Insect Apocalypse German Bug Watchers Sound Alarm

https://phys.org/news/2019-07-insect-apocalypse-german-bug-watchers.html

by TakakiTohno • 7 years ago

284 189 7 years ago

adrianN4• 7 years ago

Anybody can do a little bit to help insects. It ranges from planting a pot of some flowers, to building an insect hotel, to switching to a more natural lawn or talking to your city council to replace parts of the lawns in parks with more insect friendly meadows.

However, I don't see how I as consumer can choose agricultural products that are friendlier to insects. Organic agriculture also uses pesticides and monocultures. Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea, but other than that how can I judge the impact my food choices have on biodiversity?

arethuza• 7 years ago

Local councils in England are reducing the amount of grass cutting they do on verges of roads - so more flowers (presumably good for insects) and cheaper!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-48772448

Reason077• 7 years ago

More vegetation at the sides of roads also helps to hide all the litter.

NikkiA2• 7 years ago

Around here they only mow when there's an election upcoming, and every week for the last 6 weeks for some unknown reason.

ahje3• 7 years ago

Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea

Actually, areas used for grazing usually have more diversity, more flowers and thereby more insects, compared to something like a similarly sized wheat field.

perfunctory2• 7 years ago

Unfortunately most meat does not come from grazing animals. And if we were to convert the whole meat industry into grazing we wouldn't be able to produce meat in the same quantity, which would mean exactly reduced meat intake for everyone.

adrianN4• 7 years ago

Buying meat from animals that actually saw the sun before they were killed is usually a good way of drastically reducing your meat intake because it's much more expensive that what you usually find at your local supermarket.

plufz• 7 years ago

Wouldn’t consuming dairy products still be a better choice than meat in that case? (atleast if we are talking about cows and sheep, since I don’t think more climate friendly meat like chickens and pigs adds that much to biodiversity)

usrusr• 7 years ago

But how much meat comes from grazing? Factory farming livestock is a major consumer of monoculture crops.

esarbe7• 7 years ago

You can feed ten times as many people with the wheat that grows on a similarly sized wheat field.

Or keep feeding just one person and turn the rest into a meadow with flowers, bushes, hedges and trees.

Imagine that.

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

Depends where you are. What organic allows varies a fair bit around the world. UK's Soil Association is still stricter than the EU. I think US has one of the loosest. Not certain of how they all differ though.

I know Soil Assoc try to promote interculture (two crops at once), field margins and what not, but have know way to know how that translates to reality or just pretty words on a website entirely ignored by the farmers, though I can probably guess. Pesticide use does come with limits on what and how often so they can legally keep saying low pesticides.

I think that's about as low impact as it gets unless you have a decent sized garden as just about nowhere does it the old way any more.

Beyond that I just don't know, which is frustrating for all shopping - we're given no idea of the impact of choices so have to basically guess. It needs to be on labels, but producers would fight that tooth and nail.

afpx• 7 years ago

The USDA publishes their list of approved chemicals.

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1...

consumer4514• 7 years ago

I am fortunate in that I have a few acres in a tiny town in Central Europe and I don't need a financial return from the land. I now keep the back lot as a meadow garden instead of the giant cut lawn that it used to be. I made sure that the surrounding farmers were cool with it as I was worried they would hate a "pest farm" on my land, but they understand.

I own an additional 6 acres of farmland which I currently let a neighbor grow wheat on, but they spray all the normal ag-chems. I am looking at options for what to do with that as far as co2 mitigation and pro-bug land. My brother suggested that he could buy trees to plant as a carbon offset for every flight he takes out here. Maybe I could put the land in a trust, and open the tree purchasing to other folks that are looking for carbon offsets?

