34 ms·

75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

901 points by kawera 9y ago

leephillips 9y ago
If this holds up, this would seem to be a hugely important result. I'm waiting for HN's biologists to weigh in.
- Daishiman 9y ago
  HN biologists are likely to be far less qualified than the authors of this paper. This is not the only study detailing this observation; several have been floating around for the past few years.
avip 9y ago
Yes. This is a case of hard data confirming what we already know. As in - few types of butterflies I used to like, and see yearly as a kid - are gone. I see them now once in 5 years, if lucky. I bring my kids to look because it's a first time for them. On the other hand, some types of beetles, ants, flies, mosquitoes, even wasps - are just new. They were not here 20-30 years ago. Now, what are the consequences of all that... I kind of feel we'll find out sooner than we'd like.
- knodi 9y ago
  This kind of the same thing I'm seeing with firefly in Michigan. In the summer time when I first moved to MI over 30 years ago I use to see them everywhere in large amounts. This year they're back but last 3 years I didn't see them at all. As long as there are climate change deniers a.k.a Trump supports we're all in a lot of trouble, even humans.
  - avip 9y ago
    I wouldn't jump into blaming the climate. We've shifted many parts of a very complex system in the last 50+ years. I'd put monoculture and pesticides higher on my list of suspects.
    - coliveira 9y ago
      One of our problems is the idea that a single cause is responsible for these things. It is not just pesticides or CO2 or some other single change. It is the combination of those changes (even the small ones) that is driving this huge environmental problem. The only way to get out of this is starting to think of the environment is a complex system that needs to be preserved, not trying to find a single culprit that we can manipulate.
      - andai 9y ago
        Less finger-pointing, more parameter-tweaking!
    - GlenTheMachine 9y ago
      As an anecdotal data point, I'm trying to establish a robust, poly-culture, mostly chemical-free agricultural system on my hobby farm. We do seem to get more flying insects on my place than our neighbors, all of whom have grass lawns. Critters of all kinds, in fact - lots of frogs and toads as well, and box turtles. Obviously I haven't done a scientific study, but we see butterflies, lighting bugs, and so on; not as many as I saw growing up but they are there in some numbers. If you look around suburbia, there really isn't much ecological space for anything to grow unless it can survive on grass. Even in a lot of rural areas, with the advent of heavy-chemical farming and bigger and bigger monocultures, we're taking a lot of living space away from mother nature.
      - ioquatix 9y ago
        I think it's up to city planners to include more green belts. Better for the environment, better for water drainage, better for humans, it's really win win win.
        monodeldiablo 9y ago
        City planners would if they could, but they're not autocrats. They know that green space (and mixed zoning and high density and...) is a good thing, but they are captive to the whims of politicians and poorly-informed citizens. And property developers have more than enough money to buy policy and sway public opinion. A close relative is a city planner, a job he went into as an idealist. He saw the economic, social, and ecological suffering created by terrible urban design, and he wanted to make a better world. After 30+ years, though, he's jaded and cynical. He's seen historically active flood and landslide and earthquake areas quietly and repeatedly re-zoned for residential development. He's seethed at 40 years of opposition to even modest expansions of mass transit. Suburban sprawl, ghettoization of the poor, retail-only developments... At this point, although he still does his best to advance healthy policy, he's resigned to the fact that the developers always win in the end. So please don't direct your ire at city planners. In many places, they're the only resistance to the boundless greed of property developers. As in all things, it's important to follow the money. The only people getting rich off the status quo are banks and developers.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    Fireflies are interesting - as a New England kid in the 80s, I used to read about them in all sorts of childrens' books, but I was really bummed because I never saw one. I think I saw one firefly in my whole childhood. I just went back to Long Island this summer, and they were all over. It'd get to be twilight and hundreds of them would just be dancing through the air. I got to show my wife the childhood scene that I'd only imagined. Maybe all the fireflies moved from Michigan to New York. I think I'd read somewhere that firefly populations tend to be very cyclical anyway though.
  - TallGuyShort 9y ago
    Attributing this to climate change in it's political context is as ignorant of actual science as what you claim to be detesting.
  - nnfy 9y ago
    Some of the people you go out of your way to slander as both trump supporters and climate change deniers exist as they do because of people like you, who immediately take any adverse global trend, blame it on climate change with what amounts to shakey, correlative evidence, and then shame anyone who dares glance over with a skeptical eye. We are dumping all kinds of chemicals into the environment - pesticides, plasticizers, and a host of bio-active compounds which we already know may be directly responsible for the decline of certain individual species[1]. Climate change is a serious threat. But your post is an example of how climate change has become a highly politicized meme. Next thing you know, it becomes a cultural taboo to be skeptical about climate change, and suddenly we're only asking the questions we are allowed to ask, looking for the data we are allowed to look for, sweeping inconsistencies under the rug, and just generally practicing sloppy science. The scientific method necessitates skepticism. I welcome sources to the contrary, but modern western climate science is void of any published criticism, or at least it was when I had access to journals some 5 years ago. Hell, I couldnt find ONE paper discussing ANY benefit on any place on earth from a warmer climate-which is absurd, because northern permafrost could thaw and create arable land, for example. Climate science has been sickened by politics and political correctness. You should be very wary. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder
    - sixothree 9y ago
      I hate to admit it but whatever the solution to this problem will be, Trump supporters will almost certainly fight against it.
      - libraryatnight 9y ago
        Yes, it has nothing to do with anything based in reason or fact it's just heaps and heaps of angry stupid spewed in an attempt to defend their holy tangerine. edit: words.
    - smt88 9y ago
      Saying that science is biased because it fails to see the benefit of global warming is like saying it's biased because it doesn't discuss the benefit of a worldwide plague. Sure, there'd be benefits: fewer lines at amusement parks, all the food you can eat, etc. But that's so far from a net "good" that only a psychopath or moron would publish a paper with that argument.
  - musage 9y ago
    Bernie Sanders was swept under the rug for the "benefit" of Hillary Clinton. Trump did nothing in comparison, he simply reaped the fruits of that own goal. Which of course people swiftly pretended didn't happen to complain about Trump, being shocked constantly like some looping meme gif. Instead of using 4 years to clean one's own house, they're working harder to make it dirtier. I say "they" because I don't do the liberal/Democrat/conservative/Republican thing and am not American. So, I can tell you what the result of that will be: even worse stuff. Remember how Obama promised hope & change and removed nothing of what Bush created? But who cared, he wasn't the grating thing Bush was, and congress blocked him, and la di blah. Same shit, same day. As long as it is like this, it will always be the same lame day. Everybody has their scapegoats, nobody executes their "own".
- dawnerd 9y ago
  I’m seeing a ton of wasps this year too. Also seems like there’s way more spiders in recent years.
  - deelowe 9y ago
    Tons of wasps. Wasps everywhere and carpenter bees. It's insane. I don't recall it being like this when I was a kid.
    - dawnerd 9y ago
      I could barely mow my lawn last weekend. They just kept attacking me. Didn't even get to trim the edges because I was tired of being stung.
      - musage 9y ago
        Maybe they're trying to tell you to stop mowing the lawn and start enjoying the meadow?
        mikestew 9y ago
        “Enjoy” a meadow full of stinging insects?
        deelowe 9y ago
        And ticks.
        titzer 9y ago
        Put a small amount of tick repellant _on yourself_ and check yourself for ticks after being out. Contrast that defensive strategy with an offensive strategy, which seems to be a tick apocalypse.
        9y ago
- ashark 9y ago
  Monarchs used to be a "oh cool, look, it's the 50-100 monarchs in that field which we'll see a couple times a week for the whole season" thing here. Now it's "holy crap, it's our one single monarch butterfly of the year!" thing.
  - GlenTheMachine 9y ago
    That has a simple explanation, though. Monarch caterpillars can only survive on milkweed, and we've decimated the amount of milkweed around because we see it as, well, a weed.
    - frakr 9y ago
      You can help out with this by harvesting seeds and planting them all over!
      - georgieup 9y ago
        Good way of earning yourself some enemies.
      - winslow 9y ago
        I've been growing milkweed at my parents house and we saw a around 20 caterpillars this year! Unfortunately, ~1/2 of them didn't make it but we at least start seeing Monarchs again. Everyone should be planting better garden plants that can compared to the bland green bushes and grass that never blooms.
    - kafkaesq 9y ago
      So basically the planet is starting to treat us as a kind of a ... weed, in return.
      - smt88 9y ago
        The planet isn't conscious and can't "treat us" as anything. We are doing this to us. We are changing the environment to support short-term wants/needs at the expense of its human habitability in the future.
- MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
  This is making the headlines in Germany right now: http://www.zeit.de/wissen/umwelt/2017-10/insektensterben-fluginsekten-gesamtmasse-rueckgang-studie http://www.zeit.de/wissen/umwelt/2017-10/insektensterben-flu... http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/insekten-in-deutschland-forscher-bestaetigen-insektensterben-a-1173525.html http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/insekten-in-deutsch... http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/insektensterben-dramatischer-insektenschwund-in-deutschland-1.3713567 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/insektensterben-dramatisch... Der Spiegel discusses issues in the methodology of the data collection. The intervals over the years weren't uniform, data was collected by volunteers/hobbyists and they did not measure the dry mass weight. There are differing opinions whether or not those issues have relevance. SZ gives some details on suspected causes. Neither climate change (warmer weather should yield more insects, not less) nor changes in plant diversity can explain the observed effects alone. Main suspects: - agricultural fertilizers, especially nitrogen - pesticides, especially neonicotinoides
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    The massive use of neonicotinoides would not surprise me given the research of its impact on bee colony collapse.
    - sogen 9y ago
      Maybe a side effect of less bees pollination?
      - ChuckMcM 9y ago
        I was listening to an entomologist podcast on colony collapse and they were suggesting that as members of the colony became more and more impaired the interdependency of the various bee groups (workers, foragers, queen) was compromised and then "all of a sudden" the hive was unable to reliably function. And large social group (ants, termites, bees, etc) might be similarly affected.
        sitkack 9y ago
- freeflight 9y ago
