Could the windshield thing have something to do with more cars on the roads? Instead of 1 car hitting 100 insects, 100 cars are each hitting 1 insect? When I was a kid there were a lot fewer cars on the highways. I grew up in the Western US and I remember that on road trips my dad (who was in the military) would often pull off on the side of the free way, set up some targets, and do some target shooting with us kids. It wasn't a big deal back then with few people on the roads, but if someone was to pull out some rifles right off the side of the freeway nowadays...!
Where have all the insects gone?
101–110 of 117 posts
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#102I'm incredibly fortunate to live in the French countryside (Bourgogne). I can go out the front door, lie on the grass and witness JFK-scale traffic of insects. It's really astounding the amount of life around my house.
If any of you care about wildlife, you can actively contribute to its preservation just by buying a piece of land and letting it be.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#103I wonder what the long-term impacts of so many homeowners applying lawncare chemicals will have. It just seems like a bad idea to spray chemicals all over the lawn, yet so many do it it. I also wonder how many are over-applying, thus making matters worse. Any thoughts on how to change people's mindsets. It seems herd mentality has taken over, even though most likely know this is not healthy or environmentally friendl…
I can attest to lawns being the enemy. For many years I grew a dense native plant yard and literally have tens of thousands of pictures of terrestrial arthropods ok a lot of dupes of individuals but also amazing biodiversity and multispecies and social phenomena like ant symbiosis which I wrote about here: http://www.elegantcoding.com/2016/05/my-ant-symbiosis-storie... and opiliones social behavior. It was amazing. T…
How can it be illegal to have a yard with native plants?
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#104Interesting. So maybe it wasn't just my imagination. I remember butterflies being everywhere in Spring in this area when I was a kid. Fields and air full of 'em for weeks. Monarchs especially, but all kinds. I haven't seen that kind of thing even once in probably a decade, at least. And the windshield thing. I hadn't really thought about it, but I remember my parents having to scrape the windshield just about every g…
I wonder how global this trend. Driving on a highway in southern Europe in summer made me realize why white cars were not popular there. My car was visibly covered in blood of killed insects after 500 km of scenic road.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#105Interesting. So maybe it wasn't just my imagination. I remember butterflies being everywhere in Spring in this area when I was a kid. Fields and air full of 'em for weeks. Monarchs especially, but all kinds. I haven't seen that kind of thing even once in probably a decade, at least. And the windshield thing. I hadn't really thought about it, but I remember my parents having to scrape the windshield just about every g…
I wonder how global this trend. Driving on a highway in southern Europe in summer made me realize why white cars were not popular there. My car was visibly covered in blood of killed insects after 500 km of scenic road.
When you say "blood", do you mean a red substance? I'm asking because insects don't have blood- they have haemolymph which doesn't contain hemoglobin and is not coloured red (it's actually bluish). If the colour of the substance on your car was red, it was probably human blood from mosquitoes.
Those little flying bastards are plentiful in southern Europe and they can get real fat on human blood and make a surprisingly bloody mess when splatted. They would definitely leave a mark on a white car if it hit them.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can attest to lawns being the enemy. For many years I grew a dense native plant yard and literally have tens of thousands of pictures of terrestrial arthropods ok a lot of dupes of individuals but also amazing biodiversity and multispecies and social phenomena like ant symbiosis which I wrote about here: http://www.elegantcoding.com/2016/05/my-ant-symbiosis-storie... and opiliones social behavior. It was amazing. T…
How can it be illegal to have a yard with native plants?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13907696
Pretty much what I went through, except actually less than ten miles from the Whitehouse.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#107> No one can prove that the pesticides are to blame for the decline, however. No one can prove that insecticides are responsible for killing insects? If only someone would do some sort of study on this, or perhaps if we somehow had some way to know the purpose or function of pesticides and insecticides.
The issue of pesticides was considered and some countries did pass legislation based on it. While intuitively the connection between pesticides and insect population collapse looks attractive, the facts are a little more murky. Some scientists suspected that neonectide pesticides were linked to the decline in insect populations, particularly bees. Despite the fact that this connection was not fully proven, many EU co…
Pesticide sales went up 13% between 2006-2007[1] (current growth is about the same[2]). While pesticides have existed for a while, their use is growing quickly and the chemicals used are getting stronger and more refined. This same wild growth pattern is copied by drugs - the other chemical market.
Compared to 30 years ago, drugs and pesticides are everyday items now.
This could easily explain the more recent detection of insects like bees being affected as levels of pesticides in the environment could now have reached high enough levels.
[1]https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents...
[2]:https://ourworldindata.org/fertilizer-and-pesticides/#pestic...
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#108Interesting. So maybe it wasn't just my imagination. I remember butterflies being everywhere in Spring in this area when I was a kid. Fields and air full of 'em for weeks. Monarchs especially, but all kinds. I haven't seen that kind of thing even once in probably a decade, at least. And the windshield thing. I hadn't really thought about it, but I remember my parents having to scrape the windshield just about every g…
I was wondering the same thing. Butterflies, and even many dragonflies in a big Polish city where I live. I chalked it down to "we had more flowers". But it seems global ? And even in Poland, which uses relatively little pesticides ?
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#109They're all terrifying wasps or yellowjackets now. And they're all constantly trying to build nests in or near my house. I thought this was universal knowledge...
You thought it was universal knowledge that 80% of insect biomass has dropped in nature reserves around the world with no obvious cause?
The lack of intonation and body language in internet communication strikes again...
Although I thought I had done a good job of making it sound tongue in cheek.
Re: Where have all the insects gone?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
... and two minutes later the name of the brave person will be manure. Not because one's egregiously wrong, not because of lack of ethics, but because it'll be affecting many powerful people and their emissaries in the academia. Common story in the GMO industry. Oh, and it doesn't hurt to be prepared for all the ad hominem hit pieces: "Left loony" "commie" "anti-science" ... The conquering grounds for the corporatocr…
So I mean, if you're trying to take a stand against pesticides, you should _be in favor_ of the Bt-toxin GMOs. The GMOs that produce their own pesticide are great, because there ends up being _less_ pesticide in the field in general. (The alternative to having a plant producing their own GMOs is that, obviously, they'll just dump the field with pesticides.) Bt-toxin is also fairly specific to which insects it effects…
I don't see how any of this makes sense given the very real possibility of not using either standard or endemic pesticides, the long term ecological (and public health) consequences of which we still have very little idea. Yes organic ag uses some techniques whose sustainability is highly dubious. There are, however, plenty of models like silvopasture, agroecology, and permaculture-informed production out there that can produce better, regionally appropriate food in ways that enhance and adapt to--rather than violently work against--the native parameters of the environment. This is the only legitimate and reasonable way forward in my eyes, and it creates so many side benefits like community, beauty, health, carbon sequestration in the soil, etc.
Most high-tech industrial/corporate approaches I've seen are really just more filigree on an outdated barbaric WW2-era approach of using highly carbon intensive machinery to burn out soil and grow monocrops, kept on life support by high-"tech", low-wisdom approaches which are at their core incredibly lazy, mediocre, and destructive. My secret wish (I'm a land designer who uses GIS for this purpose) is for people like the ones on this board realizing it and flocking to the field to create data-driven approaches to true agroecology to solve hunger and climate change.
P.S. for just one example of an alternative model, see Mark Shepard, a mechanical engineer and ecologist who started a hundred acre farm in Wisconsin 20 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRhvrHeleoI