissenters are just ignorant morons. The problem is far more complex and what is even worse... XKCD's articles are better though of as a problem that all sides in every debate shares.
Everyone has confirmation bias, and all sides have people that will overlook the sins of their fellow compatriots because the ends really do justify the means. Take an politically polarized subject and you will find someone calling for criminal charges, fines, imprisonment, and even the death of those disagreeing with them. There is no faster proof of an unscientific moron than when someone trots out one of these following fallacies...
Consensus = Truth/Fact/Proof.
Correlation = Causation.
Gatekeeping qualifications... Only a certified, licensed, or recognized group/institution/team are allowed to have an opinion... except skeptics because their opinions are invalidated by the professionals that I happen to agree with.
Gaslighting people for not believing in something.
Asking for skeptics to prove a negative, or asking that they provide scientific evidence for their position when the evidence being unable to convince them is the evidence.
Acceptance of controvertible evidence, scare or abundant, as good enough to be proof as though it were incontrovertible evidence.
I don't consider name calling or generic aspersions as proof someone does not know what they are talking about. Even Einstein said... Only two things are infinite... the universe and human stupidity and I am not sure about the former.
People are stupid... epicly stupid, and human stupidity is constantly being underrated. Especially proven by all the pseudo scientists guilty of the fallacies I mentioned above.
Hopefully XKCD will keep being nothing more than a funny and witty little site where groups of pseudo intellectuals can mentally masturbate with each other.
First we were told cockroaches were the only things that were survive a nuclear war. Now we are to believe that insects are super fragile? I don't think so, they have a super short lifespan and prodigious replication rates so as to be able to out-evolve any threat and take over any exposed ecological niche.
1. Cockroaches can survive nuclear war.
2. Cockroaches are insects.
3. Therefore, stop worrying about the ecological fragility of insects.
That's logically compelling. Not.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Don't worry, someone is just running Earth in debug mode.
The entire planet Earth could spontaneously explode in 15 minutes.
It won't, but it could. It COULD.
What happens when the food supply declines, because nutrients don't cycle with fauna, because pollinators are gone, because all the interrelated parts of nature unravel? That is the basis for a planet habitable to humans.
Do we use more pesticides to fight harder for what's left, considering that pesticides cause the implosion of the very ecosystem benefits we depend on to raise food to begin with? Then we're finished.
What happens to poor people when sustenance and shelter and resources that once came freely become scarce? I'm sure the rich will have their hydroponic gardens - atop places where oaks once rivaled wheat fields for output and salmon arrived to spawn in such numbers that it appeared possible to walk across rivers on their back. If manufactured solutions are a replacement for ecosystems for the many, though, why aren't we all snapping up real estate in places like the Sahara or Antarctica?
We are turning an Eden into a much more barren world, because we so insist on dominating and concentrating its wealth. We don't live where ecosystems aren't established. Humans have got to learn to share the world with others - or else.
At this rate I'll be sleeping for nearly 200 hours per day this time next year.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
I propose you see if there is actually a problem before acting or panicking. Wow, what a radical concept, to insist on replication of results.
Why not check to see if there are other comparable results before using rhetoric which depends on their non-existence?
https://journals.plos.org/plos...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Why, so you can bury your head in the sand and sing la la la la la whilst we exterminate the planet? Sure there will be some slow down eventually but so far in Europe at least half the insects are dead already and we are heading for a disaster the likes of which we've never seen before if we don't change our rape and pollute the planet ways.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanization and climate change are also significant factors.
No, habitat loss from intensive agriculture and urbanization are both the main driver.
The heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers are second.
Invasive species and diseases from microorganisms are third (not mentioned).
Climate change is fourth.
From the abstract:
The main drivers of species declines appear to be in order of importance:
i) habitat loss and conversion to intensive agriculture and urbanisation;
ii) pollution, mainly that by synthetic pesticides and fertilisers;
iii) biological factors, including pathogens and introduced species; and
iv) climate change.
Lets talk for a minute, objectively, about alarmist fake-news.
Okay.
The above is anecdotal evidence; one person, one observation.
Not it's not. It's a scholarly paper with many observations of insect biomass and local tempertature..