A large meadow and growing the forest seem like the best options at this point. I would love to hear any other suggestions.

tomxor• 7 years ago

buy trees to plant as a carbon offset

I know you mean well, but unless you mean planting saplings - isn't buying trees just pushing around carbon offsets to change local figures while worsening global figures due to the cost of moving them?

sgt1015• 7 years ago

Try to create some wetland - a pond, or if there is a stream dam it and flood some of the land.

adrianN4• 7 years ago

You could plant some fast growing trees, turn them to charcoal and bury it. That's good for the soil and captures the carbon for a few millennia.

scottlocklin• 7 years ago

...how can I judge the impact my food choices have on biodiversity?

You can't, and neither you nor anyone else in this thread has any idea what to do about the insect apocalypse. Seems like insecticides, but we really don't know! Has insecticide use really increased that much since the 80s across the west? Doesn't seem likely. Maybe it is one specific insecticide used in growing X? Maybe some other chemical? Could be monoculture, disease, something that's already in the environment we can do nothing about; maybe it's solar panels and windmills (seriously -it's possible, and it would be ironic), maybe it's a change in drainage patterns, suburbanization, some chemical now commonly used in housing (or for all we know, skincare), changes in automotive shapes (maybe streamlined cars are more lethal to bugs somehow), or maybe insects are all "eff you, stupid apes, we're leaving before the Vogon constructor fleet gets here."

As for individual choice; as difficult as it may be for people to believe after a century of "do your bit" propaganda starting from the first world war; your actions may have no bearing on the matter. Telling people what to do when you don't know doesn't help, and acts as a sort of psychological purity ritual. Like the recycling that ends up shipped to Indonesia and dumped into the ocean; you may be making things worse. FWIIW this kind of crap was often used to give people something to do and distract them from real problems: most of the WW-2 "scrap" campaigns for the war effort were useless.

FWIIW I'm pretty sure the insect apocalypse isn't happening in northern Spain. The last time I was driving around there, the number of bugs on my windshield reminded me of when I learned to drive in the 80s. It is anecdata, but it was striking enough to be worth looking into.

YeGoblynQueenne6• 7 years ago

> Seems like insecticides, but we really don't know! Has insecticide use really increased that much since the 80s across the west?

The amount of insecticides used doesn't need to increase, to cause a mass extinction. A constant dose is enough, if it kills more insects in a given period, than are born in the same period. Over time, this will cause the number of insects to decrease steadily.

YeGoblynQueenne6• 7 years ago

I don't understand how reducing meat intake benefits insects. Is there a connection?

paulintrognon• 7 years ago

It's crazy how disconnected from nature we have become to not notice in our everyday life an extinction event happening at this very moment.

ephaeton• 7 years ago

I think it's more an issue of awareness. I do remember walking across a lawn in my childhood, and I do remember having to watch out not to step on any bees etc., as they were legion.

Nowadays, I am happy to see a few bees around.

I think we are just too "busy" to step back, open our eyes and actually watch the world we live in.

sametmax5• 7 years ago

Some of us are noticing. I was discussing last year with my friends and family how clean your bikes helmets and cars windshields were compared to 20 years ago: no insect on it.

It's just that people carry on. They don't build their life. They don't make conscious choices, orientate their actions or try to think about the society they live it.

They just go through it, going from one small short term objective to another, most of the time motivated by a small pleasure or to avoid pain.

That is why people get fat, get stuck in traffic going to a job they don't like, going back to TV eating unhealthy food and indulging some kind of addiction.

Believe it or not this is also a big cause of couples staying together, marrying, making children. Not the grand idea of love. Inertia. Status quo.

lm28469• 7 years ago

Nature doesn't exists in the modern city, I wouldn't even be surprised if some people born after 2000 haven't seen stars in their entire life.

It's like when you have to do your homework but postpone it until the very last moment. Your profs tell you to work, your parents too, even your friends, and you know deep down that you're wrong, but you don't give a shit until you get the grade and think "if only I ...".

