A looming 'insect apocalypse' could endanger global food supplies

https://www.livescience.com/animals/insects/a-looming-insect-apocalypse-could-endanger-global-food-supplies-can-we-stop-it-before-its-too-late

by Brajeshwar • 8 months ago

54 53 8 months ago

livescience.com

mschuster913• 8 months ago

There's one reason not mentioned - habitat loss, be it caused by urbanization [1] or by land consolidation ("Flurbereinigung") [2][3].

It used to be the case that rural areas were splintered into many small farms, with bushes being used to mark borders, and these bushes in turn provided harbor and food for insects and cover for small rodents and other mammals.

"Thanks" to mechanisation however, which prefers large uniform land because thats easier for ever larger machines to process, a lot of these splinters were consolidated together and so there is nothing left to support any wildlife, be it insects or small animals, which in turn also causes bird populations to drop - when there are no mice because they don't have any place to build their nests, the birds don't have food as well.

[1] https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/...

[2] https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/flugbegleiter-umfrage-...

[3] https://naturschutz-initiative.de/aktuell/neuigkeiten/landwi...

ben_w• 8 months ago

Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century.

Now sure, the causes could be multipliers, insect_pop = base * (cause_0 * cause_1 * …), or even exponential, insect_pop = 1/e^(cause_0 + cause_1 + …), so I'm not saying none of that stuff matters, but also there's definitely something nee.

mschuster913• 8 months ago

Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century.

Sure, but the real push came over the last few decades, (IMHO) closely correlating with the utter decline of employment in the primary sector [1], that was all machines and efficiencies of scale.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Wirtschaft/Konjunkturindik...

epolanski• 8 months ago

The thing that gets on my nerves is that this is really an unsolvable political problem.

When governments do try to push and make it law to have X amount of bushes and unfarmed land in a way that makes sense for wildlife to thrive you instantly get angry farmers on your roads, lose their votes and get publicly accused to starve the nation.

And farmers, due to the difficulty of their job (in time, investments and returns) and their role in a society's lifecycle get instant empathy.

There's areas in Italy where farms have absolutely polluted water to insane level, and this further compounds with heavy pollution of drinkable water wells (which should always be at least 120 meters from the closest farm from what I know).

Regular citizens, which end up getting heavily sick from all these farms (often in mortal ways) never get any kind of support as they lack the political and financial weight, and as soon as the argument scales, you're back at populist "you want to starve our people and kill our economy" arguments.

I had a house in the country, by law there shouldn't be more than one chicken farm in a 4 miles radius, yet they built two in less than 2 miles, one of them 300 meters from my house. It literally smells in disgusting ways 24/7, from ammonia to rot I had to sell it for pennies (5'000 euros, renovated), as nobody but the farmers in the area had the slightest intention to moving to such a beautiful yet disgusting place. And I haven't even mentioned that to avoid having to bring the hundreds of dead animals to a registered incinerator (as the law requires) they just dig mass graves in 5 minutes and cover the entire land.

Wildlife has absolutely disappeared.

It's really a tough, tough political battle.

Everything from agriculture to cattle to fishing is insanely polluting and bad for the environment, but the idea of really tracking and controlling how those industries operate is beyond naive. The labels on your tuna can saying it didn't kill dolphins are worthless, there's no way to check what happens on these boats, so are the labels for your coffee or cocoa not using child labor or your food being organic. It's all absolutely fake and a matter of money.

maybewhenthesun• 8 months ago

Tell it like it is!

Here in the netherlands as soon as you try to do something, the farmers start flyingh upside down flags. I call them the 'head in the sand' flags since they stand for ignoring the problems.

I fear the problem is just that the earth suffers from an infestation of humans and the equilibrium will be restored in the same way all infestations end. It won't be pretty (already isn't in lots of places).

mschuster913• 8 months ago

When governments do try to push and make it law to have X amount of bushes and unfarmed land in a way that makes sense for wildlife to thrive you instantly get angry farmers on your roads, lose their votes and get publicly accused to starve the nation.

