Lots of worms in my garden. I did a survey yesterday...
Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
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Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
#102Related anecdote: I moved to a small town in the West Midlands in the UK from Barcelona last year. One of the things I first noticed was an absence of nature sounds (but you can always hear a motorway, no matter how far you walk :( ). This is compared to living in downtown Barcelona in El Born. I finally figured it out after going back for a visit to Barcelona that there are just substantially fewer birds here, or at least in the area I live. I wonder if that's because there is less food for them?
Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
#103Earlier 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
Daniel Pauly is amazing. We hosted him for a conference here in NZ a few years ago. Such a mind! What is your connection to shifting baselines and fishing policy? My father (former commercial fisherman) is part of a recreational fishing group arguing that the goal of fish policy should be abundance not short-term profit. http://legasea.co.nz
I don't have a strong connection to it, I just know that it's an apt illustration and we have photos for it - I doubt fishers today would turn away giant groupers. It's also discussed in a book I just read, Whittled Away, about Ireland's horrendous wildlife and fishery management (while pretty, virtually the whole island has been stripped of its wildlife to turn it in to livestock grazing). In short, there used to be a hell of a lot more fish, of different species, and the stocks we want to return to are levels from an already diminished time. Though it's got a lot to do with the EU's common fisheries policy, which was similarly awful, but has been improved somewhat since, with at least a ban on deep sea trawling.
Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
#104Lots of worms in my garden. I did a survey yesterday...
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Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
#105Did anyone else notice that the article seems to be confused about "two fifths" versus "20 percent"?
Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’m afraid a couple ticks per garden are not enough for any animal to survive..
Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did just over an hour each way for three months and questioned what the point was. I was wasting my life just so I could live in one place and work in another, but for what? My "living" basically consisted if eating and sleeping and my body started to become fat and unhealthy due to not having the time to exercise. What's the point of transporting a fat, useless body 100 miles every day?
Oh, I'm 100% onboard that one of the quickest ways to improve your life is to lower your commute time. I'm just saying commuting that long is not a particularly odd thing to do.
Being overweight is not a particularly odd thing either. It's not good, it's just mundane.
Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
#108Back 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.
They moved here, to our farm in Sweden. I just finished cutting and splitting a dead and partly rotten tree. The core of that tree was filled with a good approximation of soil which again was filled with earthworms. They were also slithering between the bark and the trunk in droves - this tree being partly rotten the bark was loose on the trunk - as if they were getting ready to evolve into treeworms.
When it rains it is crawling with the things. Living in the forest and having an unpaved lot probably helps here.
Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 differen…
Mother Nature won’t remember us. Mother Nature is a non conscious evolutionary process. The non-human conscious entities within it lack the means to carry on cultural memory of the hairless primates that once ravaged their world. That doesn’t mean there won’t be a record of us though.. any future evolved tool-wielding intelligence would certainly be able to infer our presence.
> Mother Nature is a non conscious evolutionary process.
Of course, and it's completely obvious that I never claimed human consciousness of the whole nature (you can read elsewhere my view of consciousness, hint: it's not given by deities). The answer is not even a response to what I actually wrote.
Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mother Nature has been around for a very long time. She will not remember us when we are gone.
She does not have that much time and thus tries at intelligent life left. Gradual brightening of the sun will start making the earth uninhabitable in about 800Ma due to accelerated silicate weathering.
Can you provide some links with more details? Googling sub-phrases from your comment finds me nothing but information on the natural weathering cycle of silicates as it relates to CO2.