First world countries won't wake up until it gets bad (famines, war and mass immigration bad), until then it's just insects, birds and slightly warmer climate, surely people have bigger problems in their daily lives ...

https://timeline.com/los-angeles-light-pollution-ebd60d5acd4...

qwsxyh• 7 years ago

Nature doesn't exists in the modern city, I wouldn't even be surprised if some people born after 2000 haven't seen stars in their entire life.

I live in London. The stars are still clearly visible here.

alobat72• 7 years ago

I just know : my mom has a garden and in winter she used to feed the birds. Since 2 or 3 years the birds are not stopping eating this food when spring comes - my mom now feeds the birds all year. At the same time insect have become noticeably fewer

sametmax5• 7 years ago

Your comment and this article are the first I noticed mentioning the birds as a second indicator. It means the cascade has started. Somewhere else, it's probably already acting as well: the soil, the plants, or stuff we don't know about.

tuco862• 7 years ago

I noticed last year and this year again when i drove ~800 km to a vacation. 10-20 years ago i had to wipe loads of sticky insect parts of my windshield. Not necessary anymore. I'd guess back then my windshield whould have caught ~200 bugs/hour and now it's more like ~10. So my highly subjective statistic says: insects are fucked and maybe so are we.

ccozan• 7 years ago

Yes, this is a thing that I noticed, less bugs, less birds. In summer at 5am it used to be a real concert in my garden to the point that you got a natural alarm clock. Now? With my window open, there is quite quiet, an occasional bird song every 2-3 mins.

And yes, I live in Germany. It is alarming, and I fear the worst, a real threat to the ecology cycle.

carapace2• 7 years ago

"Bird populations in steep decline in North America, study finds"

North America has more than a billion fewer birds than it did 40 years ago

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/report-fi...

And then, "Lyme and Other Tickborne Diseases Increasing"

https://www.cdc.gov/media/dpk/diseases-and-conditions/lyme-d...

UglycupRawky• 7 years ago

This one scares me. No one seems to be doing anything about it, and the results could be massive.

vages2• 7 years ago

I wish that articles like these could end with at least some point of action that I could take to improve the situation. If the public should act, give them something actionable: Calling their local council, joining an organization, not cutting your lawn, whatever.

As anyone's who's been trained in crowd control during emergencies knows, you don't just sound alarm without at the same time telling people what to do. Journalists should take at least some kind of the same responsibility. Otherwise, people will either panic or stop listening.

sametmax5• 7 years ago

Just because you can report a problem doesn't mean you have a solution. That doesn't mean the problem is not worth reporting.

I haven't seen panic. People can't stop listening since they haven't even started. Most people don't know about this, don't care, or can't see the big picture.

But repeating works.

We know it works, because that's how TV ads work.

So I'm all OK with repeating that again, and again.

People getting tired of it ? Meh, they still watch TV after the 1876th coca cola ad. And then they go buy soda.

I'll take the chance of repeating a wholesome message.

lugg• 7 years ago

It's more complicated than this. I listened, I cared, for years. Then I stopped. How can I continue caring when everyone around me exploits the way things are and gets ahead because of it?

What we need is a mass awakening. We need everyone to care at the same time to see anything change.

We won't act unless we have role models acting before our very eyes. We won't act untile there is a problem directly in front of us. Until that time you may count on the status quo continuuing.

vages2• 7 years ago

Exactly: The Coke ad is actionable and makes you feel good. I at least want the first part to be true for alarmist journalism.

ekianjo• 7 years ago

Repetition alone does not work. For most people it is just noise that their brain filters out a few seconds or minutes later. There are key differences between very few ads that really stick vs regular ads.

darepublic• 7 years ago

If actionable items aren't important how do you know people aren't listening

pletnes2• 7 years ago

Stop using pesticides. Gardening uses more chemicals per area than farming by at least an order of magnitude, as people don’t care about cost. It’s not something that will solve everything, but it’s a thing you can do, now.

k_2• 7 years ago

Stop using pesticides.

That. Though I'm very skeptical about the rest of your message. Do you happen to have any source by chance?