  > On the other hand, some types of beetles, ants, flies, mosquitoes, even wasps - are just new. Afaik most of these are usually invasives species, displacing local populations, which is happening in the weirdest ways and places. In Germany, our local ladybug species are on the verge of going extinct because an imported Asian ladybug species emits some kind of spores killing them, and the Asian ones generally being sturdier. Eastern grey squirrels, brought to the European mainland from the UK, are also increasingly replacing local red squirrels. Red squirrels get through winter by hiding food supplies and staying lean and mean, while grey squirrels build up fat reserves. What ends up happening is that the grey squirrels sniff out the food supplies of the red ones and clear them out to fill up their own fat reserves, that leaves the red squirrels with no food supplies to get through the winter and so they starve. But I agree with your general sentiment, I remember nature being quite a bit "buzzier" when I was a kid, I always thought I felt that way because I might have paid more attention to things like insects as a kid, but I guess my feeling wasn't all that off.
  - NegativeLatency 9y ago
    Same thing happened with the squirrels in the Pacific Northwest. Little red ones replaced by the big grey ones. In more remote places and in the mountains where the winters are harsher you still see the small red native squirrels though.
    - kazinator 9y ago
      According to my recollection of the words of a tour guide in Vancouver, Canada, those big, dark squirrels we see around here were brought to Stanley Park from New York. Then they multiplied and kind of outcompeted the small native squirrels. Someone's related blog: https://www.miss604.com/2015/03/grey-squirrels-of-stanley-park.html https://www.miss604.com/2015/03/grey-squirrels-of-stanley-pa... Quote: So how did this squirrel get here just over 100 years ago? Some reports say that the squirrels were a gift from the Mayor of New York City in 1909 but Jolene from Stanley Park History found that in 1909 Vancouver Park Boar Chair, Charles Tisdall, wrote to various American cities in search of purchasing “grey squirrels” for Stanley Park.
    - 9y ago
- jxramos 9y ago
  I was wondering about my experiences of not seeing bugs I'd see as a kid. Not sure if I just didn't go hunting like I used to or if there was an absolute decrease. I remember spotting these many times and catching a few http://www.mappingmegan.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1-90-Yellow-Garden-Orb-Weaver.jpg http://www.mappingmegan.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1-90-..., now I mainly see their hairier cousins http://www.suttonmass.org/animals/spiders/orbweavercrucifera/ http://www.suttonmass.org/animals/spiders/orbweavercrucifera... Various little butterflies would be abundant seem much less now. I wish I knew their names.
- timthelion 9y ago
  I never read "silent spring", but the title has stuck with me since childhood. Perhaps I'll read it now.
- avodonosov 9y ago
  Butterflies - exactly the example I wanted to mention too. In childhood I saw them often, now - very rarely.
  - throwme211345 9y ago
    A field of butterflies in the cow pasture feeding on manure. Pure joy. Rarely seen now, more the lone floater on the wind.
- refurb 9y ago
  Don't different species normally wax and wane in prevalence? And enter/leave areas? A particularly cold winter can kill off a certain type of insect and the loss lasts for year. How can we determine how much of the change we even have control over?
  - codefined 9y ago
    When 75% of _all_ flying insect biomass is lost, that's not just wax / wane. Considering the only difference in the past 2 years vs. the other thousands of years that insects have survived is human intereference, doesn't this suggest that we have complete control over this change?
- christophilus 9y ago
  This year, I left a portion of my lawn unmowed. I seeded it with a $10 bag of wildflower seeds. It's given me 4 months of beautiful flowers, loads of polinators, many butterflies, and it's given me less yard to mow. I now think that lawns of neatly trimmed grass are about as dumb as it gets.
  - irrlichthn 9y ago
    Ha, did exactly the same thing, since I noticed nearly no bees or other insects last year. I dedictated around 200 m² of my lawn to nature. I think it helped: This year, there where so much more of them to see.
    - downer71 9y ago
      Aren’t there local ordinances in some jurisdictions, requiring an orderly yard about the house? For sure, in many places there are laws regulating tree count and what you can and can’t chop down. I swear I’ve heard of fines for unmowed lawns too.
      - sulam 9y ago
        HOAs, township laws, etc — it is somewhat common in the US to be unable to do anything but grow grass in your front yard. We took advantage of the CA drought and tore out all our grass in front and replaced it with drought tolerant natives. It looks better and the kids didn’t play there anyway. And now we have monarchs.
        dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        >somewhat common in the US in the parts of the US that are over-represented on HN FTFY.
        Bartweiss 9y ago
        21% of all Americans live in common-interest housing. Half of that is condominiums, half is HOA-governed housing. It's a safe bet that large portions of that heavily restrict lawn conditions. Add in another ~10% of the country living in multi-family apartment buildings, which usually have no lawns or owner-controlled lawns. And, of course, single-family home lawns in any densely populated area are likely to be regulated, many of which aren't high income. I can't get numbers on how many of those ~70% of Americans are under town restrictions, but it's not a trivial number. So no, it's not just HN's demographics. This is genuinely widespread in the US; I'd estimate that at least 100,000,000 Americans live under some form of these restrictions. https://www.caionline.org/AboutCommunityAssociations/Pages/StatisticalInformation.aspx https://www.caionline.org/AboutCommunityAssociations/Pages/S... http://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-americans-prefer-single-family-homeownership_o http://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-a...
- frik 9y ago
  Isn't it well understood that Monsanto with its gen manipulated crap is very bad for humans and animals (like bees). "EU report on weedkiller safety copied text from Monsanto study" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-report-on-weedkiller-safety-copied-text-from-monsanto-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-repor...
- jimmies 9y ago
  I am Vietnamese. There was a mythically rare oil called 'ca cuong' that not many have experienced in their life but was mentioned enough times in traditional folklore and old-timey food novels. The oil is from a little cockroach-like insect that has a liquid producing sac in their body. They live in rice fields that span across the north of Vietnam. It was believed you have to catch hundreds of them to harvest those little sacs just to have just a raw drop. So ten years ago when I was 20, I had the chance to go with my rich old friend-boss to a relatively high-end restaurant. He called a noodle dish -- I have eaten the same dish -- that cold noodle with shrimp paste (which smells pungent but tastes good) -- for hundreds of times in my life and I didn't expect anything different. But before we started, the waitress brought up a bottle that has a small pipette and dropped a little drop to the paste. The aroma was warm and fuzzy like how you would think of the cinnamon apple juice for a cold day. When I tasted the same dish, it tasted so warm, so rich, and so aromatic. But that's about as good as words get because it was unlike anything I have had in my life. It transformed the dish and my experience to another level of existence. It was that little bug that made me appreciate the food, my life, and the little heritage in the little country, where, honestly, not a lot of things really made sense. But definitely, that little drop of oil does make a lot of sense. Fast forward one year ago, life has been so much easier to me. Food is abundant, but I sometimes miss that little dish. I asked my parents if they could get some of the ca cuong oil to me, even if it's expensive (as it always has been believed). They tried then replied that they couldn't source the oil, no one sells it. Further researching revealed to me that the little insect has gone practically extinct and it is now illegal to catch them. I want to believe that it wasn't me that contributed to it, but maybe I did. It was more widely believed, however, that the widespread use of pesticide and insect-resistant rice has pushed the little insect to extinction in just a matter of 10-15 years. The day I figured that out, I feel died a little bit inside. I feel something was lost when I, and many people around me, was busy pursuing. I am now doing work that has a lot to do with biology, and I go to talks of people having that little spiel with how our challenge for the 8-billion people world is food security. I heard PhD students and faculty talking about how great is insect-resistant plants. The scientists in large agree with the assertion that GMOs aren't harmful. My friends would go great lengths to defend GMOs on their blogs and facebook statuses. They are all hardcore, hardworking, real scientists with good intents. I tend to believe smart people meant goodwill. Still, the world marches forward for whatever it marches forward for, little insects that eat human's food be damned.
- baxtr 9y ago
  Once we are gone, they’ll all come back: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/wildlife-returns-to-radioactive-wasteland-of-chernobyl/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/wildlife-returns-...
- atomical 9y ago
  I'll respond with my ancedotal experience as well. I live on a farm and the bugs are irritating as ever. There is a lot of pesticide used around here and I have used pesticide as well on the lawn. It hasn't decreased the number of bugs.
- adriand 9y ago
  I totally agree with the anecdotal perceptions around the decrease in insects since childhood. In my case, what I noticed recently was how few times my children have been stung by bees/wasps at their current ages, compared to how many times I was stung at those ages. My seven-year-old daughter has never been stung. My ten-year-old son claims he was stung once, but I'm not sure I believe him. By the time I was ten years old, I had been stung at least a dozen times. (I can still remember some of the particular stings, just due to the severity of the swelling.) This strikes me as odd, and in the context of this paper, frightening.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    Did you spend more time outdoors, or in woodlands?
- jly 9y ago
  Invertebrates often get overlooked for conservation efforts and money spent, in favor of larger animals. Pollinators are critically important for their direct food supply services, but we really just don't know the full ecological impact down the road of mass species loss on a scale we could be heading towards with many other species of insects, other arthropods, molluscs, coral, etc. If you're in the US, we have a great conservation organization for invertebrates that is doing great work on both habitat revival and pesticide reduction, and receives not nearly enough donations: https://xerces.org/ https://xerces.org/
- Shivetya 9y ago
  well for few years we had a severe reduction of monarchs and (blue/black variety whose name escapes me) in NW metro Atlanta but they returned this year in large numbers. Also returning, not sure of exact connection, but the tent caterpillars were abundant after seemingly being gone.
aklemm 9y ago
Presumably this is similar here in the U.S.? In the 80's and 90's the fronts of our cars would get so encrusted with mashed bugs that it would take real scrubbing to get them off. I haven't had to do that in many years.
- xattt 9y ago
  I have heard this before. I’m not a climate change denier. Could it have anything to do with more aerodynamic car designs?
  - mshook 9y ago
    That's a good question but from my experience it's not the case. I live in France and 20 to 30 years ago, after hours driving on highways, it was quite common to have your car plastered with bugs. Now it rarely happens. And with the last 2 cars I've had, I know it's not an aerodynamic issue because one of my hobbies is to do track days. I go to Michelin's wet track something like once a year and it's bugs' paradise: fields, grass all around and very humid because the track is wet so you can hydroplane easily. Bottom line is my car gets plastered there and we don't even drive that fast (something like 80/90 km/h or 50/55 mph).
