Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 378 posts

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

#151

Post by Beltalowda »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #130
Beltalowda wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't care at all if an insect lives or dies. Insects do not have emotions; no other insects mourn if one dies. This makes them markedly different from humans and other animals; insects are little more than machines and from a moral perspective much closer to bacteria than, say, mice. The only reason I care is because of the broader ecological effects. I don't care whether my gut microbes live or die eithe…

Ants are certainly smarter than mice. Ants also have a complex range of psychological responses. (Not sure I'd call them "emotions" since we're obviously too distantly related to them to have a meaningful reference here, but whatever.)

Ants have very interesting learning behaviour, but I don't think you can really say they're "smarter" than a mouse, or even "intelligent" (depending on your exact definition of that). You can teach a computer English better than the average human (see e.g. Grammarly), but that does not make the computer smarter. The learning behaviour of ants is certainly amazing, but very limited in scope.

Ants can response to their environment, but are they even "psychological responses" or just a piece of machinery responding in a pre-programmed way? When I played the Sims 20 years ago my characters would respond in certain pre-programmed ways. None of can truly know what it's like to be an ant, but given the tiny size of their brains compared to higher animals I think it's fair to say the machinery for any kind of emotion just isn't there.

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

#152

Post by pharke »

tejohnso wrote: post #111

Maybe because we're in the midst of an anthropogenic mass extinction? https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1704949114 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction "The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate" "the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history o…

Genuinely curious but how is this

> "the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth."

an accurate statement when there have been a few mass extinction events that were (apparently) caused by sudden changes?

Is this assuming that the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event was caused by gradual changes instead of an impact or volcanic event? Same for the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction? I think there are also a number of extinction pulses in the record that could be attributed to sudden events although I'm unsure of how they compare in terms of the number of species affected.

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

#153

Post by bluGill »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #129
stinos wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the municipalities mowing nice patches of grass/plants/flowers where insects thrive. That lacks an important nuance: in most circumstances (regarding soil type/nitrogen deposition), not mowing at all would lead to those patches being overgrown by fast growers leading to less plant diversity. Can happen in as little as a year or 2. So the mowing itself is not the problem, it's the amount, how and when.

Mowing itself is the problem. Fast growers are just the first step in a recovery process that takes place when a previously stunted ecosystem is allowed to heal. Other types of plants follow in subsequent years, leading to a much more healthy ecosystem than when you mow it all down to hell.

As the other reply said, each area is unique and so there is no general rule that applies to every location on earth.

Where I live the native prairie was naturally mowed by the bison roaming around, and so not mowing leads to a number of problems as the plants around here depend on that regular mowing. Various lightening strikes and the like ("Indians") caused regular fires as well, which took care of overgrowth. Mowing simulates that without the fire. (this is both good and bad - it makes for cleaner air, but those fires also put charcoal into the ground and so made the prairie net carbon negative over the long term which is something we desperately need)

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

#154

Post by jshprentz »

Mark Hostetler's analysis of North American windshield splatters in 1997 is documented in his book, "That Gunk on Your Car: A Unique Guide to Insects of North America." He reports on two dozen types of insects, with photos of them splattered and intact. His work won the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for entomology [1].

No time to read a whole book? Hostetler's son, Bryce, released a free iPhone/iPad app in 2018 [2].

[1] https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig1997

[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/that-gunk-on-your-car/id135275...

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

#155

Post by jrd79 »

Regarding all the anecdotes, I would have said the same thing 8 years ago when I moved to my current house in suburban Minneapolis. Then we had some landscaping done and added a bunch of planting beds to the otherwise boring grass-only yard. And my kids threw some milkweed seeds on a slope that is too steep to mow. Now we've got tons of bumblebees, honey bees, monarch butterflies, and other insects. I think the range of most insects is quite small, so maybe people who miss the bugs just need to plant a bit more in their yards :).

Second point: the windshield splats proxy is too confounded to be useful. Use actual measurements or reasonable people will discount the claims (as I have done).

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

#156

Post by bamboozled »

dncornholio wrote: post #122

So we've been killing bugs with our windshields for decades and we wonder where they are? I'll rest my case! Jokes aside, I don't think we take into account how many bugs we've killed with windshields, are we?

I thought the same for a long time, surely it has an effect ?

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

#158

Post by fleddr »

jgraham wrote: post #92
fleddr wrote: post #74

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…

It's good to see a comment that recognises that this "bug splatter on the windshield" data is mostly just an easily observed hook to connect the measured declines to people's everyday life experiences. The topic seems to come up here ever few months, and there's always a significant percentage of the discussion devoted to aerodynamic effects, or changes in insect distribution specific to roadside habitats. Those conv…

I happen to study/photograph insects as an amateur and can casually confirm the collateral damage pesticides have on insect life.

A common manifestation of it is to find lethargic insects. Bodily fully intact and seeming healthy, yet barely able to move. Insects normally skittish that you can simply pick up. I'm not talking about insects at the end of their life cycle or them being very cold. There's something very wrong with these individuals, I believe studies suggest their brains are messed up from the pesticides.

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

#159

Post by noasaservice »

bamboozled wrote: post #133
Beltalowda wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've noticed after moving back to the Netherlands is how absolutely obsessed people are with keeping things "tidy". In a way, it's nice I guess, at least sometimes, but it comes with some serious costs too. This is not unique to the Netherlands, but we're probably the best (or worst?) at it, except maybe Singapore.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/24/let-fall... Article from today, “let fallen leaves lie”

I blow them off my wood deck, so they don't rot and damage the wood.

I let them lie on the rest of my 1.6 acres. And the 1 acre that's forested, we're working on trying to de-invasive-ize the forest and try to help rehabilitate it. Its just 2 of us, but we're trying.

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

#160

Post by dsfyu404ed »

unglaublich wrote: post #100

Pesticides and crop mono-cultures. There is no place for insects to live. When 0.1% of humans dies of a virus, we call it a disaster. When 50% of insects dies, we don't give a damn.

Insect populations are declining in places like New England and the upper midwest despite farming both declining and finding more efficient ways to use fertilizer and pesticides on the same timeline.

If we're going down the road of human introduced chemical toxins (like pesticide pollution) I think a fair bit of blame also deserves to be laid at the feet of the state (and by proxy voters) for poisoning the soil immediately adjacent to roads (and to a slightly lesser degree, the watersheds) with various salts.

Post reply on HN