And also try not to buy (or at least avoid it as often as possible) products that come from those that use pesticides to reduce the impact of farming.

bryan11• 7 years ago

While I don't use any pesticides, farms and cities use high amounts of pesticides. Farms apply pesticides by crop-dusting and with tractors. Cities drive trucks up and down every street fogging the entire city with mosquito pesticides.

If enough people complained to the cities about the harmful effects of spraying, they may stop. Convincing agriculture to use less pesticides would be much harder and likely involve powerful lobbies at the state and federal level.

ptah• 7 years ago

put plants in your garden that feeds insects and stop tilling the land https://www.growveg.co.uk/guides/no-dig-gardening-an-easier-...

sgt1015• 7 years ago

Also, dig a small pond. An old bucket sunk in the ground will do, just an area of standing water. This will rapidly become a breeding ground for insects.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

Fair point.

After a small web digging, here are few ideas:

- making tiny green spots on your balcony / garden (enough to let insects live)

- guerrillagardening

empath752• 7 years ago

I’m not sure that there is a meaningful action to solve these problems that the public would actually take. It would require reducing our agricultural output, which would mean producing less, more expensive food.

foobar19624• 7 years ago

I think there are too many people. Problems of loss of habitat and the use of pesticides and fertilisers to increase food production are all solved with <less people>.

The problem will solve itself, unfortunately.

Even if we had cold fusion and unlimited free energy, we'd still have the problem of too many people.

amelius• 7 years ago

I wish that articles like these could end with at least some point of action that I could take to improve the situation.

See this comment for an idea:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20335198#20336220

_ph_• 7 years ago

The actions taken should be quite obvious and around here I can see a bit of those: keep more areas natural. Just today I noted, how public grass stripes are not mowed this year - while usually they were mowed weekly. A wide selection of flowers are growing there now, this should benefit all kind of insects a lot. There was also a public referendom recently here in Bavaria. It successfully required more areas set aside for insect population, where no agriculture is allowed and no pesticides.

mirimir2• 7 years ago

There is no solution to species being extinct. They're just gone. No coming back.

And even reducing the rate of loss is likely impossible. Our food supply basically depends on killing insects. Although it's possible to change practices, to kill less insects, that would be logistically impractical.

minitoar• 7 years ago

Through this lens it seems obvious we should switch to cultivating and consuming insects.

dwaltrip• 7 years ago

And even reducing the rate of loss is likely impossible.

This is far too pessimistic. We put a person on the moon, but we can't improve our agriculture practices to stop ravaging the insect ecosystems?

rexpop• 7 years ago

We have online one course of action: make companies accountable to their impacted communities.

And there is only one reliable method of accomplishing that: industrial unions.

specialist• 7 years ago

Call to action should be SOP.

I stopped attending book tour events for this very reason.

What better time to rally and organized concerned (self-selecting) citizens? How hard would it be to give a shout out to relevant local orgs? Or to invite local experts up to the mic during the Q&A.

But the times I've tried to organize local tie-ins with national authors, the authors have been oblivious (eg hadn't occurred to them, seemed disinterested) and the host facilities actively thwart it (eg don't distribute literature on our property).

It's maddening.

As a counter point, Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! makes the effort to connect their audiences to the local orgs.

splittingTimes3• 7 years ago

* Look into permaculture and its many low tech DIY solutions to support your local habitats.

* Do guerillia gardening a throw seed bombs ever you can.

* Reduce your waste output. Try worm composing when you live in a flat.

* Use a bike or public transport instead of a car.