  - wiredfool 9y ago
    I've had similar experience with bikes on a roof rack, where there's not a significant change in aerodynamics over the time.
  - lostapathy 9y ago
    I drive a jeep (basically a brick on wheels) and bugs are still awful.
    - knowaveragejoe 9y ago
      But were they as bad as they were?
    - xattt 9y ago
      The reason I asked this question was because I drive a Nissan Cube.
GlenTheMachine 9y ago
What are the odds that honey bee colony collapse disorder isn't confined to just honey bees?
Roritharr 9y ago
I'm extremely unqualified, but is it possible that the insects just learned to avoid the specific traps used to do the measurements over time?
- frinxor 9y ago
  I was thinking the same, but its unlikely to lead to a 75% decline. The ratio of trapped insects (or insects that even get within a few meters of the traps) to total insects must be incredibly incredibly small.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rleigh 9y ago
  Not really. For the traps I've seen, a powerful fan pulls air from an intake pipe at a certain height above ground level through a fine steel mesh filter. You remove the filter after a certain time period, and weigh the mass of the collected insects. You can then count them, and separate by species etc. It's difficult to avoid being sucked in so it's very unlikely that learned avoidance plays any role here; it's simply sampling flying insects in the local vicinity.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
wazoox 9y ago
My feeling: brace for systemic collapse.
- anvandare 9y ago
  I sometimes wonder what people were thinking or doing, in the days before a calamity. In Pompeii, in Lisbon, in Hiroshima, ... Unaware of what was about to happen to them. Just living their daily lives. I also sometimes wonder if future people will have reason to think of us in a similar way, when I hear of news like this, or the clathrate gun hypothesis.
  - nostromo95 9y ago
    >Hiroshima Don’t know if you’ve ever read this, but here you go: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
    - anvandare 9y ago
      I had read some brief stories before (or seen them read out in a documentary) but this one I had not yet read. Thank you.
- michaelkeenan 9y ago
  If you make that a specific prediction, I might like to bet against it, if you're interested.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    Not the bravest of bets. How's @wazoox supposed to collect from you if the system collapses?
    - michaelkeenan 9y ago
      Bet on it happening in another continent? Bet on a precursor?
cjensen 9y ago
That's alarming, but it needs followup. There have been rather obvious changes in Europe since the end of Iron Curtain. Would be nice to see similar data for other continents.
NicoJuicy 9y ago
Not sure, I have been wondering ( Europe) why new bugs appear that I have never noticed before. Butterflies are less also
- avip 9y ago
  Either due to warming (pine beetle being the poster child of that), or invasive species (Asian tiger mosquito).
stonewhite 9y ago
Just today we were discussing how there was almost zero insects splatters on the windshield or bonnet after an intercity travel. I remember it would get very dirty, at least almost always needed a wash.
- paganel 9y ago
  > zero insects splatters on the windshield or bonnet after an intercity travel. Still happens for me in Romania. In fact, I've just noticed it today after an 8-hour trip in my car through half of the country. Could be caused by the fact that we're not that "advanced" when it comes to use of insecticides.
phkahler 9y ago
Too bad it wasn't the mosquitoes. Now when people shoot down ideas to eradicate them because "what about the species that eat them" I can just point out this 75 percent reduction in other flying insects...
- daemin 9y ago
  I seem to recall that there are no actual species found that eat purely mosquitoes.
asquabventured 9y ago
Edit: I see the study was conducted in Germany, but it has me wondering about the U.S. where I have (anecdotally) noticed a large decline as well. Are there large enough areas of the country that you could control for areas that don't spray for mosquitos to see if the populations have also declined in those areas? It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that the spraying over the last 10 years to control the mosquito population due to the media induced West Nile panic followed by zika panic has contributed to this.
- iaw 9y ago
  My understanding is that mosquito's make up a very small amount of the total insect biomass (happy to be corrected). I'm wondering if there aren't environmental factors like the rise of plastics or other chemicals in the environment that are slowly degrading insect populations.
jpm_sd 9y ago
This is pretty alarming and suggests that soaking agricultural land in insecticides might be having some far-reaching side effects.
- tobltobs 9y ago
  side effects?
  - undersuit 9y ago
    Primary effects.
- rando444 9y ago
  While plausible, this study doesn't suggest that. They mention it as a potential cause, but did no research to that effect and even state they made no attempt to measure such things.
- DoodleBuggy 9y ago
  Well, the intention of insecticides is to kill insects. All insects. It's working, but perhaps a little too well?
  - turk184 9y ago
    Exactly. It's what humanity set out to do--we applied chemistry and other sciences to the problem and solved it and now somebody is complaining. Someone who didn't get malaria.
  - lightbyte 9y ago
    The intention of insecticides is to kill the insects that prey on specific crops, not to kill every single insect there is. It's working better than they thought, causing it to have unintended consequences.
- doctorcroc 9y ago
  The primary suspected cause of this is a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. These are not sprayed, but rather coated on seeds (which is arguably even more alarming). See: https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7550/full/nature14420.html https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7550/full/nature...
crispinb 9y ago
Results like this are some confirmation of what everyone not entirely swaddled in the virtual worlds of city and business is already entirely aware of: that our living planet is dying. All the people I know who have lived in rural areas for decades (in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and SE. Asia) are in no doubt that their local ecologies are collapsing, and that the collapse is accelerating. I'm not sure how useful the knowledge is at this late stage. Turning things around would require changes of a pace and scale that we have no idea how to motivate and coordinate. Fork and done, I reckon.
- wolco 9y ago
  In other parts of the world like Canada things are becoming alive with the changes. The earth is a living ecosystem.
  - andai 9y ago
    It's warming up, isn't it? I'm hearing about a loss of permafrost. Sounds like it's becoming more habitable up north.
    - devmunchies 9y ago
      buy lots of land up there while its cheap. thats gonna be the only prime land in a few years.
      - sulam 9y ago
        A good chunk of it will be underwater. Make sure to buy something that is higher than 100m above sea level.
        andai 9y ago
        You might be on to something. Long-term thinking is the single greatest predictor of long-term success!
- 9y ago
DanielleMolloy 9y ago
This kind of data should be collected on multiple places in the world. Given such findings we should thoroughly watch our ecosystems. I have been in Japan during summer this year and (gotten used to the central-European ecosystems where the data for this paper has been collected) was surprised by the amount of insects and especially butterflies, which I had rarely seen for years. Is this just the climate (which also grows some giant insects) or could there be something different at play?
katastic 9y ago
Everyone is chiming in with anecdotes. Maybe they're all correct. But I definitely remember fireflies being everywhere at my parents house and turning the sky into a shimmering display... and I rarely see more then a few fireflies at all these days.
- jonathankoren 9y ago
  Same. I don't know if it's the pesticides on the farm fields by my parents' house, or what. There used to be swarms of them, maybe 2-3 feet in diameter. Now just a hand full. It's been like that for over 20 years. Same with gnats, but I don't get nostalgic about those.
Boothroid 9y ago
Monsanto.
notadoc 9y ago
It's almost as if widespread use of pesticides is having a widespread effect on insects
carbonmachine 9y ago
Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Is there an organization that is trying to rid the world of pesticides (assuming that's the cause)? If I opt to call my representatives, what am I calling in support of/against? Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem, but I'm not certain if there's anything pragmatic to be done against big areas of environmental concern like this, global warming, ocean acidity, and etc.
- flerbozorp 9y ago
  If our problem is all the smoke we have to breath, and the embers, ashes and soot blown into our face, how do we fix it so that the camp fire doesn’t choke us, sting our eyes, and ruin our clothes? How do we control the camp fire that we keep buring right in the middle of our living room? It’s ruining the wall paper, and there’s a huge blackened stain on the ceiling. No matter how many showers I take, my clothes still smell like smoke. What gives?
- m_mueller 9y ago
  Not that I've planned it for that reason, but my family has the documents to live in either Japan or Switzerland. Both seem reasonable bets to me, i.e. protected by geography and with a pretty resilient local population. Have a read on the Bronze age collapse - when the global economy collapses, the main danger won't be environmental but due to human migration. In a functioning economy I'm very liberally minded towards freedom of movement (and in fact this lessens the danger I'm describing), but in a collapse, global inequality will come back to haunt the developed world in an apocalyptic fashion.
  - point78 9y ago
    Two very expensive countries
  - losteric 9y ago
    The developed world will use the first wave of immigration to build the walls that keep out the rest
nickbauman 9y ago
I live in Minneapolis. The city fumigates regularly in the summer by aircraft and ground-based methods both, which is why I can go running around the lakes in mid July and get maybe one mosquito bite. I think most US cities are like this. It's a policy that should be scrapped in spite of the risk of West Nile and Lyme Disease.
- peacetreefrog 9y ago
  They're not fumigating, they're spreading a bacteria that kills (only supposedly) mosquito larva. http://www.mmcd.org/mosquito-control/larva-control/ http://www.mmcd.org/mosquito-control/larva-control/
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - nickbauman 9y ago
    So that's what they're doing? Are you sure that's all?
- bryan11 9y ago
  Every few weeks, many cities in Iowa drive trucks throughout the city fogging the neighborhoods with permethrin based pesticides. A popular choice is called MasterLine Kontrol 4-4.
- monochromatic 9y ago
  > It's a policy that should be scrapped Why? They're not spraying some broad-spectrum pesticide.
  - nickbauman 9y ago
    But it's a policy that eliminates a food source for some other animal. Especially when we have very effective and safe insect repellants already, like Picaridin and Lemon Eucalyptus.
- 9y ago
vermontdevil 9y ago
I’ve noticed a lot less bug splatter on windshields when I go on a long trip in the Midwest. Inm sure there’s research in this but I’m in a restaurant right now waiting for my group. It has to be disconterning to see these kind of changes. Edited: there’s more with linked articles elsewhere in the thread that I just saw.
srcmap 9y ago
I went to Disney World/NASA space center in Orlando a few years back. One impression I got was: For a place with some many water around, there were no mosquito and extremely quiet- no bird noise and no cricket noise at all.
novaleaf 9y ago
