Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?

Scary thing is how many people don't consider this to be scary.

If we were to blame anyone, we should blame ourselves. But I'll return to that in a moment.

We live in a complex system, so we can blame the political/financial system for providing wrong incentives, loans and subsidies to the big agriculture, based on profitability alone.

We can blame agriculture companies for sprayng millions of tons of poisons all over our countryside to keep profits up and costs down. When you're planting monocrops, and spraying it with pesti/herbicides, you're propagating environmental equivalents of deserts. Deserts leaking poisons not only on itself, but through whole nature (through wind & water cycle).

Both pesticides and herbicides are inbelievably poisonous not only to plants and pests, but also to other bugs (we all know at least about bees), to all other animals, the animals we feed with the produce, and in the end, even to humans. Those poisons' bioaccumulate and their neurodegenerative and hormons-altering effects are causing havoc not only in bugs, frogs and mice, but also in humans (parkinson, etc.).

The solution is something we're actively killing with our current agricultural practices. Biodiversity.

For example, we don't need to kill the mice with poisons. We can interplant trees into our fields to provide living space for predators (e.g. owls and foxes) to manage the mice population and not use the poisons to keep those predators alive.

We can't reasonably expect the return of an army of small farmers, providing local communities with poison-free grown food, not in a reasonable time frame we have until environmental collapse and/or extinction of key animal kinds (no pollinators, no birds, no small predators, more mice, more bad bugs and diseases, famines ...).

But what we can do, we can change our habits. We don't have to eat meat/dairy, which is incredibly land/resource/poison intensive (we would need 4+ earths to feed the world's population same diet as americans have). We don't have to feed other animal 20x more food than we would need only to eat its muscles. We don't have to cut down forests to grow meat (we would need 1/4 of the land to feed the population if everybody were to switch to a plant based diet), if we eat the plants ourselves and let the nature be and let it repair itself.

We can then change the political/financial/agricultural system through our own actions (buying/cooking/eating). When enough people do, there won't be the pressure to produce a much as we currently do, then we can legislate the change in the agriculture , forbid use of poisons, protect the ecosystems, reforest the earth, live in sync with the nature, stop exploiting everything (and living beings) with our need for financial gains.

Sorry for my bad english. Also, I'm in the system, it's monday, no time to write shorter comment, and no time to incorporate everything-that-is-wrong and everything-that-should-be-done. It's a complex system. But it can be solved in our own kitchens.

Here in the ultra-dense Netherlands, threats to insects are magnified. As such, it's easier to point to specific causes.

Butterflies: 50% reduction in 50 years. Beetles: 75% decline since 1985. Ladybugs: 50% reduction in 20 years. Across the border in Germany: a 75% decline in flying insects since 1989.

It doesn't take much of a scientist to see the trend. I've been hiking the forests here multiple times per week for 20 years. You can clearly see how some groups are disappearing whilst others remain.

There's several root causes but the primary one is a lack of native plant diversity. Since agriculture over here is done in close proximity to forests, the soil becomes acid due to the nitrogen disposition. This benefits the growth of a handful of plants at the expense of all others. In some of our forests, the soil is now so acid that snails no longer develop a case and bird eggs collapse.

In this plant monoculture, insects depending on a specific host plant disappear. Outside (protected) forests, things aren't much better. Even the tiniest of strips of grass that would normally produce wildflowers, are aggressively mowed down. People's gardens are designed to be as hostile to insects as is possible.

Secondary reasons are invasive species and light pollution.

It's a sad state of affairs and one we should be deeply ashamed of. We're not talking about some iconic predator requiring hundreds of acres of wild forest just to survive. We're talking about insects that require little space, healthy soil, a flower, and for it to be left alone. We can't even offer that.

A boom of one particular species is not necessarily indicative of a healthy ecosystem. We don't welcome algal blooms as signs of life bouncing back; rather, they are brutally disruptive to ecosystems. They leave mass death in their wake. Without a closer study of which species you're observing (they might be human-borne invasive species after all), it's not really easy to say if what you're seeing is healthy at all. And the timescales are important. This year or this decade might be a boom and 20 years from now they've managed to deplete their environment of resources and crash.

Many much moosen

https://youtu.be/CafPNEWnDhk

Sadly, also in Denmark as the article mentions, I’ve only had to clean my windshield once this summer (by clean I mean scrubbing, I do use the windshield washer more often). 1995 Defender.

I only have to look outside at my neighbors winter wheat field to find one of the reasons. It’s been sprayed 3 times already this fall after sowing.