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

Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

fwi.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 110 posts

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#81

Post by benj111 »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #75
benj111 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I still have issues though. We don't know how representative those picture were. The 1950s pictures have survived over a half century, they were taken at a time when photography was harder work than today. I could go fishing, photograph my meagre catch, and put it on instagram for the world to see easily. Plus these seem to be tourist photos? Maybe its a symptom of (inexperienced) amateurs going to Florida Ke…

Isn't that conclusion 100% the wrong way round? If it were so difficult for photos to survive half a century wouldn't it be hard to show catches tended to bigger? After all the ancient 1950s photos of large catches have been lost through not surviving such unimaginable eons. Sorry for the tone, but seriously, by 1950s photography was not the rare and specialist thing it was in the 1910s. Sure, it might be just the un…

My point was more that today I have a phone in my pocket permanently, digital photos are free so ill take a picture of anything. In the 50s there were financial and convenience barriers to photography, however small.

Plus these photos have survived. My modern photo of an un notable thing probably wont survive, a picture of a notable thing probably will.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#82

Post by Rotareti »

m-i-l wrote: post #79
mads wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

The dramatic reduction in insects on car windscreens could be "explained away" by technological advances in car design (getting windscreens covered in insects could conceivably have been a problem great enough for someone to have invested time and money into resolving with more efficient aerodynamics of windscreens or whatever). Not saying that is actually the cause, just that many people could rationalise it as such…

> The dramatic reduction in insects on car windscreens could be "explained away" by technological advances in car design

I have been driving the same car for 20 years with the same roof-rack. 20 years ago the roof-rack was crusted with insects after each trip on the autobahn. I had to clean them off with a bucket of water and a sponge after each trip. I remember this because it was a standard routine. These days, when I come back from a trip, there is nothing. I haven't cleaned the rack for years.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#83

Post by garmaine »

acqq wrote: post #74
garmaine wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point of the comment. If human beings drive ourselves extinct, life will eventually rebound just as it has from other, even larger mass extinctions.

What the comment actually claimed is that whatever will be after us "will not remember us." Which is not true. Other comparable extinctions to the one we are currently causing are on the hundreds of the millions of years scale. What we are causing will be definitely seen as an extinction event for at least millions of years in the future. That's how big it is. "The life will eventually rebound" is completely differen…

Mother Nature won’t remember us. Mother Nature is a non conscious evolutionary process. The non-human conscious entities within it lack the means to carry on cultural memory of the hairless primates that once ravaged their world. That doesn’t mean there won’t be a record of us though.. any future evolved tool-wielding intelligence would certainly be able to infer our presence.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#84

Post by Meing4im »

frutiger wrote: post #48
yingw787 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah. Be careful with what you wish for. One day us humans might not be just dominant, we will be alone. And in that sense, I don't want us to prevail against Mother Nature; I just want a healthy balance.

Mother Nature has been around for a very long time. She will not remember us when we are gone.

She does not have that much time and thus tries at intelligent life left. Gradual brightening of the sun will start making the earth uninhabitable in about 800Ma due to accelerated silicate weathering.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#86

Post by pvaldes »

losteric wrote: post #8
pvaldes wrote: post #3

Without more context the study is not very useful pesticides, copper levels, phreatic level, number and species of hammerhead flatworms...

Those questions are exactly why a study like this is useful - we didn't know there was a problem, now we can ask the questions to find out what's going on.

We knew there was a problem since decades in fact, the disemination of tropical hammerhead flatworms that predate earthworms and can release the same neurotoxin as fugu fishes (in our potatoes?).

But we shouldn't fall in the temptation of making a mountain from a sand grain. Falling in gross extrapolation for clickbait purposes is as bad as no data. I can be wrong, but it seems that what we have here is an article done in part by volunteers and non professional ecologists (there is a variability in the observers), about a local area and in a narrow date interval.

Would be like to register what I ate the 23-Jan and assume that this is what I will eat for the rest of the year. Earthworm populations can raise and fall as a normal process.

And we should not mistake quantity by quality. I had analysed marine trophic chains and marine annelida appear everywhere. There is a huge biodiversity in sea worms. Huge loads of some species is bad, not good. Means that the ecosystem is in big trouble. With earthworms is the same. Not finding earthworms is not always a problem and finding a lot of them is not always good news.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#87

Post by wnkrshm »

m-i-l wrote: post #79
mads wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

The dramatic reduction in insects on car windscreens could be "explained away" by technological advances in car design (getting windscreens covered in insects could conceivably have been a problem great enough for someone to have invested time and money into resolving with more efficient aerodynamics of windscreens or whatever). Not saying that is actually the cause, just that many people could rationalise it as such…

With the introduction of LED lighting and lighting becoming cheaper with it, the amount of artificial light at night has increased over the last decades and may be contributing to declining insect populations as has been noted in the UK and Germany.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#88

Post by black-tea »

mads wrote: post #63
paulddraper wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time wise though, it might be a faster commute than in Silicon Valley.

Around 1.5 hours today each direction, but I am commuting to a different country and have to cross a bridge. Back then it was 1 hour or so - maybe a little less if traffic was good.

How can you waste that much of your life? You've spent almost an entire year over the past ten years just moving your body around because other people want you to.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#89

Post by neffy »

benj111 wrote: post #81
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that conclusion 100% the wrong way round? If it were so difficult for photos to survive half a century wouldn't it be hard to show catches tended to bigger? After all the ancient 1950s photos of large catches have been lost through not surviving such unimaginable eons. Sorry for the tone, but seriously, by 1950s photography was not the rare and specialist thing it was in the 1910s. Sure, it might be just the un…

My point was more that today I have a phone in my pocket permanently, digital photos are free so ill take a picture of anything. In the 50s there were financial and convenience barriers to photography, however small. Plus these photos have survived. My modern photo of an un notable thing probably wont survive, a picture of a notable thing probably will.

I find it´s best to make a mental note, and talk to Uncle´s friends. There is an intergenerational information transfer band if you pay enough attention to it. Plus your own memory will inform you after a while.

I remember growing up and there being 3-4 weeks of snow around January and putting on multiple pairs of socks to play in it. My mother remembers there being a couple of feet of snow up into March, and getting trapped once driving across Dartmoor.

Perhaps your children will ask you what snow was.

Re: Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England

#90

Post by pvaldes »

wjn0 wrote: post #16
stuart78 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or is it 1 out of 5 fields? Big difference!

> 42% of fields studied had poor earthworm diversity > 21% of fields lacked surface-dwelling worms Seems pretty clear to me. Some vs. none...

Talking here about "earthworm diversity", is another thing that is wrong.

To identify earthworms is difficult even for experienced taxonomists and you need a microscope, a disection table and a lot of training. Polychaetes are much easier by comparison and I can assure you that they aren't easy. You need months of study.

Not, not everybody can do the work of a biologist. Not even the smartest children. Is complex, and hard work. Unless you want to classify the diversity of worms into "small", "medium sized" and "big worm", dig a hole and count isn't enough.

Post reply on HN