The problem is... farmers are a pretty split bunch. On the one side you have the last few remaining small holdouts trying to make ends meet with a few dozen cows or so, they already get swamped in ever increasing bureaucracy, and on the other side you got the megafarms who not only have the benefits of scale available to them (in anywhere from machines to sheer purchase power for feedstock) but also got dedicated full time employees just taking care about getting government handouts.

Of course the small ones get up in arms whenever anything changes, they don't have the capacity and resiliency left anymore.

terminalshort9• 8 months ago

But that isn't true in all areas. And the particular study in Germany that found a 76% decline was done in forest areas.

jmclnx• 8 months ago

Plus I heard somewhere song birds are declining due to this apocalypse.

But mosquitoes are not declining, the one insect I wish would decline real fast :)

terminalshort9• 8 months ago

Actually I feel like they are. I would get mosquito bites all the time as a kid when I went outside in the evening. Now I almost never do.

PaulKeeble2• 8 months ago

They are spreading further north now, places that have mostly been free of them are starting to see mosquitoes now due to the increased temperature.

rc_mob• 8 months ago

and higher altitudes. its nuts. ticks also are doing this.

ACCount37• 8 months ago

One day, humankind will force a full mosquito extinction. That day can't come soon enough.

exasperaited• 8 months ago

Why get rid of all mosquitoes when only about one in every fifteen mosquito species bites us?

acessoproibido• 8 months ago

Archive Link:

https://archive.ph/mpOkK

Retric2• 8 months ago

The windshield test is somewhat deceptive as improved aerodynamics plays a role, but the difference is still quite noticeable when driving around in a classic car.

magicstefanos• 8 months ago

But a lot of people drive old as shit cars.

TulliusCicero• 8 months ago

"Old as shit" is still a moving target. An old as shit car from 30 years ago is not the same model year as an old as shit car today.

maxerickson• 8 months ago

The other thing is that the cleared right of way on highways is larger. Both because highways are larger and because it reduces things like animal strikes.

e40• 8 months ago

You're telling me the trend of those big, flat noses (chins?) aren't bug collectors?

WillAdams• 8 months ago

Habitat seems to play a large role --- I've always raked leaves and piled up sticks which fall from trees in our yard into a compost pile in a shady area, which I've been careful to disturb as little as possible from from fall through spring, since fireflies lay eggs in such piles, and their larvae mature in such conditions.

My kids would invite their friends over on nice summer evenings to see fireflies, since none of the McMansion neighborhoods had nearly as many.

exe34• 8 months ago

I moved to the countryside in the last year. it's night and day as compared to the nearby town that I lived in, when it comes to insects and spiders. I constantly find corpses of insects on the window sill and the spiders are chunky, given how well they feed.

terminalshort9• 8 months ago

The second driver is habitat loss — the inexorable creep of urbanization, deforestation and sterile suburban lawns, which host fewer and less-diverse ranges of insects.

I don't buy this as a cause of a global decline, though. In many areas things have gone in the opposite direction. The Appalachian mountains were clear cut in the 1800s and now are back to forest. If this theory is correct, I would expect there to have been a massive increase in insect populations on the east coast.

snypher• 8 months ago

Forest isn't some Boolean you can toggle 0 and 1. It's not the same forest, why would we expect the same inhabitants?

terminalshort9• 8 months ago

If you want to claim that the forest that is there now is somehow dramatically worse for insects than the forest that grew there before, that's going to need some evidence behind it.

anon848736283• 8 months ago

I'm confused by your comment about the Appalachians. Were talking about the last handful of decades, not two centuries. The country is less wild today than ever before. More subdivisions, more strip malls, more farms.

terminalshort9• 8 months ago

No it isn't less wild than ever. It was literally clear cut for farming in the 1800s. I know that this goes against some popular narratives, but if you look it up you will find that it is very true. Also the amount of forest land in the US has been increasing in the last few decades too.

WillPostForFood• 8 months ago

This is actually not true, the amount of forest land has been stable for about 100 years. Most of the decline is in the 19th century as population expanded west.

https://imgur.com/a/IhmnKWD

Land dedicated to farming has also declined for the last ~75 years. Peak was 1954 with about 1.16 billion acres. It is down to about 875 million acres.

https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...

stinos• 8 months ago

I don't buy this as a cause of a global decline, though

The definition of habitat loss here is a bit poor because it doesn't mention the main contributor: farm land which over the past century got changed from something where insects could still survive to something which is more of a barren wasteland to them. And the thrid factor which goes hand in hand with that is pesticide use.

