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75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

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Re: 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

#311

Post by viridian »

Fezzik wrote: post #238
irrlichthn wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, I can do with my garden whatever I want to do, as long as a I don't turn it into forrest. But that's here in Austria. What you describe sounds terrible. Fines for not mowing? In which country do you live?

In the United States most (all?) cities have local ordinances regulating lawn height. For example, in Portland, Oregon “lawn areas” can be no more than 10 inches high[1]. Mind you, this is just for the city and only applies to lawns, not gardens, or forested areas on large acreages. I imagine it stemmed from helping reduce fires near dwellings, but that is a total guess. Rural areas will have different regulations th…

>Rural areas will have different regulations though.

Sometimes those can be even worse. I lived in a town of 300 growing up, and we often had to deal with the mayor's wife and occasionally the mayor himself coming to our door to tell us we were in violation of some lawn ordinance or another. This is particularly obnoxious considering that the only way to even look up town ordinances is to go to the other side of the county to view the documents at the county office.

Re: 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

#312

Post by turk184 »

DoodleBuggy wrote: post #145
jpm_sd wrote: post #24

This is pretty alarming and suggests that soaking agricultural land in insecticides might be having some far-reaching side effects.

Well, the intention of insecticides is to kill insects. All insects. It's working, but perhaps a little too well?

Exactly. It's what humanity set out to do--we applied chemistry and other sciences to the problem and solved it and now somebody is complaining. Someone who didn't get malaria.

Re: 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

#313

Post by turk184 »

nickbauman wrote: post #83

I live in Minneapolis. The city fumigates regularly in the summer by aircraft and ground-based methods both, which is why I can go running around the lakes in mid July and get maybe one mosquito bite. I think most US cities are like this. It's a policy that should be scrapped in spite of the risk of West Nile and Lyme Disease.

Yes, and if they didn't do that nobody would want to be outside for most of the summer. The mosquitos in MN are bad, really really bad. Some summers are worse than others, but there's a reason why the mosquito is the state bird.

Re: 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

#314

Post by freeflight »

stevekemp wrote: post #281
freeflight wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, some types of beetles, ants, flies, mosquitoes, even wasps - are just new. Afaik most of these are usually invasives species, displacing local populations, which is happening in the weirdest ways and places. In Germany, our local ladybug species are on the verge of going extinct because an imported Asian ladybug species emits some kind of spores killing them, and the Asian ones generally being st…

>that leaves the red squirrels with no food supplies to get through the winter and so they starve. Things with squirrels are a bit more complex. While the two species do fight over the same resource, the main reason for the decline of red squirrels is disease. The grey squirrels carry squirrel-pox, which can be fatal to the reds. That's always the explanation I've heard cited for the decline in red squirrels in the U…

I think it's a combination of a number of factors. It's still really fascinating to me how the grey squirrel's survival tactic pretty much seems like it's built on exploiting the survival tactic of the red squirrels.

I wonder if the grey squirrels adapted this behavior because of previous encounters with red squirrels, displacing them in the process, or if it's just "bad luck" for the red squirrels to run into grey squirrels who just happen to perfectly counter their survival tactics?

Re: 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

#315

Post by freeflight »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #58
freeflight wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, some types of beetles, ants, flies, mosquitoes, even wasps - are just new. Afaik most of these are usually invasives species, displacing local populations, which is happening in the weirdest ways and places. In Germany, our local ladybug species are on the verge of going extinct because an imported Asian ladybug species emits some kind of spores killing them, and the Asian ones generally being st…

Same thing happened with the squirrels in the Pacific Northwest. Little red ones replaced by the big grey ones. In more remote places and in the mountains where the winters are harsher you still see the small red native squirrels though.

> In more remote places and in the mountains where the winters are harsher you still see the small red native squirrels though.