Not about insects, but birds: In the Pacific Northwest, on the coast of Olympic National Park, (Ruby Beach, Kalaloch, etc) 30 years ago (when I was a kid) the beaches were teaming with seagulls. On a given day you would see hundreds. The last two years I've taken my own kids there, we are lucky to see even 1 seagull each day. Maybe it's something else, heck maybe there was an open garbage pit 30 years ago and it's since been closed, but as discussed, most of these ecological changes (even human caused) are too slow for individual humans to detect. So thought I'd share my own anecdote :P
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
interfixus 9y ago
It's pot-boilerish, a good deal of the science (i.e. why the insects disappear) is bonkers, and the author's reputation is somewhat tarnished these days, but oh boy did it make an impression: I read Charles Pellegrino's Dust almost twenty years ago, and this talk of insect die-off still brings the terrifying plot to the front of my mind. Also, for a 1998 novel, it had a pretty decent future scenario of people somewhere around now using all-powerfull 'pads' for their web and mail and video chats and general computing.
evanslify 9y ago
Seems like the site would freeze the entire browser on Firefox 57.0b9 in macOS 10.12.
atiffany 9y ago
I might be missing something here, but we’re only talking about measurments in Germany, right? It seems like there’s some conclusion-jumping in the comments that this is happening globally (whether or not it actually is).
- _rpd 9y ago
  > only talking about measurements in Germany, right? Yes ... > total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany
ryanx435 9y ago
All this pessismism in this thread, acting like everyone on the planet has a terminal illness. Lol. Go outside. Read about the success of the endangered species program. Stop living in fear
zghst 9y ago
We need to do a better job as humans of respecting and embracing the ecosystems around us.
contingencies 9y ago
I went down the Mekong River from China to Thailand in about 2006 and there were thousands of insects that would flock to the boat when it moored overnight. I repeated the trip in early 2016 and there were almost none. Deforestation and the replacement of virgin forest with rubber plantations appeared to be the main factor, but at a guess the use of pesticides was probably also to blame.
sparrish 9y ago
We are not having this problem in Colorado, USA. We've got so many butterflies this year, they're showing up on weather radar. http://www.businessinsider.com/butterflies-appear-on-weather-radar-in-denver-2017-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/butterflies-appear-on-weather...
giardini 9y ago
This study appears to be an alarmist rehash of what was previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 Here's one of the original papers: https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%20Nature%20reserve.pdf https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2... The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot. From that paper: "What follows is a description of measured Insect-Biomasses from samples collected in the Orbroich Bruch Nature Reserve, near Krefeld, using Malaise Insect Traps. The results show that, in the same two areas, sampled in the years 1989 and 2013, there was a dramatic fall in the number of flying insects. Using the same traps, in the same areas, significant reductions of insect populations, of more than 75%, were found. Our data confirms, that in the areas studied, less than 25% of the original number of flying insects collected in 1989, were still present in 2013." "The Orboicher Bruch, to the Northwest of Krefeld, is a designated Nature Reserve of around 100 hectares (220 acres). Due to the reserve’s relatively remote location and its rugged landscape, intensive farming came to the area only recently." So alarmists are extrapolating from two data points (years 1989 and 2013) for a 220-hectare plot of German farmland to the entire world. I think that is a bit of a stretch, even for statistics. since different bugs breed in different seasons, and numbers depend on the fruitfulness of previous generations, food supply, predation, disease, temperature and so on, this bug weight could vary considerably from year to year (or site to site) for any number of reasons. While one year cicadas thrive, the next year there may be none. Shocking, simply shocking! BTW they're measuring the weight of dead bugs - not how many bugs or what species of bugs - just the weight of bugs. Actually they're not even measuring that, they're measuring the weight of dead bugs' soaked in 70-80% alcohol. I could go on and on about controls in statistical experiments but I think you get the idea. See the original HN posting for discussions pointers to the earlier papers.
- wazoox 9y ago
  To people that were driving 20 years ago and are now, it was pretty obvious without any statistics that something was wrong, for several years now. 25 years ago, I couldn't drive 500 km in summer without scraping off a thick crust of dead bugs on my windshield afterwards (it was even common to stop just for that). In the past few years, I've driven thousands of km across Europe in summer with barely a dead bug on my windows.
11235813213455 9y ago
more pets, less wildlife, welcome to idiocracy
rb666 9y ago
And in the meantime here we are, spending 200 kWh in energy per Bitcoin transaction. Planet is doomed :(
- keymone 9y ago
  why would you single out bitcoin? did you do any calculations as to how much material and human resources are spent^Wwasted maintaining fiat systems around the world? there are whole industries around designing, printing, securing and transporting money. banks, financial institutions, government institutions. all of that would be 90% obsolete if we switched to cryptocurrencies. bitcoin is literally drop in the bucket.
titzer 9y ago
It's not only a consequence of direct habitat destruction, but also the use of pesticides. According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946087/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946087/, more than a billion pounds of pesticides are used on lawns in the US every year. There is little regulation there. All of those pesticides are designed to kill bugs. Why are we now surprised that bugs are disappearing? We are sterilizing the planet. According to this (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/lawn/factsheets/LAWNFACTS&FIGURES_8_05.pdf http://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/lawn/...), we use up to 3.5x more pesticides per acre on suburban lawns than on agriculture.
- moultano 9y ago
  Per acre doesn't seem like the right metric.
  - wott 9y ago
    The right metric would be per hectare, indeed :-)
  - titzer 9y ago
    This article (http://scienceline.org/2011/07/lawns-vs-crops-in-the-continental-u-s/ http://scienceline.org/2011/07/lawns-vs-crops-in-the-contine...) is about water usage, but it states that there is more lawn acreage in the US than the 8 top irrigated crops combined. (Discussed here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lawn-largest-crop-america_us_55d0dc06e4b07addcb43435d_ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lawn-largest-crop-ameri...) (original here: http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf)
    - immutable_ai 9y ago
      This article seems very misleading, at least for California. If you look at aggregate water usage for California agriculture uses 4X "urban" and "urban" includes industrial, golf courses, parks, etc. So even if lawns are using more area they are much less water intensive than agriculture. http://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ http://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
keymone 9y ago
this thread is full of doom and gloom. is there really no non-apocalyptic perspective on this? consider: any other "apex" predator in history never stopped to research and ponder on effects of him demolishing the ecosystem. the fact that this makes rounds in media and grabs attention and creates social pressure gives at least a glimmer of hope that something will be done about it. if it's not too late.
arethuza 9y ago
We move at the start of the year to a house in the country here in Scotland that is pretty much surrounded by farmland and I've been amazed at the amount of insect life in our garden - particularly the amount of bees and butterflies. However, because the area round us is rather hilly it is all low intensity cattle and sheep rearing. It's probably at least 15 kms (mostly over sea) to the nearest arable farming - who are presumably the heaviest users of insecticides.
- samastur 9y ago
  Sounds lovely, but what is the net connection like? (asking as someone who needs it for work)
  - arethuza 9y ago
    20Mbps - which isn't nearly as fast as what we had in central Edinburgh but fast enough for my work and Netflix/iPlayer etc. Mind you finding a house we liked with a decent internet connection was very difficult. [Weirdly we did find a house in rural Perthshire that had 450Mbps - full BT FTTP - but we didn't like the house!]
opilionesman 9y ago
I think I might have found a way to reverse this at the local level in an individual yard. The problem is that is illegal and I was basically told that I was a scumbag for doing this. You can read more about my native yard experiment here: http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share-some-things-that-i.html http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share-so...
Gravityloss 9y ago
Well, it's not worth doing anything now. We can engineer them out of diamonds with boutique DNA later. Or something.
gilbetron 9y ago
The company I work for has a big portion of it's land devoted to nature meadow, and it is amazing how much more insects you see and hear, and I find it 9000x prettier than grass. We're letting most of our lawn at home get overtaken by a clover-like plant called Germander. People call it "lawn cancer", but I like it better than grass. More life in it, it gets pretty purple flowers in the spring, and it is hardy as hell. My wife hates spiders in the house, but I love them - they take care of all the other critters I hate more, and they are interesting little buggers, especially the jumping spiders and wolf spiders.
- miceeatnicerice 9y ago
  Our flat is the same - I enjoy letting the mould grow on the wall, in its pretty, grey shapes. And every Summer, as the world turns in its natural course, there's the seasonal infestation of fruit flies around the bin. Nature's lovely. Maybe our romantic adoration could be rediscovered if we admitted more things as being 'natural'? People, too, provide a kind of undergrowth, and their greater structures form some very fetching accretions.
  - gilbetron 9y ago
    Hyperbole, the first resort of trolls.
Gnarl 9y ago
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/electronic-smog-is-disrupting-nature-on-a-massive-scale-921711.html https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/electronic-... http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378.2015.1043557 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378.2015.104... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22367734 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22367734 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383571806003202 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383571806...
ainiriand 9y ago
When I was a kid I used to play with ladybugs that where almost everywhere. Not anymore. Now the only thing that I see are spiders and wasps.
navigator01 9y ago
I dislike most insects. So long as this doesn't impact humanity's ability to thrive on the planet I don't mind. Since we're doing just fine in the face of such significant losses in biomass I don't really worry.
briantakita 9y ago
Tech like Permaculture & Regenerative Agriculture utilize ecosystems & food webs to manage pests. Better to design natural processes to create more food than to manage natural processes by destroying them. There's a saying, "You don't have a bug problem, you have a lack of (insert appropriate bug predator here) problem."
abacate 9y ago
Which is one of the reasons I don't understand a few "pro-science" folks that go against organic by equating things like anti-vaxxers to people that believe sustainable and organic farming are better for our health and for the planet as a whole. Sure, people defend all kinds of things with stupid arguments, but just because stupid arguments may be used to argue for something doesn't mean that other arguments are not correct.