In many areas things have gone in the opposite direction.

Could be, but I'm pretty sure globally there are more areas where it is not going in that direction though. Or at least hasn't been going over the past century.

The Appalachian mountains were clear cut in the 1800s and now are back to forest. If this theory is correct, I would expect there to have been a massive increase in insect populations on the east coast.

Fir starters that's only one, quite localized example. Also the reasoning doesn't hold - ecosystems are complex systems. It's not because one specific area has been properly restored that insects would suddenly go there from surrounding areas, let alone that from the restored areas they then would suddenly have colonized neighboring areas (the entire east coast as you mention). Mainly because the speed at which they can colonize is limited and insects bound to forests don't necessarily all survive in other types of habitats.

terminalshort9• 8 months ago

I was only talking about the land use argument. Pesticides seem like a much more likely cause to me, especially because pesticide use on developed land can also cause contamination on undeveloped land.

forgotoldacc2• 8 months ago

Forests were clear cut in the 1800s, yeah. But plant life remained. The latter half of the 1900s moved us in a direction where nature was clear cut and paved over with a mix of rocks and petroleum, which is not very conducive to life. Then we kept moving in that direction by building massive parking lots that are empty most of the time and putting day/night cycle disrupting lights everywhere to keep those paved barren areas lit all night. Then because those dim yellow lights weren't enough, we switched to bright white lights that simulate daytime that blast all hours of the night just to really drive in the day and night cycle disruption. Also, we replaced all native plants with ugly grass. And because that grass struggles to survive, we spray the grass with poison to kill any life that may consume it and any local plants that may attempt to thrive amongst the grass. Also, we constantly mow that grass to keep it just 1 inch long and kill anything that may survived there even despite the poison and lack of biodiversity. And whenever leaves from local plants fall, which serve to replenish soil during decomposition, and act as food and shelter for insects, we get a loud ass leaf blower to put it all into a pile, put that into a garbage bag, and ship it all off to a garbage dump to ferment inside a bag for the next few hundred years so we can make a lot of methane to accelerate global warming for generations to come.

1800s folks stupidly cut down trees because they didn't know any better, but they weren't actively destroying everything and intentionally making it absolutely uninhabitable like our generation does. And now we even have bizarre concepts like HOAs, which mandate absolute and completely intentional environmental destruction for the sake of uniformity.

terminalshort9• 8 months ago

You are vastly overestimating the amount of land that is taken up by urban and suburban areas. Drive across the country and you will see that very little of the time you spend is in those areas. And then even that is an overestimate because those roads aren't random. They were specifically built to go through all the biggest cities on the way.

PaulKeeble2• 8 months ago

We keep getting these warnings, for decades now insect biomass has been in sharp decline and so far we have done very little to try and reverse it. At some point ecosystems are going to go into collapse including ones critical for our food chain.

amelius• 8 months ago

Thanks for another warning.

cryptonector• 8 months ago

^Fpesticide

Nothing here in this thread.

We're overusing pesticides. It's a problem. We should stop.

Here in the Texas hill country we don't have much agricultural use of pesticides, but out in East Texas we do. In the hill country I see plenty of insects.

Tanoc• 8 months ago

A large portion of the habitat loss I suspect isn't actually lawns, which have been decreasing in size as suburbs have been increasing in density. Many suburbs built since the 1990s are so tightly packed that you can't fit a car between the houses to get to the back yard, and the back yard itself is two thirds of the footprint of the house itself.

What I suspect is driving it is actually pavement and development ready property. The footprint for pavement for a building is usually three times the footprint for the building itself. This includes parking lots, connecting roads, sidewalks, and even the concrete slabs needed to place things like air conditioning units or tall signage. That pavement denies undergrowth and pioneer species that small insects thrive on seasonally.