Am I going to seriously make a change to my lifestyle because the never fallable Brad Lister, scientist extraordinair, made an observation? No. The bar of evidence is a study. I need hard data.
The data are decribed in the paper linked above. Knock yourself out.
Lowest price I can find for me to get copies was around $6k.
So there's two possibilities here; either this is fake news and I have a publication so desperate they need to post clickbait, or this isn't fake news and the rich are keeping vital information from the public because, most likely, we're screwed as a species.
There's a third possilbilty. This research was published in a scientific journal that isn't open access.
The one time humans could have maybe made dent, with DDT and mosquitos, they checked out thanks to more fake science [reason.com] that claimed DDT harmed birds eggs.
No, that's not fake science.
DDT and Birds
Birds played a major role in creating awareness of pollution problems. Indeed, many people consider the modern environmental movement to have started with the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's classic Silent Spring, which described the results of the misuse of DDT and other pesticides. In the fable that began that volume, she wrote: "It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh." Silent Spring was heavily attacked by the pesticide industry and by narrowly trained entomologists, but its scientific foundation has stood the test of time. Misuse of pesticides is now widely recognized to threaten not only bird communities but human communities as well.
The potentially lethal impact of DDT on birds was first noted in the late 1950s when spraying to control the beetles that carry Dutch elm disease led to a slaughter of robins in Michigan and elsewhere. Researchers discovered that earthworms were accumulating the persistent pesticide and that the robins eating them were being poisoned. Other birds fell victim, too. Gradually, thanks in no small part to Carson's book, gigantic "broadcast spray" programs were brought under control.
But DDT, its breakdown products, and the other chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides (and nonpesticide chlorinated hydrocarbons such as PCBs) posed a more insidious threat to birds. Because these poisons are persistent they tend to concentrate as they move through the feeding sequences in communities that ecologists call "food chains." For example, in most marine communities, the living weight (biomass) of fish-eating birds is less than that of the fishes they eat. However, because chlorinated hydrocarbons accumulate in fatty tissues, when a ton of contaminated fishes is turned into 200 pounds of seabirds, most of the DDT from the numerous fishes ends up in a relatively few birds. As a result, the birds have a higher level of contamination per pound than the fishes. If Peregrine Falcons feed on the seabirds, the concentration becomes higher still. With several concentrating steps in the food chain below the level of fishes (for instance, tiny aquatic plants crustacea small fishes), very slight environmental contamination can be turned into a heavy pesticide load in birds at the top of the food chain. In one Long Island estuary, concentrations of less than a tenth of a part per million (PPM) of DDT in aquatic plants and plankton resulted in concentrations of 3-25 PPM in gulls, terns, cormorants, mergansers, herons, and ospreys.
"Bioconcentration" of pesticides in birds high on food chains occurs not only because there is usually reduced biomass at each step in those chains, but also because predatory birds tend to live a long time. They may take in only a little DDT per day, but they keep most of what they get, and they live many days.
The insidious aspect of this phenomenon is that large concentrations of chlorinated hydrocarbons do not usually kill the bird outright. Rather, DDT and its relatives alter the bird's calcium metabolism in a way that results in thin eggshells. Instead of eggs, heavily DDT-infested Brown Pelicans and Bald Eagles tend to find omelets in their nests, since the eggshells are unable to support the weight of the incubating bird.
Shell-thinning resulted in the decimation of the Brown Pelican populations in much of North America and the extermination the Peregrine Falcon in the eastern United States and southeastern Canada. Shell-thinning caused lesser declines in populations of Golden and Bald Eagles and White Pelicans, among others. Similar declines took place in the Br
Just as true as the original headline: "Insect researchers could vanish within a century!"
The italicized word is doing a lot of work in both sentences....
And of course the solution is to sit on your ass and do nothing except make snarky comments and maybe increase the use of pesticides because the 70-90% declines in insect populations we are seeing already is clearly a non-issue.
Funny you should mention xkcd... https://xkcd.com/1732/
is obvious, if somewhat cynical. Stop using new pesticides. Get used to reduced yields and higher prices of food. There will be famines in the 3rd world. It is inevitable. The human population on our Earth is already well past the line where it can be fed safely. The first few decades will be the hardest. But a century in the future, our descendants will thank us for having evaded the looming catastrophe.