901 points by kawera 9y ago

leephillips 9y ago

If this holds up, this would seem to be a hugely important result. I'm waiting for HN's biologists to weigh in.

Daishiman 9y ago
HN biologists are likely to be far less qualified than the authors of this paper. This is not the only study detailing this observation; several have been floating around for the past few years.

avip 9y ago

Yes. This is a case of hard data confirming what we already know. As in - few types of butterflies I used to like, and see yearly as a kid - are gone. I see them now once in 5 years, if lucky. I bring my kids to look because it's a first time for them. On the other hand, some types of beetles, ants, flies, mosquitoes, even wasps - are just new. They were not here 20-30 years ago. Now, what are the consequences of all that... I kind of feel we'll find out sooner than we'd like.

knodi 9y ago
This kind of the same thing I'm seeing with firefly in Michigan. In the summer time when I first moved to MI over 30 years ago I use to see them everywhere in large amounts. This year they're back but last 3 years I didn't see them at all. As long as there are climate change deniers a.k.a Trump supports we're all in a lot of trouble, even humans.
- avip 9y ago
  I wouldn't jump into blaming the climate. We've shifted many parts of a very complex system in the last 50+ years. I'd put monoculture and pesticides higher on my list of suspects.
  - coliveira 9y ago
    One of our problems is the idea that a single cause is responsible for these things. It is not just pesticides or CO2 or some other single change. It is the combination of those changes (even the small ones) that is driving this huge environmental problem. The only way to get out of this is starting to think of the environment is a complex system that needs to be preserved, not trying to find a single culprit that we can manipulate.
    - andai 9y ago
      Less finger-pointing, more parameter-tweaking!
  - GlenTheMachine 9y ago
    As an anecdotal data point, I'm trying to establish a robust, poly-culture, mostly chemical-free agricultural system on my hobby farm. We do seem to get more flying insects on my place than our neighbors, all of whom have grass lawns. Critters of all kinds, in fact - lots of frogs and toads as well, and box turtles. Obviously I haven't done a scientific study, but we see butterflies, lighting bugs, and so on; not as many as I saw growing up but they are there in some numbers. If you look around suburbia, there really isn't much ecological space for anything to grow unless it can survive on grass. Even in a lot of rural areas, with the advent of heavy-chemical farming and bigger and bigger monocultures, we're taking a lot of living space away from mother nature.
    - ioquatix 9y ago
      I think it's up to city planners to include more green belts. Better for the environment, better for water drainage, better for humans, it's really win win win.
      - monodeldiablo 9y ago
        City planners would if they could, but they're not autocrats. They know that green space (and mixed zoning and high density and...) is a good thing, but they are captive to the whims of politicians and poorly-informed citizens. And property developers have more than enough money to buy policy and sway public opinion. A close relative is a city planner, a job he went into as an idealist. He saw the economic, social, and ecological suffering created by terrible urban design, and he wanted to make a better world. After 30+ years, though, he's jaded and cynical. He's seen historically active flood and landslide and earthquake areas quietly and repeatedly re-zoned for residential development. He's seethed at 40 years of opposition to even modest expansions of mass transit. Suburban sprawl, ghettoization of the poor, retail-only developments... At this point, although he still does his best to advance healthy policy, he's resigned to the fact that the developers always win in the end. So please don't direct your ire at city planners. In many places, they're the only resistance to the boundless greed of property developers. As in all things, it's important to follow the money. The only people getting rich off the status quo are banks and developers.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Fireflies are interesting - as a New England kid in the 80s, I used to read about them in all sorts of childrens' books, but I was really bummed because I never saw one. I think I saw one firefly in my whole childhood. I just went back to Long Island this summer, and they were all over. It'd get to be twilight and hundreds of them would just be dancing through the air. I got to show my wife the childhood scene that I'd only imagined. Maybe all the fireflies moved from Michigan to New York. I think I'd read somewhere that firefly populations tend to be very cyclical anyway though.
- TallGuyShort 9y ago
  Attributing this to climate change in it's political context is as ignorant of actual science as what you claim to be detesting.
- nnfy 9y ago
  Some of the people you go out of your way to slander as both trump supporters and climate change deniers exist as they do because of people like you, who immediately take any adverse global trend, blame it on climate change with what amounts to shakey, correlative evidence, and then shame anyone who dares glance over with a skeptical eye. We are dumping all kinds of chemicals into the environment - pesticides, plasticizers, and a host of bio-active compounds which we already know may be directly responsible for the decline of certain individual species[1]. Climate change is a serious threat. But your post is an example of how climate change has become a highly politicized meme. Next thing you know, it becomes a cultural taboo to be skeptical about climate change, and suddenly we're only asking the questions we are allowed to ask, looking for the data we are allowed to look for, sweeping inconsistencies under the rug, and just generally practicing sloppy science. The scientific method necessitates skepticism. I welcome sources to the contrary, but modern western climate science is void of any published criticism, or at least it was when I had access to journals some 5 years ago. Hell, I couldnt find ONE paper discussing ANY benefit on any place on earth from a warmer climate-which is absurd, because northern permafrost could thaw and create arable land, for example. Climate science has been sickened by politics and political correctness. You should be very wary. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder
  - sixothree 9y ago
    I hate to admit it but whatever the solution to this problem will be, Trump supporters will almost certainly fight against it.
    - libraryatnight 9y ago
      Yes, it has nothing to do with anything based in reason or fact it's just heaps and heaps of angry stupid spewed in an attempt to defend their holy tangerine. edit: words.
  - smt88 9y ago
    Saying that science is biased because it fails to see the benefit of global warming is like saying it's biased because it doesn't discuss the benefit of a worldwide plague. Sure, there'd be benefits: fewer lines at amusement parks, all the food you can eat, etc. But that's so far from a net "good" that only a psychopath or moron would publish a paper with that argument.
- musage 9y ago
  Bernie Sanders was swept under the rug for the "benefit" of Hillary Clinton. Trump did nothing in comparison, he simply reaped the fruits of that own goal. Which of course people swiftly pretended didn't happen to complain about Trump, being shocked constantly like some looping meme gif. Instead of using 4 years to clean one's own house, they're working harder to make it dirtier. I say "they" because I don't do the liberal/Democrat/conservative/Republican thing and am not American. So, I can tell you what the result of that will be: even worse stuff. Remember how Obama promised hope & change and removed nothing of what Bush created? But who cared, he wasn't the grating thing Bush was, and congress blocked him, and la di blah. Same shit, same day. As long as it is like this, it will always be the same lame day. Everybody has their scapegoats, nobody executes their "own".
dawnerd 9y ago
I’m seeing a ton of wasps this year too. Also seems like there’s way more spiders in recent years.
- deelowe 9y ago
  Tons of wasps. Wasps everywhere and carpenter bees. It's insane. I don't recall it being like this when I was a kid.
  - dawnerd 9y ago
    I could barely mow my lawn last weekend. They just kept attacking me. Didn't even get to trim the edges because I was tired of being stung.
    - musage 9y ago
      Maybe they're trying to tell you to stop mowing the lawn and start enjoying the meadow?
      - mikestew 9y ago
        “Enjoy” a meadow full of stinging insects?
        deelowe 9y ago
        And ticks.
        titzer 9y ago
        Put a small amount of tick repellant _on yourself_ and check yourself for ticks after being out. Contrast that defensive strategy with an offensive strategy, which seems to be a tick apocalypse.
        9y ago
ashark 9y ago
Monarchs used to be a "oh cool, look, it's the 50-100 monarchs in that field which we'll see a couple times a week for the whole season" thing here. Now it's "holy crap, it's our one single monarch butterfly of the year!" thing.
- GlenTheMachine 9y ago
  That has a simple explanation, though. Monarch caterpillars can only survive on milkweed, and we've decimated the amount of milkweed around because we see it as, well, a weed.
  - frakr 9y ago
    You can help out with this by harvesting seeds and planting them all over!
    - georgieup 9y ago
      Good way of earning yourself some enemies.
    - winslow 9y ago
      I've been growing milkweed at my parents house and we saw a around 20 caterpillars this year! Unfortunately, ~1/2 of them didn't make it but we at least start seeing Monarchs again. Everyone should be planting better garden plants that can compared to the bland green bushes and grass that never blooms.
  - kafkaesq 9y ago
    So basically the planet is starting to treat us as a kind of a ... weed, in return.
    - smt88 9y ago
      The planet isn't conscious and can't "treat us" as anything. We are doing this to us. We are changing the environment to support short-term wants/needs at the expense of its human habitability in the future.
MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
This is making the headlines in Germany right now: http://www.zeit.de/wissen/umwelt/2017-10/insektensterben-fluginsekten-gesamtmasse-rueckgang-studie http://www.zeit.de/wissen/umwelt/2017-10/insektensterben-flu... http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/insekten-in-deutschland-forscher-bestaetigen-insektensterben-a-1173525.html http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/insekten-in-deutsch... http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/insektensterben-dramatischer-insektenschwund-in-deutschland-1.3713567 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/insektensterben-dramatisch... Der Spiegel discusses issues in the methodology of the data collection. The intervals over the years weren't uniform, data was collected by volunteers/hobbyists and they did not measure the dry mass weight. There are differing opinions whether or not those issues have relevance. SZ gives some details on suspected causes. Neither climate change (warmer weather should yield more insects, not less) nor changes in plant diversity can explain the observed effects alone. Main suspects: - agricultural fertilizers, especially nitrogen - pesticides, especially neonicotinoides
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  The massive use of neonicotinoides would not surprise me given the research of its impact on bee colony collapse.
  - sogen 9y ago
    Maybe a side effect of less bees pollination?
    - ChuckMcM 9y ago