DanBC• 7 years ago

Find out who's responsible for destruction of hay meadows and similar in your country, and start a campaign to get this habitat restored.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0128fk5

When we hear about the threat to some of our precious and important habitats, our minds often turn to the polar ice cap or the rainforests of the Amazon. But one of our most threatened natural environments is right here in the UK and that is the traditional upland hay meadow - fields packed with grasses and wild flowers, alive with bird song and the buzz of bees. Sadly these meadows have almost disappeared from our landscape. There are less than 4 square miles of this habitat left in the UK and around 40% of that is in the North Pennines. A lot of hard work is currently being undertaken to protect and preserve what we have left. [...]

https://www.plantlife.org.uk/uk/about-us/news/real-action-ne...

over 97% of our meadows have been eradicated since the 1930s

emmelaich• 7 years ago

This worries me way more than warming itself.

malicioususer11• 7 years ago

who would have thought that ichthyology could be so sexy?? :3

Ensorceled• 7 years ago

My large, extended family, notes this every year when we go to our family reunions in Northern Ontario: each year, our cars have fewer bugs than the previous year.

We've had the family reunion the same July weekend for 45 years now and our cars and trucks used to be just plastered with insects. Now there may be none at all.

Kaiyou2• 7 years ago

Can someone explain to me why this is a bad thing? We used to go out of our way to kill insects in past decades, presumably because we'd prefer them dead. Now they are dying off and I'm not sure why I should be unhappy about this.

What are the bad consequences of this?

tpetry• 7 years ago

Because these insects are eaten by other animals which are eaten by other animals which are...

You get the point. The food chain can collapse and some animals are doing good things for the environment.

k_2• 7 years ago

Add pollination to the equation and we're even more fucked =/

kingkawn• 7 years ago

Insects also are primary processors of rotting biomass. Without them we will soon find that corpses last longer.

They are also the primary source of crop pollination. Without them much of our food won’t be pollinated and reproduce well.

We need them.

kristiandupont• 7 years ago

This short video about wolves in Yellowstone National Park gives a good intro to the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

Kaiyou2• 7 years ago

Sorry, I still don't understand what the bad consequences of some animals dying are. Aren't all animals we need kept and fed by us? What are these good things some animals are doing for the environment?

empath752• 7 years ago

Like flowering plant species all dying?

Anarch157a• 7 years ago

We tried to kill the ones that were bad for us, like mosquitos, cockroaches, locust s, etc. But i the process, we ended up affecting the ones that are beneficial (bees) and the wild ones that are neither.

The consequences are a collapse of the food chain, like others already mentioned.

kieckerjan• 7 years ago

Not to sound overly optimistic, but I can imagine that a trend like this is less difficult to reverse than, say, climate change.

The scientific consensus about climate change seems to be that even if we can muster the political courage and will and do our darndest, we may already have passed the tipping point and will boil anyway.

As to the insect apocalypse: given a fighting chance, life has a way of veering back. This is of course if viable numbers of populations survive and keystone populations have not been extinguished. (Maybe this is just a complicated way of stating that ecological systems work on other timescales than the climate.)

3131s• 7 years ago

Species loss is irreversible though.

interfixus• 7 years ago

You are so right. Insects are mass breeders, and it's common for the numbers of any given species to veer wildly from year to year. We may or may not be seeing a serious setback for insects in general, but given a chance, they will bounce back within a few short generations. And so will their predators, albeit over a longer stretch of time. For what it's worth, nature seems remarkably unperturbed up here a little north of Germany. Some counts up, some counts down. Two years ago, we had mice everywhere, this year hardly any. But then a recent infestation of butterflies, and the bats are doing extraordinarily well this summer, as are the spiders apparently - hardly indicative of any extreme dearth of insects.

meerita2• 7 years ago

In 1958 Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows to be killed, as part of the famous Four Pests Campaign (Chinese: 除四害), because they ate too much grain. This caused one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Without birds, the population of insects grew massively and ate most of the plants, grains making one of the one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine.

choeger4• 7 years ago

So... We should kill sparrows?

meerita2• 7 years ago

Maybe we should control the predators of the insect species who are struggling.

dmos62• 7 years ago

How do you think this relates to our present crisis?

FredrikMeyer• 7 years ago

Off topic, but capitalizing words in titles in English really bothers me. Every word in the title are nouns, but some are here ment to be verbs. In German for example, only the nouns would have been capitalized, making the title much easier to read.