And here I was thinking milder winters would benefit the red squirrels because they would have a better chance getting through those without food supplies/fat reserves. Guess it's actually more of an even playground in terms of food supplies, where things like the grey's parapoxvirus tip the balance in favor of more greys surviving.

Are harsher winter conditions harder on the grey squirrels? Maybe their fat-reserves give them a mobility disadvantage that becomes crippling in harsher winter conditions? Or maybe those remote places are so remote that grey squirrels merely haven't made it there, yet.

Re: 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

#316

Post by opilionesman »

I think I might have found a way to reverse this at the local level in an individual yard. The problem is that is illegal and I was basically told that I was a scumbag for doing this. You can read more about my native yard experiment here: http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share-so...

Re: 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

#317

Post by arethuza »

samastur wrote: post #309
arethuza wrote: post #308

We move at the start of the year to a house in the country here in Scotland that is pretty much surrounded by farmland and I've been amazed at the amount of insect life in our garden - particularly the amount of bees and butterflies. However, because the area round us is rather hilly it is all low intensity cattle and sheep rearing. It's probably at least 15 kms (mostly over sea) to the nearest arable farming - who a…

Sounds lovely, but what is the net connection like? (asking as someone who needs it for work)

20Mbps - which isn't nearly as fast as what we had in central Edinburgh but fast enough for my work and Netflix/iPlayer etc.

Mind you finding a house we liked with a decent internet connection was very difficult.

[Weirdly we did find a house in rural Perthshire that had 450Mbps - full BT FTTP - but we didn't like the house!]

Re: 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

#318

Post by giardini »

wazoox wrote: post #247
giardini wrote: post #239

This study appears to be an alarmist rehash of what was previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 Here's one of the original papers: https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2... The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot. From that paper: "What follows is a description of measured Insect-Biomasses from samples collected in the Orbr…

To people that were driving 20 years ago and are now, it was pretty obvious without any statistics that something was wrong, for several years now. 25 years ago, I couldn't drive 500 km in summer without scraping off a thick crust of dead bugs on my windshield afterwards (it was even common to stop just for that). In the past few years, I've driven thousands of km across Europe in summer with barely a dead bug on my…

Has traffic increased in the last 20-25 years? It has where I live. Even with the same bug population, more traffic means fewer bugs/car/trip. And cars today are more aerodynamic.

Re: 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

#319

Post by saiya-jin »

musage wrote: post #154
harshreality wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might not apply to GP if they're not in an incorporated area, but in cities, the wasps should tell that to city councils, which tend to have established rules regarding height of lawns and weeds and such. Good luck talking to them about it; you'll be labelled a green wacko one step removed from eco-fanatics who firebomb SUV dealerships. If you don't want or like proper suburban manicured lawns, maybe you shouldn…

> Good luck talking to them about it; you'll be labelled a green wacko one step removed from eco-fanatics who firebomb SUV dealerships. Yes, and? That's them projecting the weakness they actually do have inside them on you. To the degree you are free from weakness, their weakness will destroy them, so be the wall they splatter themselves against, be the water they drown in. > your neighbors are going to think you're…

this approach either comes naturally, or not at all. it sucks a bit, because it will constantly make you an outsider with most people. I won't budge, since it feels right and a proper life attitude, kind of a celebration of personal freedom of mind and expression of oneself outward.

but finding likeminded people is HARD, since most mankind are hardcore conformists.

Re: 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

#320

Post by jakevn »

viridian wrote: post #310
kpil wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The land of the 'free' I believe they call themselves....

People are free to not move into a HoA area or gated community though. I'm looking to buy a house soon, and any HoA with any real authority causes me to reject the house based just on that. There's nothing wrong with the idea of "lets all agree to these rules that define a neighborhood we all would like to live in" in theory, but in practice the HoA contract is often a cudgel used to bludgeon people who aren't well l…

This is not specific to HoAs. Most non-rural ordinances have some definition of what is legal to have for a lawn, and those generally forbid natural growth.
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