      I was listening to an entomologist podcast on colony collapse and they were suggesting that as members of the colony became more and more impaired the interdependency of the various bee groups (workers, foragers, queen) was compromised and then "all of a sudden" the hive was unable to reliably function. And large social group (ants, termites, bees, etc) might be similarly affected.
      - sitkack 9y ago
freeflight 9y ago
> On the other hand, some types of beetles, ants, flies, mosquitoes, even wasps - are just new. Afaik most of these are usually invasives species, displacing local populations, which is happening in the weirdest ways and places. In Germany, our local ladybug species are on the verge of going extinct because an imported Asian ladybug species emits some kind of spores killing them, and the Asian ones generally being sturdier. Eastern grey squirrels, brought to the European mainland from the UK, are also increasingly replacing local red squirrels. Red squirrels get through winter by hiding food supplies and staying lean and mean, while grey squirrels build up fat reserves. What ends up happening is that the grey squirrels sniff out the food supplies of the red ones and clear them out to fill up their own fat reserves, that leaves the red squirrels with no food supplies to get through the winter and so they starve. But I agree with your general sentiment, I remember nature being quite a bit "buzzier" when I was a kid, I always thought I felt that way because I might have paid more attention to things like insects as a kid, but I guess my feeling wasn't all that off.
- NegativeLatency 9y ago
  Same thing happened with the squirrels in the Pacific Northwest. Little red ones replaced by the big grey ones. In more remote places and in the mountains where the winters are harsher you still see the small red native squirrels though.
  - kazinator 9y ago
    According to my recollection of the words of a tour guide in Vancouver, Canada, those big, dark squirrels we see around here were brought to Stanley Park from New York. Then they multiplied and kind of outcompeted the small native squirrels. Someone's related blog: https://www.miss604.com/2015/03/grey-squirrels-of-stanley-park.html https://www.miss604.com/2015/03/grey-squirrels-of-stanley-pa... Quote: So how did this squirrel get here just over 100 years ago? Some reports say that the squirrels were a gift from the Mayor of New York City in 1909 but Jolene from Stanley Park History found that in 1909 Vancouver Park Boar Chair, Charles Tisdall, wrote to various American cities in search of purchasing “grey squirrels” for Stanley Park.
  - 9y ago
jxramos 9y ago
I was wondering about my experiences of not seeing bugs I'd see as a kid. Not sure if I just didn't go hunting like I used to or if there was an absolute decrease. I remember spotting these many times and catching a few http://www.mappingmegan.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1-90-Yellow-Garden-Orb-Weaver.jpg http://www.mappingmegan.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1-90-..., now I mainly see their hairier cousins http://www.suttonmass.org/animals/spiders/orbweavercrucifera/ http://www.suttonmass.org/animals/spiders/orbweavercrucifera... Various little butterflies would be abundant seem much less now. I wish I knew their names.
timthelion 9y ago
I never read "silent spring", but the title has stuck with me since childhood. Perhaps I'll read it now.
avodonosov 9y ago
Butterflies - exactly the example I wanted to mention too. In childhood I saw them often, now - very rarely.
- throwme211345 9y ago
  A field of butterflies in the cow pasture feeding on manure. Pure joy. Rarely seen now, more the lone floater on the wind.
refurb 9y ago
Don't different species normally wax and wane in prevalence? And enter/leave areas? A particularly cold winter can kill off a certain type of insect and the loss lasts for year. How can we determine how much of the change we even have control over?
- codefined 9y ago
  When 75% of _all_ flying insect biomass is lost, that's not just wax / wane. Considering the only difference in the past 2 years vs. the other thousands of years that insects have survived is human intereference, doesn't this suggest that we have complete control over this change?
christophilus 9y ago
This year, I left a portion of my lawn unmowed. I seeded it with a $10 bag of wildflower seeds. It's given me 4 months of beautiful flowers, loads of polinators, many butterflies, and it's given me less yard to mow. I now think that lawns of neatly trimmed grass are about as dumb as it gets.
- irrlichthn 9y ago
  Ha, did exactly the same thing, since I noticed nearly no bees or other insects last year. I dedictated around 200 m² of my lawn to nature. I think it helped: This year, there where so much more of them to see.
  - downer71 9y ago
    Aren’t there local ordinances in some jurisdictions, requiring an orderly yard about the house? For sure, in many places there are laws regulating tree count and what you can and can’t chop down. I swear I’ve heard of fines for unmowed lawns too.
    - sulam 9y ago
      HOAs, township laws, etc — it is somewhat common in the US to be unable to do anything but grow grass in your front yard. We took advantage of the CA drought and tore out all our grass in front and replaced it with drought tolerant natives. It looks better and the kids didn’t play there anyway. And now we have monarchs.
      - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        >somewhat common in the US in the parts of the US that are over-represented on HN FTFY.
        Bartweiss 9y ago
        21% of all Americans live in common-interest housing. Half of that is condominiums, half is HOA-governed housing. It's a safe bet that large portions of that heavily restrict lawn conditions. Add in another ~10% of the country living in multi-family apartment buildings, which usually have no lawns or owner-controlled lawns. And, of course, single-family home lawns in any densely populated area are likely to be regulated, many of which aren't high income. I can't get numbers on how many of those ~70% of Americans are under town restrictions, but it's not a trivial number. So no, it's not just HN's demographics. This is genuinely widespread in the US; I'd estimate that at least 100,000,000 Americans live under some form of these restrictions. https://www.caionline.org/AboutCommunityAssociations/Pages/StatisticalInformation.aspx https://www.caionline.org/AboutCommunityAssociations/Pages/S... http://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-americans-prefer-single-family-homeownership_o http://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-a...
frik 9y ago
Isn't it well understood that Monsanto with its gen manipulated crap is very bad for humans and animals (like bees). "EU report on weedkiller safety copied text from Monsanto study" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-report-on-weedkiller-safety-copied-text-from-monsanto-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/15/eu-repor...
jimmies 9y ago
I am Vietnamese. There was a mythically rare oil called 'ca cuong' that not many have experienced in their life but was mentioned enough times in traditional folklore and old-timey food novels. The oil is from a little cockroach-like insect that has a liquid producing sac in their body. They live in rice fields that span across the north of Vietnam. It was believed you have to catch hundreds of them to harvest those little sacs just to have just a raw drop. So ten years ago when I was 20, I had the chance to go with my rich old friend-boss to a relatively high-end restaurant. He called a noodle dish -- I have eaten the same dish -- that cold noodle with shrimp paste (which smells pungent but tastes good) -- for hundreds of times in my life and I didn't expect anything different. But before we started, the waitress brought up a bottle that has a small pipette and dropped a little drop to the paste. The aroma was warm and fuzzy like how you would think of the cinnamon apple juice for a cold day. When I tasted the same dish, it tasted so warm, so rich, and so aromatic. But that's about as good as words get because it was unlike anything I have had in my life. It transformed the dish and my experience to another level of existence. It was that little bug that made me appreciate the food, my life, and the little heritage in the little country, where, honestly, not a lot of things really made sense. But definitely, that little drop of oil does make a lot of sense. Fast forward one year ago, life has been so much easier to me. Food is abundant, but I sometimes miss that little dish. I asked my parents if they could get some of the ca cuong oil to me, even if it's expensive (as it always has been believed). They tried then replied that they couldn't source the oil, no one sells it. Further researching revealed to me that the little insect has gone practically extinct and it is now illegal to catch them. I want to believe that it wasn't me that contributed to it, but maybe I did. It was more widely believed, however, that the widespread use of pesticide and insect-resistant rice has pushed the little insect to extinction in just a matter of 10-15 years. The day I figured that out, I feel died a little bit inside. I feel something was lost when I, and many people around me, was busy pursuing. I am now doing work that has a lot to do with biology, and I go to talks of people having that little spiel with how our challenge for the 8-billion people world is food security. I heard PhD students and faculty talking about how great is insect-resistant plants. The scientists in large agree with the assertion that GMOs aren't harmful. My friends would go great lengths to defend GMOs on their blogs and facebook statuses. They are all hardcore, hardworking, real scientists with good intents. I tend to believe smart people meant goodwill. Still, the world marches forward for whatever it marches forward for, little insects that eat human's food be damned.
baxtr 9y ago
Once we are gone, they’ll all come back: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/wildlife-returns-to-radioactive-wasteland-of-chernobyl/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/wildlife-returns-...
atomical 9y ago
I'll respond with my ancedotal experience as well. I live on a farm and the bugs are irritating as ever. There is a lot of pesticide used around here and I have used pesticide as well on the lawn. It hasn't decreased the number of bugs.
adriand 9y ago
I totally agree with the anecdotal perceptions around the decrease in insects since childhood. In my case, what I noticed recently was how few times my children have been stung by bees/wasps at their current ages, compared to how many times I was stung at those ages. My seven-year-old daughter has never been stung. My ten-year-old son claims he was stung once, but I'm not sure I believe him. By the time I was ten years old, I had been stung at least a dozen times. (I can still remember some of the particular stings, just due to the severity of the swelling.) This strikes me as odd, and in the context of this paper, frightening.
- Chris2048 9y ago
  Did you spend more time outdoors, or in woodlands?
jly 9y ago
Invertebrates often get overlooked for conservation efforts and money spent, in favor of larger animals. Pollinators are critically important for their direct food supply services, but we really just don't know the full ecological impact down the road of mass species loss on a scale we could be heading towards with many other species of insects, other arthropods, molluscs, coral, etc. If you're in the US, we have a great conservation organization for invertebrates that is doing great work on both habitat revival and pesticide reduction, and receives not nearly enough donations: https://xerces.org/ https://xerces.org/
Shivetya 9y ago
well for few years we had a severe reduction of monarchs and (blue/black variety whose name escapes me) in NW metro Atlanta but they returned this year in large numbers. Also returning, not sure of exact connection, but the tent caterpillars were abundant after seemingly being gone.