CalRobert• 7 years ago

It's the standard (albeit inconsistent and undefined) for headlines, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Title_case

vectorEQ• 7 years ago

in my country right next to germany, within 'protected' natural areas, insect life declined by as much as 85%. If you have a garden which is friendly to insects you get swarmed as there are literally no other places to go.

people need to be aware of this and stop just paving their gardens. create a nice home for some bugs :-) it will be good for your children and their children. So no excuse not to put some flowers outside and keep at least a few insects fed and happy.

patientplatypus• 7 years ago

Dang it you guys, I posted this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339865) yesterday. Things are getting so bad so rapidly...

chiefalchemist2• 7 years ago

"Since 1982, the traps we manufacture ourselves have been standardised and controlled, all of the same size and the same material, and they are collected at the same rate in 63 locations that are still identical," explains Sorg.

Do I believe that something, likely humans, is doing damage to nature? Yes.

However, give the above, I have to ask: couldn't the argument be made that collecting less samples is natural selection at work? That is, the insects that aren't trapped - for whatever reason - will pass those traits on and so on. The survivors breed more survivers. Those that are trapped and die, well so does their DNA.

pcstl• 7 years ago

The conclusion that this will lead to the eventual extinction of insects as a whole also does not pass scrutiny. Even if 99% of insects are extinguished, the remaining 1% that are adapted to the new conditions will populate the now-vacant ecological niches and diversify. That's how evolution works.

rorykoehler• 7 years ago

Depends how fast it happens. Cascading failure/collapse is a real possibility.

fallingfrog2• 7 years ago

63 traps is a statistically insignificant cause of insect death over the area of an entire countryside. Not enough to drive natural selection.

arrrg2• 7 years ago

That doesn’t really pass scrutiny. It’s not like they are mass collecting insects and it’s not like someone else is using insect traps to mass trap insects. As such there is practically no evolutionary pressure to adapt to not being caught in insect traps.

Insect traps are a rare sight for any one insect.

chiefalchemist2• 7 years ago

I'm don't follow.

Let's take bug species Foo. We have two Foos. One has DNA trait Y the other DNA trait Z. Zs are more prone to be trapped. Ys are less.

Over time Zs die off. And Ys prevail. Therefore, over time the traps will capture less Foos.

You're (falsely?) thinking in terms of traditional evolution. But natural selection is not the same thing. I'm suggesting that - at least in theory - natural selection can be used to explain why they are catching less insects.

fallingfrog2• 7 years ago

Is there no pattern at all to the locations where the greatest decrease happened? If it’s pesticides then the traps nearest an active field of crops will show the greatest decrease. It doesn’t sound like they’re finding that. If it was road deaths then it would be near the roads. If it’s temperature then you would expect to see decreases in hot years, increases in cold years. If crawling insects are affected differently than flying ones, that tells you something. If it’s everywhere at once with no pattern whatsoever, well thats just baffling. It would have to do with the composition of the air or maybe the solar cycle or something else that affects everywhere at once.

splittingTimes3• 7 years ago

The German parliament had two interesting votes last week:

(1) Recoginze the ongoing climate catastrophe - propose measure to counter act [1]

(2) Stop using coal power stations [2]

You can guess how the ruling parties voted. It makes me furious in the light of recent devastating news (No permafrost in Candian arctic, melting Greenland ice, hottest June in Germany since record keeping, Anchorage seeing unprecedented temperatures...)

===

[1] https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimm...

[2] https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimm...

EGreg2• 7 years ago

What alarms me even more is that the insect apocalypse is MORE urgent than climate change.

geggam3• 7 years ago

Humans ability to adapt will be tested in the near future I fear. Not only due to tensions among humans but the disasters we are creating in nature.

mikro2nd2• 7 years ago

And almost infinitely easier to stop. All we need to do is ban a relatively small number of insecticides and insect populations will rebound in a very small number of years.

terminalhealth2• 7 years ago

To me this reveals three possibilities:

1. There is confidential information that the damage is irreversible at this point (e.g. permafrost is melting three times faster and 70 years earlier than expected) and any attempts to break the layers upon layers of prisoner's dilemmas are completely futile.

