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Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
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Re: Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
#62Swallows. That and the fact wild animal populations swing widely to extremes sometimes. I have been paying close attention to swallows in recent few years and the numbers of them as well as the bugs they eat are skyrocketing in my area. When I moved to the area it was essentially empty field a couple hundred meters from anything. The farmer owning it converted a bit in the middle into residential building plots, a road was built, electricity hooked up etc. Most of the people that buy those plots do it as an investment so they don't do anything to them. I have observed over last 10 years how nature took over those plots. Hay that grows and is not mowed accumulates and besides being a fire hazard provides an environment for birds to nest in. Wild trees have grown to the point one wouldn't recognise it was a field a decade ago. I regularly have hedgehogs, hares, deer, lots of all kinds of birds (including a golden Eagle once). Every year there are huge numbers of swallows come in the spring. As of last 2 years there have been moose and even wild wolves. Yes, wolves, in a middle of Europe in 2022. I have photos of their dinner I once found in addition to other info.
People don't realise nature is very resilient and it will move into every area that is not polluted with toxins. Even with toxins or radiation (like the famous Chernobyl exclusion zone) nature evolves to deal with it.
Re: Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fireflies for me. I live in Italy and between the vineyards it was full of them. Now I occasionally see one or two. It's a pity not only because it is a concrete sign of habitat degradation, but it was also mesmerizing to walk and have them filing around you. Something my kids won't experience.
Between two long trips to Italy in my childhood, the fireflies we could see from the terrace of a small B&B we stayed at in a small village not far from Genoa is one of my most enduring memories.
Yeah, they are amazing. I'm not sure about Liguria, but where I am from (Garda Lake on the Veneto side) they basically disappeared.
Re: Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
#64I guess whatever reason it is local, because last summer drove from Lisbon to Berlin and this summer drove from Berlin to Milan and every time I stopped at a gas station I had to clean the car because boy did it have A LOT of dead bugs.
Completely anecdotal, but this does seem to be a North American issue, I did a two week roadtrip through Croatia this year and I had to stop just to clean bugs off the car more often than stopping just for gas. I've done quite a few roadtrips in America and never once had to stop just to clean bugs off the windshield.
It's possible that it's happening more in NA, but the article started with a research made on Denmark roads 1996-2017 with a 80-97% fall of insect splats in the period.
Anecdotally, I hardly had to clean my windscreen when I was living in a city. I'm living in a small town with fields all around it now and I never have a clean windscreen anymore. However nothing like the one in the first picture of the article. That's how my front license plate looks like.
Re: Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
#65To everyone replying “aerodynamics”, I’ve had the same car for about 9 years now and the drive along the 5 from Bay Area to LA feels like there’s fewer bugs on my windshield (granted not recorded diligently for scientific purposes but whereas before I’d need to scrub the windshield at least once halfway these days I can drive all the way and still don’t need a wash at the end) Same goes for the argument that bugs hav…
> To everyone replying “aerodynamics”, I’ve had the same car for about 9 years now and the drive along the 5 from Bay Area to LA feels like there’s fewer bugs on my windshield (granted not recorded diligently for scientific purposes but whereas before I’d need to scrub the windshield at least once halfway these days I can drive all the way and still don’t need a wash at the end) Hasn’t California had extremely climat…
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Re: Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
#66An Occam's razorish answer is that there are fewer bugs nowadays in whatever area this phenomenon is observed. So a better question could be why are there fewer bugs?
Re: Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
#67It's partly due to mowing alongside highways and medians. That is primarily motivated by keeping the number of small animals down, reducing fire risk, and other reasons, but fewer tall grasses means drastically fewer bugs. Also, pesticides and general global insect decline. This is not primarily due to aerodynamics.
It's smart to keep it maintained for safety reasons, but that doesn't explain the full story - there's bound to be plenty of unkempt grassland and whatnot further away from the road where insect populations SHOULD be thriving.
> where insect populations SHOULD be thriving.
Oh, I know. It's not looking good for bugs globally because of a lot of reasons.
Re: Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
#68Probably a large part is due to the increased frequency of cars inside broadly the same volume of road space. Assuming that you have the same number of bugs per m^3 and the same number of bugs entering per m^3 per minute as before, then bugs splattered per car will change in inverse proportion to cars per minute.
I think you grossly overestimate how much space does car infrastructure hold in relation to literally millions of km^2 of free space around it. Assuming your observation is right its impact would be minuscule.
Re: Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
#69To everyone replying “aerodynamics”, I’ve had the same car for about 9 years now and the drive along the 5 from Bay Area to LA feels like there’s fewer bugs on my windshield (granted not recorded diligently for scientific purposes but whereas before I’d need to scrub the windshield at least once halfway these days I can drive all the way and still don’t need a wash at the end) Same goes for the argument that bugs hav…
> Same goes for the argument that bugs have evolved to migrate away from the roads
There are many studies in all kind of environments, even in the middle of the woods, in natural reserves; insects are going down both in term of diversity and numbers everywhere
They're being evolved away by pollution
Re: Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
#70Probably a large part is due to the increased frequency of cars inside broadly the same volume of road space. Assuming that you have the same number of bugs per m^3 and the same number of bugs entering per m^3 per minute as before, then bugs splattered per car will change in inverse proportion to cars per minute.
That or the fact that insect population has been proven to decline over and over pretty much everywhere in the world including natural reserves