aklemm 9y ago

Presumably this is similar here in the U.S.? In the 80's and 90's the fronts of our cars would get so encrusted with mashed bugs that it would take real scrubbing to get them off. I haven't had to do that in many years.

xattt 9y ago
I have heard this before. I’m not a climate change denier. Could it have anything to do with more aerodynamic car designs?
- mshook 9y ago
  That's a good question but from my experience it's not the case. I live in France and 20 to 30 years ago, after hours driving on highways, it was quite common to have your car plastered with bugs. Now it rarely happens. And with the last 2 cars I've had, I know it's not an aerodynamic issue because one of my hobbies is to do track days. I go to Michelin's wet track something like once a year and it's bugs' paradise: fields, grass all around and very humid because the track is wet so you can hydroplane easily. Bottom line is my car gets plastered there and we don't even drive that fast (something like 80/90 km/h or 50/55 mph).
- wiredfool 9y ago
  I've had similar experience with bikes on a roof rack, where there's not a significant change in aerodynamics over the time.
- lostapathy 9y ago
  I drive a jeep (basically a brick on wheels) and bugs are still awful.
  - knowaveragejoe 9y ago
    But were they as bad as they were?
  - xattt 9y ago
    The reason I asked this question was because I drive a Nissan Cube.

GlenTheMachine 9y ago

What are the odds that honey bee colony collapse disorder isn't confined to just honey bees?

Roritharr 9y ago

I'm extremely unqualified, but is it possible that the insects just learned to avoid the specific traps used to do the measurements over time?

frinxor 9y ago
I was thinking the same, but its unlikely to lead to a 75% decline. The ratio of trapped insects (or insects that even get within a few meters of the traps) to total insects must be incredibly incredibly small.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rleigh 9y ago
Not really. For the traps I've seen, a powerful fan pulls air from an intake pipe at a certain height above ground level through a fine steel mesh filter. You remove the filter after a certain time period, and weigh the mass of the collected insects. You can then count them, and separate by species etc. It's difficult to avoid being sucked in so it's very unlikely that learned avoidance plays any role here; it's simply sampling flying insects in the local vicinity.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

wazoox 9y ago

My feeling: brace for systemic collapse.

anvandare 9y ago
I sometimes wonder what people were thinking or doing, in the days before a calamity. In Pompeii, in Lisbon, in Hiroshima, ... Unaware of what was about to happen to them. Just living their daily lives. I also sometimes wonder if future people will have reason to think of us in a similar way, when I hear of news like this, or the clathrate gun hypothesis.
- nostromo95 9y ago
  >Hiroshima Don’t know if you’ve ever read this, but here you go: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
  - anvandare 9y ago
    I had read some brief stories before (or seen them read out in a documentary) but this one I had not yet read. Thank you.
michaelkeenan 9y ago
If you make that a specific prediction, I might like to bet against it, if you're interested.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Not the bravest of bets. How's @wazoox supposed to collect from you if the system collapses?
  - michaelkeenan 9y ago
    Bet on it happening in another continent? Bet on a precursor?

cjensen 9y ago

That's alarming, but it needs followup. There have been rather obvious changes in Europe since the end of Iron Curtain. Would be nice to see similar data for other continents.

NicoJuicy 9y ago

Not sure, I have been wondering ( Europe) why new bugs appear that I have never noticed before. Butterflies are less also

avip 9y ago
Either due to warming (pine beetle being the poster child of that), or invasive species (Asian tiger mosquito).

stonewhite 9y ago

Just today we were discussing how there was almost zero insects splatters on the windshield or bonnet after an intercity travel. I remember it would get very dirty, at least almost always needed a wash.

paganel 9y ago
> zero insects splatters on the windshield or bonnet after an intercity travel. Still happens for me in Romania. In fact, I've just noticed it today after an 8-hour trip in my car through half of the country. Could be caused by the fact that we're not that "advanced" when it comes to use of insecticides.

phkahler 9y ago

Too bad it wasn't the mosquitoes. Now when people shoot down ideas to eradicate them because "what about the species that eat them" I can just point out this 75 percent reduction in other flying insects...

daemin 9y ago
I seem to recall that there are no actual species found that eat purely mosquitoes.

asquabventured 9y ago

Edit: I see the study was conducted in Germany, but it has me wondering about the U.S. where I have (anecdotally) noticed a large decline as well. Are there large enough areas of the country that you could control for areas that don't spray for mosquitos to see if the populations have also declined in those areas? It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that the spraying over the last 10 years to control the mosquito population due to the media induced West Nile panic followed by zika panic has contributed to this.

iaw 9y ago
My understanding is that mosquito's make up a very small amount of the total insect biomass (happy to be corrected). I'm wondering if there aren't environmental factors like the rise of plastics or other chemicals in the environment that are slowly degrading insect populations.

jpm_sd 9y ago

This is pretty alarming and suggests that soaking agricultural land in insecticides might be having some far-reaching side effects.

tobltobs 9y ago
side effects?
- undersuit 9y ago
  Primary effects.
rando444 9y ago
While plausible, this study doesn't suggest that. They mention it as a potential cause, but did no research to that effect and even state they made no attempt to measure such things.
DoodleBuggy 9y ago
Well, the intention of insecticides is to kill insects. All insects. It's working, but perhaps a little too well?
- turk184 9y ago
  Exactly. It's what humanity set out to do--we applied chemistry and other sciences to the problem and solved it and now somebody is complaining. Someone who didn't get malaria.
- lightbyte 9y ago
  The intention of insecticides is to kill the insects that prey on specific crops, not to kill every single insect there is. It's working better than they thought, causing it to have unintended consequences.
doctorcroc 9y ago
The primary suspected cause of this is a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. These are not sprayed, but rather coated on seeds (which is arguably even more alarming). See: https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7550/full/nature14420.html https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7550/full/nature...