2. The political caste does not care about more than 20 years into the future because most of them will have died by then (avg. age of the conservative parties is 60(!) [1]).

3. The dangers of a manmade climate catastrophe are being overstated.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/192255/umfrag...

throwaway2048• 7 years ago

Sorry the same people who peddled "Its not happening" for years, don't get to switch over and start with "its too late to do anything about it" as a new excuse to not act.

zw123456• 7 years ago

I thought it was ironic that an advertisement for exterminators came up in the middle of the article. Another triumph for add algos ;)

haarts• 7 years ago

I'm surprised to read no one seems to know what to do about this. There's a simple thing you can do and that is buying organic produce. Sure, it still uses some pesticides but not all and a lot less (at least in Europe, not sure about the US).

choeger4• 7 years ago

The intriguing aspect is: This phenomenon is indeed observable everywhere (windshields) yet there is no obvious reason. Pesticide use should have gone down across all of Germany in the last 30 years. So should have general pollution. Warmer weather should actually help insects. Large natural reserves have been created (e.g., former military training grounds, depopulated areas in rural Germany).

So either this is caused by an as of now unknown agent, or we see some form of delayed effect.

jakobdabo• 7 years ago

unknown agent

The only thing that comes to my mind besides the climate change is the increased EMF/RF radiation levels.

choeger4• 7 years ago

Yeah, that would fit the timeframe very well.

terminalhealth2• 7 years ago

Wouldn't it be easy to find location correlates if this was the case? Strong EMF/RF radiation is rather spatially confined. If it was affecting insects, we should expect negative results in sparsely populated areas.

m23khan• 7 years ago

The older I get, the more guilty I feel of even squashing an ant in my home -- they are living forms like us and we should be treating them with respect and give them space to thrive as well. And if this means setting up protected reserves for insects and to ban certain types of chemicals then so be it.

futureastronaut• 7 years ago

If it's an argentine ant and you're not in that part of the world, you should eradicate with prejudice as they're an invasive species.

zmix• 7 years ago

"He and an army of volunteers have over the years gathered as many as 80 million insects that are now floating in countless ethanol bottles."

Ah, that's where the insects went!

agentultra2• 7 years ago

I'm doing everything I can in my own yard: growing vegetables without pesticides/herbicides, growing wildflowers/natural fauna in the majority of our gardens, etc.

And I'm growing sympathy for insects in my children! My daughter is obsessed with ants and we're getting into my childhood hobby of farming ants.

Etymology is almost as cool as mycology. I love insects, arachnids, and all of our crawly little friends!

fencepost• 7 years ago

This is also easily observed by anyone old enough who drives in the suburbs or rural areas, and it really jumped out at me a decade or more ago.

When's the last time you had to clean your windshield of a bunch of dead bugs (or a few large ones)? I remember when every gas fill up also meant using both the mesh sponge side and the squeegee side of a windshield washer, and you knew which gas stations kept those buckets filled and had good squeegees. How long since you used one of those to clean off a filthy windshield, or since you noticed if a gas station has good ones?

On a somewhat related note, how long since you had to do the same for bird droppings? And when you're parking at night or walking back to your car, do you have any issues with walking through the huge clouds of bugs around the lights or are there no longer any such clouds?

Edit: expanded and mobile corrections

andrekandre• 7 years ago

i love in tokyo, and when i graduated school in 2011, i used to get bitten every summer like mad by mosquitos, you could see bugs everywhere in the spring and summer

for probably the past 5 years i haven’t been bit once, rarely see a mosquito or other bugs... something very strange has has happened in the past 10 years

carapace2• 7 years ago

Brain dump:

Reading V. Smil's "Energy and Civilization a History" has made me realize that the Applied Ecology (Permaculture) epoch would be a fundamentally new form of civilization.

