Anecdotally the spiders here in Germany this year are insane.
Where have all the insects gone?
91–100 of 299 posts
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only the government had nationalised industry, these bugs would be alive?
I mean, probably? If we had elected good officials at least. I'm not defending socialism at all, but if you accept the fact that this kind of thing happens because there's no monetary incentive for the industry to avoid it, then the logical conclusion is that under a system not motivated by profit this would be less likely to happen. But what I'm sure you are aware of this line of thinking. What is the argument again…
You should read about the Great Leap Forward and The Four Pests campaign that lead to the greatest famine in human history with up to 55 million people dead from starvation and bodies piling up on sides of roads.
Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes. Mao decreed increased efforts to multiply grain yields and bring industry to the countryside. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting "surpluses" that in fact did not exist and leaving farmers to starve. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. The Great Leap resulted in tens of millions of deaths, with estimates ranging between 15 and 55 million deaths, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest famine in human history.
The Four Pests campaign (Chinese: 除四害; pinyin: Chú Sì Hài), was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward in China from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The extermination of sparrows is also known as smash sparrows campaign (Chinese: 打麻雀运动; pinyin: Dǎ Máquè Yùndòng) or eliminate sparrows campaign (Chinese: 消灭麻雀运动; pinyin: Xiāomiè Máquè Yùndòng), which resulted in severe ecological imbalance, being one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine. In 1960, Mao Zedong ended the campaign against sparrows and redirected the fourth focus to bed bugs.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#93I feel like if this were true we would be seeing a major decline in the sales of pesticides, at least on consumer-level volume. Has anyone dug into those numbers?
Not sure this would hold true. The most efficient way to manage insects in a home (consumer) environment has nothing to do with pesticides.
For example: Ants are best managed caulking ingress points. Silverfish are best managed by reducing humidity. Bed bugs typically require professional fumigation. Flies & roaches by removing/storing food sources, etc.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#94> He spent a sabbatical conducting field work on Trinidad and Tobago and in Suriname. What a great example for why we need the Oxford Comma.
I don't think you'd use a comma there in any circumstance. It's a list of two places, joining with a single and is appropriate.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically, the capitalist countries have been much less-polluted ('cleaner') and more environmentally friendly in general than the communist countries. With respect to 'socialist' countries, the correlations depend on exactly how you define socialism, and which countries you include/exclude.
Totally and completely false. The UK in 1930 was much more polluted than the USSR and China at that time. Making that argument today is possible if you ignore moving practically all manufacturing to a country that happens to be communist. There would be far less pollution in China if they weren't making all of our stuff. It's actually a good example of how unchecked capitalism is always looking for new ways to extern…
Well, China wasn't communist in 1930; that aside, I think it's tough to get an accurate idea of one specific time in the past, as such I think we're better off trying to understand the general situation over the situation over a longer-term in the USSR. Here is a quote from a self-professed socialist on a socialist website about the environmental situation there:
>"On this basis, let me agree with Adam that the damage done to the environment by the Soviet regime and its successor doesn’t remotely bear comparison with that in the West. It was, and remains, catastrophically worse. Particular countries elsewhere, especially in the developing world, have suffered one or another ecological disaster, sometimes of mind-bending dimensions. The USSR managed something in just about every sector of heavy industry to match the worst of them."
https://socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/ecological-di...
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#96Anecdotally, while driving along Minnesota's segment of I94 in the '90s, one would have to stop and scrape the bugs off the front window and grill. Today, this is no longer a problem.
Could that be explained by improved aerodynamics of cars now compared to then? Has that been studied?
I mentioned this in a similar discussion on HN a few years ago. I used to own a Nissan Cube (a boxy car), and it would regularly get encrusted with insects every summer, when compared to other family members’ vehicles which did not.
Insects still get hit with aerodynamic cars, but the blows are glancing and less likely to cause a “burst”.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#97Sometimes I get the sense that people hate that we exist, in the numbers that we do, because of our impact on the earth by merely existing. A self-hatred if you will. And before you respond with "if only we did X, it would be fine," consider that the difficulty of convincing/coercing lots of people to do things is also an inherent part of our existence. Also part of our existence is the incentive to cheat to get ahea…
I'm sure there are some who do. There are a lot of people out there, you can find just about any belief. But sometimes I get the sense that people say things like this as a way to derail the conversation. They'd rather talk about other people's motives and beliefs than the the actual observation about the environment. And we know those people are out there. Some of them get paid a lot to do it.
There is strong evidence that when humans first arrived in locations they had never existed before, mass extinctions of megafaunal species occurred. And this was thousands of years ago, before we collectively had any idea about the dangers of biodiversity loss, climate change, or the sheer extent of the power we wielded as a species. The first time we ever thought about the greenhouse effect as a tangible concept was only 200 years ago.
Given that it required us thousands of years to develop a scientific mindset to even be able to comprehend the scope of our own destruction, I can't see how we could have stopped ourselves any sooner.
The recent uptick in energy consumption is now magnifying the problem at an exponential rate, but it doesn't sound agreeable or practical to prevent people from spreading around to consume all the resources we have, or to smack the newly invented, frivolous and energy-draining devices from their inventors' hands the moment they've been first actualized.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#98Anecdotally, while driving along Minnesota's segment of I94 in the '90s, one would have to stop and scrape the bugs off the front window and grill. Today, this is no longer a problem.
I just drove across the US (down the east coast, across the south, up the Rockies) and found I had to do this only after driving across Texas.
meaning bugs are doing well in Texas, but not nowhere else?
Really weird
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#99Somehow mosquitos, stink bugs, and asian lady beetles persist in my area. It is amazing to see every other type of animal come back stronger with the waning of industry.
I believe that bugs (Heteroptera) might be more resistant to common pesticides than other insects.
Where I live, in Europe, several species of bugs have become quite abundant in recent years.
On the other hand, most other kinds of insects, e.g. butterflies, dragonflies, beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, various kinds of wasps and flies etc. have become exceedingly rare compared to how abundant they were when I was young.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#100Anecdotally, while driving along Minnesota's segment of I94 in the '90s, one would have to stop and scrape the bugs off the front window and grill. Today, this is no longer a problem.
Could that be explained by improved aerodynamics of cars now compared to then? Has that been studied?
Huge trucks and SUVs are really popular in the US. The aerodynamics are not going to compare favorably to typical 90's cars, where even the trucks are much smaller.