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Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

fwi.co.uk

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Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#71

Post by garmaine »

acqq wrote: post #53
frutiger wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mother Nature has been around for a very long time. She will not remember us when we are gone.

> Mother Nature (...) will not remember us when we are gone. She will. Yes, she will outlive us, but with very heavy losses. Due to these losses, it will be very obvious we have existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction "one of the most significant extinction events in the history of the Earth " ... "is mainly a result of human activity ." "The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 10…

I think you missed the point of the comment. If human beings drive ourselves extinct, life will eventually rebound just as it has from other, even larger mass extinctions.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#72

Post by [deleted] »

nikofeyn wrote: post #66
frutiger wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mother Nature has been around for a very long time. She will not remember us when we are gone.

i hate when this sentiment pops up. it is practically meaningless but can even be even be viewed as harmful. most people don’t care about the environment already, so stating it will live on just silently emboldens people to keep on keeping on. many plants and animals are already dead directly due to human influence and others are to quickly follow.

[deleted]

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#73

Post by Aromasin »

fouc wrote: post #12

Probably a result of tiling the soil. Disturbing the natural ecosystem of it. And pesticides too presumably. Something like permaculture could help. Chop and drop. Mulching on the spot.

I can't find the studies now as I should be working, but there's lots of evidence to say poly-culture is also very necessary for a healthy soil biome.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#74

Post by acqq »

garmaine wrote: post #71
acqq wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mother Nature (...) will not remember us when we are gone. She will. Yes, she will outlive us, but with very heavy losses. Due to these losses, it will be very obvious we have existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction "one of the most significant extinction events in the history of the Earth " ... "is mainly a result of human activity ." "The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 10…

I think you missed the point of the comment. If human beings drive ourselves extinct, life will eventually rebound just as it has from other, even larger mass extinctions.

What the comment actually claimed is that whatever will be after us "will not remember us."

Which is not true. Other comparable extinctions to the one we are currently causing are on the hundreds of the millions of years scale.

What we are causing will be definitely seen as an extinction event for at least millions of years in the future. That's how big it is. "The life will eventually rebound" is completely different from it "will not remember us."

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#75

Post by NeedMoreTea »

benj111 wrote: post #69
nosuchthing wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://sites.uw.edu/bevanseries/2018/02/28/data-is-in-the-e... "Dr. McClenachan used photographs taken between 1956 and 1985 to document the loss of the large trophy fish in the Florida Keys, and compared them with photographs that she took in 2007. She found a major shift in species composition across reef communities through time, with larger predatory fish being fished first, followed by a steep decline in the si…

Thanks. I still have issues though. We don't know how representative those picture were. The 1950s pictures have survived over a half century, they were taken at a time when photography was harder work than today. I could go fishing, photograph my meagre catch, and put it on instagram for the world to see easily. Plus these seem to be tourist photos? Maybe its a symptom of (inexperienced) amateurs going to Florida Ke…

Isn't that conclusion 100% the wrong way round?

If it were so difficult for photos to survive half a century wouldn't it be hard to show catches tended to bigger? After all the ancient 1950s photos of large catches have been lost through not surviving such unimaginable eons. Sorry for the tone, but seriously, by 1950s photography was not the rare and specialist thing it was in the 1910s. Sure, it might be just the unrepresentative ones that survived into modernity, but...

With millions of photos being taken daily today, shouldn't it be trivial to find some examples of enormous catches among them? Yet we don't find them. Yeah, yeah, I know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Reports of 2m, 100kg cod are from history, today both size and catch has plummeted.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#76

Post by NeedMoreTea »

zizee wrote: post #51
mads wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

Same car? Could improved aerodynamics play a part?

I noticed the effect motorcycling. With an aerodynamically unchanged helmet and headlight, riding mainly naked bikes.

Last time I saw this crop up in a thread another comment claimed they actually were using the same car.

Maybe 50 years of these rivers of metal boxes reliably taking out trillions of insects yearly has played a part too.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#77

Post by Cthulhu_ »

benj111 wrote: post #67
CalRobert wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shifting baselines problem comes up a lot; it related to fish catches It's described more here - https://oceana.org/blog/daniel-pauly-and-george-monbiot-conv... and aptly illustrated here - https://oceana.org/sites/default/files/285468/catch_of_the_d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

This is interesting, thanks for the links, but..... It isn't science its basically relying on peoples unreliable memory. Should I believe my uncle Bob, when he tells me he used to catch fish bigger than he was using a homemade hook, and some twine? So at the moment I'm struggling with what this is. History? Probably. A tool for deciding public policy? Probably not. I'm not denying the phenomena, just that as it stand…

Aren't there trading / sales logs, like, official records from back then?

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#78

Post by Cthulhu_ »

manmal wrote: post #58
mads wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

Yes, insects are also vastly reduced. In my region, there’s an increase in ticks (and tick-borne disease) because there are less insects, leading to less birds, leading to thriving ticks. So, an annoying side effect of reduced insect count is that we have lots of ticks in our gardens. BTW we have non-organic agricultural fields in 50m distance of our house, so that _might_ be a factor for the dying insects. Oh, and o…

You'd think there'd also be an uptick (ha!) in animals that eat ticks, but maybe that takes a lot longer to correct itself. If it wasn't for the prevalence of pesticides, insect populations would restore due to a shift in balance - that is, less insects = less predators eating them, less predators = more insects, etc.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#79

Post by m-i-l »

mads wrote: post #46
photoguy112 wrote: post #13

Back when I was a kid, after a heavy downpour the roads would be crowded with earthworms. You really had to watch where you step to avoid stepping on one of those suckers. Fast forward today and I RARELY see a single worm out on the road after a similar downpour.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

The dramatic reduction in insects on car windscreens could be "explained away" by technological advances in car design (getting windscreens covered in insects could conceivably have been a problem great enough for someone to have invested time and money into resolving with more efficient aerodynamics of windscreens or whatever). Not saying that is actually the cause, just that many people could rationalise it as such.

The earthworms on a path or road is slightly more troubling though. Not something I'd thought about before, but there is a path through a park where I grew up that used to be covered in earthworms after every rain when I was a child, but the odd times I've been back up since in similar conditions I've not noticed any at all. Being a park it wouldn't have been exposed to more intensive farming or anything else. Same park, just a different time.

Chilling thought that there could be significant and detrimental changes underway in nature, happening on generational timescales so slowly that no-one notices, a little like the proverbial frog in boiling water.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#80

Post by johndough »

zizee wrote: post #51
mads wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

Same car? Could improved aerodynamics play a part?

I also observe less insects on my windshield, same car as 25 years ago.
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