Cf. Hemenway's lecture: "Permaculture can save Humanity and the Earth but not Civilization"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo It's about an hour. Here are some notes I took:

He reframes "sustainable" as the midpoint of a spectrum with "degenerative" on one side and "regenerative" on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.

He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing "culture" (group activites, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it's roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.

    Five culture types based on food getting technology:
        Foraging
        Hunter-gatherer
        Agricultural (cities)
            Pastoral (Animal herding)
            Industrial

Then follows a great deal of the "dirt" on agriculture. Old hat to those who know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don't. Hemenway sums it up, "Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people."

(Oil => Food => People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be trouble...

Holmgrin's scenarios:

- Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it.)

- Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.

- Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) "Earth Stewardship" "Permaculture" I don't know where the people are supposed to have gone.

- "Atlantis" - i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but I'm okay with being proven wrong on that.

"Peak Wood" - no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a close. Wow.

Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.

The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these subjects. https://fertilefuture.blogspot.com/2011/05/toby-hemenway-vid...

- - - -

OMG: Obvious ways that we are out of whack with Nature:

Glass windows kill millions of birds.

Windshields kill billions of insects.

Rain brings out earthworms that then die on the sidewalk.

Asphalt covers n% of the Earth and vulcanized rubber particles are continously emitted into the ecosystem.

Plastic collecting in the Oceanic Gyres and beaches of the world, as well and in the bellies of animals, and coating and fusing with rock.

Gas-burning, noise- and air-polluting leaf blowers that are inherently wasteful (each item is typically blown about 2~5 times before arriving at resting point. Compare to vacuum cleaner.)

In fact, all the pollution.

Lawns are everywhere. Intrinsically wasteful, deliberately stunted and impoverished ecosystems, massive applications of chemicals.

Agriculture. Literally counter-productive: untouched ecosystems are orders of magnitude more productive. Doing nothing is more productive than farming.

We wear shoes that insulate us from contact with the Earth (lit. grounding). We do this because we have poured concrete all over everything.

Where the meat comes from...

And so on.

- - - -

Part Yay: Humans are Nature's turbo-chargers!

We can increase the productivity of natural system by an order of magnitude again over baseline untouched ecosystems. (Example: WPA built miles of massive swales across the western states, and years later (with no maintainence) there are plants and animals there where before there was desert. TODO: look this up.)

(Cf. Yeoman's Keyline techniques. Draw water out onto ridges to gte more use out of rainfall. http://www.keyline.com.au/ )

Broadly speaking we can corrugate terrain and systems to get more surface area and interaction and create more niches and therefore more life. Recall that life exists in the thermodynamic flow from the Sun (and yes, the oceanic heat vents) to ultimately the rest of the sky, and that we are nowhere near the physical limiting factors. It's relatively easy to add niches to an existing garden. Especially if you're able to make modifications! I have a whole DVD about Permaculture water harvesting where they bring in a backhoe to dig out a new little lake and some canals! A one-time expenditure of fossil fuel to make a vast change in the water/energy flows of a local system to ultimately increase the ecological robustness and yield makes sense. And in theory, locally grow alcohol fuel could be used to power land-shaping machines.

There is also a possibility to use Bucky Fuller-style Tensgresity (or merely geodesic) structures to create "3D" gardens.

With Permaculture techniques you can revitalize salty desert in a few years ("Greening the Desert" Geoff Lawton) and there is plenty of desert. All of the necessary factors are themselves organic and therefore capable of geometric increase. We could green the deserts from Southern CA to Texas and accomodate several hundred million people in an ecologically (climate proof!) way.

SamPatt• 7 years ago

"Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades."

This is almost certainly false. The paper released earlier this year only looked at other studies which reported insect populations in decline, a methodology certain to find a problem.

Insect Apocalypse German Bug Watchers Sound Alarm

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