What I can tell you is there here in Northern Ontario, Canada, when I used to go fishing as a boy (~35 years ago) our truck would be covered with insect guts before we even got to our destination 50 miles away. You would be eaten alive by flies and mosquitoes at the destination until you got out onto the water.
Nowadays, we can go and do the same trip and it's not apparent we've hit even a single bug on the way. And bugs at the shoreline are hardly a nuisance anymore, relatively speaking.
And it's not just insects. I can go on a trip in the bush and not see any animals, not even birds sometimes.
I can't speak for anywhere else in the world, but something is very wrong with this.
You read the materials and methods section?
An you found they used 6 data points?
I'll copy the relevant part of the section here:
Arthropod Samples.
Lister (22) sampled arthropods within the Luquillo forest during July 1976 and January 1977. Following the same procedures and using the same study area, arthropod abundances were again estimated during July 2011 and January 2012 using both sticky-traps and sweep netting. Our 10 traps were the same size (34 × 24 cm) as Lister’s (22), and also utilized Tanglefoot as the sticky substance. Traps were laid out on the ground in the same-sized grid (30 × 24 m), and also left uncovered for 12 h between dawn and dusk before all captured insects were removed and stored in alcohol. Hoop sizes of our sweep nets (30-cm diameter) matched those used by Lister (22). Body lengths of all captured arthropods were measured to the nearest 0.5 mm using a dissecting scope and ocular micrometer. Regression equations were used to estimate individual dry weights from body lengths (142, 143).
Anolis Abundance.
To compare Anolis densities with Lister’s (22) estimates from July 1976 and January 1977, we sampled anoles within the same 15 × 15-m quadrat during July 2011 and January 2012. Following Lister (22), we used the Schnabel multiple recapture method (27) to estimate densities. However, instead of marking captured lizards by toe clipping, we used Testor’s enamel paint to create small (2 mm) spots with different color combinations directly above the dorsal base of the tail.
Climate Data.
We analyzed climate data taken at two locations in the Luquillo forest: the United States Forest Service El Verde Field Station and the Bisley Lower meteorological tower, which is part of the Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory. The El Verde station lies 5 km southwest of our study area (18.3211 N, 65.8200 W), at an elevation of 350 m. The upper Bisley Tower is located 3.2 km southeast of our study area (18.3164 N, 65.7453 W) at 352 m in elevation. Temperature data for the El Verde station span 37 y, from 1978 to 2015 (Fig. 1A), and for the Bisley station 21 y from 1993 to 2014 (Fig. 1B). Given that the highest ambient temperatures for a given area should have the greatest impact on fitness, especially for ectotherms (144), daily maximum temperatures were utilized in our analyses. Climate data for the Estacion de Biologia Chamela were obtained from www.ibiologia.unam.mx/ebchamela/www/clima.html.
Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research Data.
Data sets from the Luquillo long-term ecological research (LTER) online Data Center were downloaded and analyzed for trends in population abundances over time. Detailed methods employed in the various studies can be found at the LTER Data Center website (https://luq.lter.network/luquillo-information-management-system-luq-ims).
Canopy arthropods.
Data were collected by Schowalter (23) near the El Verde field station between February 1991 and June 2009. Several articles have analyzed these samples with respect to invertebrate diversity, functional groups, arthropod composition in gap and intact forest, and recovery from disturbance (145), but none have looked for trends in overall abundance. Here we summed all arthropods sampled each year across taxa, forest type, and tree genera.
Walking sticks.
We analyzed data from a census of walking sticks (Lamponius portoricensis) carried out by Willig et al. (24) between 1991 and 2014 in the 16-ha Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot (LFDP) near the El Verde Field Station. Sampling was conducted during the wet and dry seasons and captured individuals were classified as adults or juveniles. To analyze walking stick abundance through time, we summed all juveniles and adults across seasons and land classes.
E. coqui abundance.
We analyze census data for the Puerto Rican frog E. coqui taken by Woolbright (29, 30) between 1987 and 1997 at study areas n