It also denies water runoff. Without the water being able to saturate the ground it gets redirected to elsewhere. There's several issues with that, including unnatural subsidence and runoff pollution. The ground has some ability to naturally filter out small amounts of pollution as water seeps down through the soil and to the water table. But if there's pavement all of that water torrents to a single area which gets oversaturated. The soil can't hold any more, and so the water is rejected and pools above the surface. This is why you see so many puddles at the edges of parking lots or road intersections. This allows the pollutants to concentrate, and when the ground finally does absorb the excess water it pulls in those pollutants all the way down to the water table as they're in too high a concentration for the soil to capture.

And development ready property is an actual serious problem. Companies buy real estate and then deforest and regrade it in anticipation of someone eventually buying it. They don't have a buyer lined up, they're just expecting someone to eventually want to settle there, be it a business or a home. In the meantime they keep the land stripped, with no trees or shrubbery, no native plants, and sometimes without even grass. There are places I've seen that were turned into development ready property that have sat hollow and scarred for twenty years.

Even in places where there's native plants, undergrowth, and pioneer species that overcome this, the continual removal of trees makes it almost impossible for animals to stay there for long. Part of this is that with the heat island effect of nearby pavement you get constant blowing lateral winds. Winds which birds can't use as updrafts, winds which blow away rodent ground nests, and winds which scatter colonies of insects. But even if they survive all of that, the constant grooming of the land to keep it "presentable" means zero turn mowers rolling over all of that and destroying it, irrigation being dug that drains naturally forming ponds that house insects and amphibians, and the turfing that chokes out everything with fast growing non-native grasses.

CheeseFromLidl• 8 months ago

I wonder what the influence of wind is on survival of flying insects. Over here - W. Eu. - we’ve seen storms on a monthly base now. I don’t think the energy balance of foraging adds up if there’s too much wind.

Helmut10001• 8 months ago

This is an even bigger issue than climate change because the intensity of the change is even harder to notice. I still see glimpses of biodiversity loss all around me, and it scares me.

metalman• 8 months ago

it will likely come as a double wammy, polinator/benificial/comensual insects will be reduced past self sustaining number and destructive bugs will increase to uncontrolable levels. plants have been managing this for millions of years, needing polinators and preditory insects, but fighting destructive and seed eating bugs the fight is older in animals, where there is a direct connection in the amount of abrasive silica in plants, and the development of teath and dental enamil is parellel in the fossil record we humans, fucking with shit big time is not going to go good, nature negotiates in ways and time frames that quite clearly exclude our direct partisipation, with nature ready, at any time, for a complete reset.

warpspin• 8 months ago

While I support protecting insects and I literally see how their amounts decreased since I've been a child, I wished people would stop the alarmist "food supply in danger" headline. It's not, at least not because of the insects. Most of our food supply is not dependent on wild insects, instead people usually pay for cultivated bees to pollinate their plants. Business is too serious to rely on circumstance.

The real problem is that loads of the wild plant life depends on wild insects, and we do not want to lose that.

Don't get me wrong. Neither I deny climate change, nor do I say we should destroy nature as much as we do.

But we need to start talking the truth instead of invented talking points, or people won't take science serious anymore... even more than they already ignore it.

yummypaint• 8 months ago

Interactions between species are scarcely understood in general, if they are known at all. It's only very recently that the existence of mycelial networks was discovered. It's only very recently that the importance of micro biome and it's role in health is starting to be recognized. It's only in hindsight that impact of the near extinction of vultures in India on human health was understood.

History has shown industrialized humans to be dangerously ignorant of environmental systems, and almost every action we take with regard to these systems is destructive. Every extinction is irreversible. Things are so wildly out of equilibrium now that it's no longer possible to return to the equilibria from our past.

Ecological collapse isnt some mild inconvenience that makes milk more expensive. Once it has happened, ecological collapse cannot and will not be undone by the seriousness of "business." This type of thinking embodies exactly the kind of arrogant hubris that led us into this situation. The negative feedback loops that have kept earth habitable for us so far aren't laws of nature, and no-one knows how far they can be bent before breaking, or how they even work.

A looming 'insect apocalypse' could endanger global food supplies

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