451–460 of 481 posts
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I feel that I hear people say « we’re having a unusually hot dry year » every year...
On that note I just did a Google search for "more fireflies this year" and got news articles saying as much from 2018, 2019, and 2020.
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It's a combination of factors. Insecticides, pollution, loss of habitat, light pollution(especially from daylight LEDs), global warming(throwing off reproduction timing), ubiquitous roadways and vehicles, flat surfaces(beetles get stuck on their back).
Whenever I see someone claim a given problem is due to a combination of factors, I get a bit suspicious. First, this seems like a way to say "I don't really know the actual cause." Second, in the real world in situations like these, there is almost always one overwhelming factor that accounts for >60% of total influence. I really do wonder what that is because I like insects!
That may be true when you're optimising a program, but is very much not true in ecology. The parent comment is generally correct with its list of drivers of biodiversity loss (compare the IPBES global summary: https://ipbes.net/global-assessment).
A key feature of ecology is its extreme complexity and the myriad factors at play in any given situation. Of course, there will be individual situations in which one factor is indeed dominant. Those cases actually often end up as textbook examples precisely because they are so rare, like the snowshoe hare/lynx Lotka-Volterra cycles. In most situations, researchers have to resort to some pretty advanced statistics to try and figure out what the most important factors are. There are almost always several, and getting any one factor to explain 60% of the variance is very rare. (That's why principle component analyses -PCAs- are so popular in ecological research papers.)
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> Also good is using more LED street lamps that focus the light where we need it, Focusing light where needed is good. Using LEDs, as we do now, has downsides though. LED lighting in cities is making astronomy and astrophotography and even animal life worse in some cases.[1] Traditional sodium vapour lights pollute around a wavelength of 589 nm.[2] That's the yellow/orange sky you used to see in the sky around cities…
We made LED lighting white because we wanted it. We can make yellow LED lighting as well. This should be suggested to city councils, if changing the wavelength would be beneficial to insects with no downsides.
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That is a pretty accusatory tone... There are probably over 10 million species of plants and animals in the world. Of course some of these are going to be better at coping with humans and their cities than others. As you correctly observe, foxes happen to be some of the best at adapting to city life. If you want more examples, just take a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_wildlife However, these exceptio…
You are again evading the pertinent question. For the ideologues, foxes are an endangered species: https://www.bussgeldkatalog.org/tierschutz-fuchs/ It is a crime to hurt a fox! But I am sure that if there are 5 foxes per person in Germany, there will be a new "Referentenentwurf" and everyone will ask how this could possibly have happened. If you cannot see how this hurts credibility, you have to get out of your ecol…
You need to differentiate between endangered species and protected species, and between biodiversity conservation ("Naturschutz") and animal rights ("Tierschutz").
The fox is not an endangered species, as both the German and the global red lists show (https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/23062/46190249, https://www.rote-liste-zentrum.de/de/Detailseite.html?specie...).
It is, however, a protected species in Germany (Anhang 1 BArtSchV), though at the lower protection level ("besonders geschützt", not "streng geschützt"). Note, however, that there are multiple reasons to give a species legal protection. These include a need for conservation (not the case here), but also ethical implications (higher animals like birds and mammals generally enjoy higher protection levels than insects or plants) and cultural reasons (in this case, the fox is a huntable species, which means that it falls under the Jagdgesetz).
In short: yes, the fox is protected, but that doesn't automatically mean that it's also endangered.
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I’m about the same sense that I’m not forced to buy electricity from the local power utility Large parts of the country have very little housing stock, especially newer housing, that isn’t HOA-encumbered.
This. We bought a house in an HOA and I definitely had a moment where I was like, "Wait a minute, some guy bought this land, subdivided it, and created this HOA out of thin air and now here we are, 40 years later, living under that HOA he made up. None of the original owners even live here anymore!"
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> that can encourage racial segregation. Unnamed critics state things "can" do things, while the following sentence shows there is no evidence. Then there is a follow up statement that the racial demographics show that HOAs tend to be richer (A major point of HOAs is to improve and maintain neighborhood values), and less diverse. The second part on its face might seem upsetting but, you'll find largely suburban commu…
Without commenting on the quality of the Bloomberg piece, exclusion is quite literally the reason that HOAs were created. The original, explicit, and completely legal purpose of an HOA was to exclude specific races and creeds and we cannot dispute that. Argue devil's advocate all you like, but there are many HOAs with "No Jews, Asiatics, Blacks, or Mulattos allowed" still on the charter and "Whites only" written dire…
Restrictive covenants have been a dead letter for decades, and they predate modern HOAs by definition.
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We made LED lighting white because we wanted it. We can make yellow LED lighting as well. This should be suggested to city councils, if changing the wavelength would be beneficial to insects with no downsides.
I'd be so stoked for red street lights. They don't mess up your vision at night.
Potential small (safety?) downside: red light illumination does greatly reduce colour discrimination at night versus white light.
I remember star nights walking outside as a kid seeing the Milky way Galaxy full of stars.
As for ordinary street lights, the purpose of street lights are for crime prevention, but there is motion sensors. Do we really need to have the lights on with no one on a street?
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> that can encourage racial segregation. Unnamed critics state things "can" do things, while the following sentence shows there is no evidence. Then there is a follow up statement that the racial demographics show that HOAs tend to be richer (A major point of HOAs is to improve and maintain neighborhood values), and less diverse. The second part on its face might seem upsetting but, you'll find largely suburban commu…
Without commenting on the quality of the Bloomberg piece, exclusion is quite literally the reason that HOAs were created. The original, explicit, and completely legal purpose of an HOA was to exclude specific races and creeds and we cannot dispute that. Argue devil's advocate all you like, but there are many HOAs with "No Jews, Asiatics, Blacks, or Mulattos allowed" still on the charter and "Whites only" written dire…