crispinb 9y ago

Results like this are some confirmation of what everyone not entirely swaddled in the virtual worlds of city and business is already entirely aware of: that our living planet is dying. All the people I know who have lived in rural areas for decades (in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and SE. Asia) are in no doubt that their local ecologies are collapsing, and that the collapse is accelerating. I'm not sure how useful the knowledge is at this late stage. Turning things around would require changes of a pace and scale that we have no idea how to motivate and coordinate. Fork and done, I reckon.

wolco 9y ago
In other parts of the world like Canada things are becoming alive with the changes. The earth is a living ecosystem.
- andai 9y ago
  It's warming up, isn't it? I'm hearing about a loss of permafrost. Sounds like it's becoming more habitable up north.
  - devmunchies 9y ago
    buy lots of land up there while its cheap. thats gonna be the only prime land in a few years.
    - sulam 9y ago
      A good chunk of it will be underwater. Make sure to buy something that is higher than 100m above sea level.
      - andai 9y ago
        You might be on to something. Long-term thinking is the single greatest predictor of long-term success!
9y ago

DanielleMolloy 9y ago

This kind of data should be collected on multiple places in the world. Given such findings we should thoroughly watch our ecosystems. I have been in Japan during summer this year and (gotten used to the central-European ecosystems where the data for this paper has been collected) was surprised by the amount of insects and especially butterflies, which I had rarely seen for years. Is this just the climate (which also grows some giant insects) or could there be something different at play?

katastic 9y ago

Everyone is chiming in with anecdotes. Maybe they're all correct. But I definitely remember fireflies being everywhere at my parents house and turning the sky into a shimmering display... and I rarely see more then a few fireflies at all these days.

jonathankoren 9y ago
Same. I don't know if it's the pesticides on the farm fields by my parents' house, or what. There used to be swarms of them, maybe 2-3 feet in diameter. Now just a hand full. It's been like that for over 20 years. Same with gnats, but I don't get nostalgic about those.

Boothroid 9y ago

Monsanto.

notadoc 9y ago

It's almost as if widespread use of pesticides is having a widespread effect on insects

carbonmachine 9y ago

Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Is there an organization that is trying to rid the world of pesticides (assuming that's the cause)? If I opt to call my representatives, what am I calling in support of/against? Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem, but I'm not certain if there's anything pragmatic to be done against big areas of environmental concern like this, global warming, ocean acidity, and etc.

flerbozorp 9y ago
If our problem is all the smoke we have to breath, and the embers, ashes and soot blown into our face, how do we fix it so that the camp fire doesn’t choke us, sting our eyes, and ruin our clothes? How do we control the camp fire that we keep buring right in the middle of our living room? It’s ruining the wall paper, and there’s a huge blackened stain on the ceiling. No matter how many showers I take, my clothes still smell like smoke. What gives?
m_mueller 9y ago
Not that I've planned it for that reason, but my family has the documents to live in either Japan or Switzerland. Both seem reasonable bets to me, i.e. protected by geography and with a pretty resilient local population. Have a read on the Bronze age collapse - when the global economy collapses, the main danger won't be environmental but due to human migration. In a functioning economy I'm very liberally minded towards freedom of movement (and in fact this lessens the danger I'm describing), but in a collapse, global inequality will come back to haunt the developed world in an apocalyptic fashion.
- point78 9y ago
  Two very expensive countries
- losteric 9y ago
  The developed world will use the first wave of immigration to build the walls that keep out the rest

nickbauman 9y ago

I live in Minneapolis. The city fumigates regularly in the summer by aircraft and ground-based methods both, which is why I can go running around the lakes in mid July and get maybe one mosquito bite. I think most US cities are like this. It's a policy that should be scrapped in spite of the risk of West Nile and Lyme Disease.

peacetreefrog 9y ago
They're not fumigating, they're spreading a bacteria that kills (only supposedly) mosquito larva. http://www.mmcd.org/mosquito-control/larva-control/ http://www.mmcd.org/mosquito-control/larva-control/
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nickbauman 9y ago
  So that's what they're doing? Are you sure that's all?
bryan11 9y ago
Every few weeks, many cities in Iowa drive trucks throughout the city fogging the neighborhoods with permethrin based pesticides. A popular choice is called MasterLine Kontrol 4-4.
monochromatic 9y ago
> It's a policy that should be scrapped Why? They're not spraying some broad-spectrum pesticide.
- nickbauman 9y ago
  But it's a policy that eliminates a food source for some other animal. Especially when we have very effective and safe insect repellants already, like Picaridin and Lemon Eucalyptus.
9y ago

vermontdevil 9y ago

I’ve noticed a lot less bug splatter on windshields when I go on a long trip in the Midwest. Inm sure there’s research in this but I’m in a restaurant right now waiting for my group. It has to be disconterning to see these kind of changes. Edited: there’s more with linked articles elsewhere in the thread that I just saw.

srcmap 9y ago

I went to Disney World/NASA space center in Orlando a few years back. One impression I got was: For a place with some many water around, there were no mosquito and extremely quiet- no bird noise and no cricket noise at all.

novaleaf 9y ago

Not about insects, but birds: In the Pacific Northwest, on the coast of Olympic National Park, (Ruby Beach, Kalaloch, etc) 30 years ago (when I was a kid) the beaches were teaming with seagulls. On a given day you would see hundreds. The last two years I've taken my own kids there, we are lucky to see even 1 seagull each day. Maybe it's something else, heck maybe there was an open garbage pit 30 years ago and it's since been closed, but as discussed, most of these ecological changes (even human caused) are too slow for individual humans to detect. So thought I'd share my own anecdote :P

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

interfixus 9y ago

It's pot-boilerish, a good deal of the science (i.e. why the insects disappear) is bonkers, and the author's reputation is somewhat tarnished these days, but oh boy did it make an impression: I read Charles Pellegrino's Dust almost twenty years ago, and this talk of insect die-off still brings the terrifying plot to the front of my mind. Also, for a 1998 novel, it had a pretty decent future scenario of people somewhere around now using all-powerfull 'pads' for their web and mail and video chats and general computing.

evanslify 9y ago

Seems like the site would freeze the entire browser on Firefox 57.0b9 in macOS 10.12.

atiffany 9y ago

I might be missing something here, but we’re only talking about measurments in Germany, right? It seems like there’s some conclusion-jumping in the comments that this is happening globally (whether or not it actually is).

_rpd 9y ago
> only talking about measurements in Germany, right? Yes ... > total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany

ryanx435 9y ago

All this pessismism in this thread, acting like everyone on the planet has a terminal illness. Lol. Go outside. Read about the success of the endangered species program. Stop living in fear

zghst 9y ago

We need to do a better job as humans of respecting and embracing the ecosystems around us.

contingencies 9y ago

I went down the Mekong River from China to Thailand in about 2006 and there were thousands of insects that would flock to the boat when it moored overnight. I repeated the trip in early 2016 and there were almost none. Deforestation and the replacement of virgin forest with rubber plantations appeared to be the main factor, but at a guess the use of pesticides was probably also to blame.

sparrish 9y ago

We are not having this problem in Colorado, USA. We've got so many butterflies this year, they're showing up on weather radar. http://www.businessinsider.com/butterflies-appear-on-weather-radar-in-denver-2017-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/butterflies-appear-on-weather...

giardini 9y ago

This study appears to be an alarmist rehash of what was previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 Here's one of the original papers: https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%20Nature%20reserve.pdf https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2... The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot. From that paper: "What follows is a description of measured Insect-Biomasses from samples collected in the Orbroich Bruch Nature Reserve, near Krefeld, using Malaise Insect Traps. The results show that, in the same two areas, sampled in the years 1989 and 2013, there was a dramatic fall in the number of flying insects. Using the same traps, in the same areas, significant reductions of insect populations, of more than 75%, were found. Our data confirms, that in the areas studied, less than 25% of the original number of flying insects collected in 1989, were still present in 2013." "The Orboicher Bruch, to the Northwest of Krefeld, is a designated Nature Reserve of around 100 hectares (220 acres). Due to the reserve’s relatively remote location and its rugged landscape, intensive farming came to the area only recently." So alarmists are extrapolating from two data points (years 1989 and 2013) for a 220-hectare plot of German farmland to the entire world. I think that is a bit of a stretch, even for statistics. since different bugs breed in different seasons, and numbers depend on the fruitfulness of previous generations, food supply, predation, disease, temperature and so on, this bug weight could vary considerably from year to year (or site to site) for any number of reasons. While one year cicadas thrive, the next year there may be none. Shocking, simply shocking! BTW they're measuring the weight of dead bugs - not how many bugs or what species of bugs - just the weight of bugs. Actually they're not even measuring that, they're measuring the weight of dead bugs' soaked in 70-80% alcohol. I could go on and on about controls in statistical experiments but I think you get the idea. See the original HN posting for discussions pointers to the earlier papers.

wazoox 9y ago
To people that were driving 20 years ago and are now, it was pretty obvious without any statistics that something was wrong, for several years now. 25 years ago, I couldn't drive 500 km in summer without scraping off a thick crust of dead bugs on my windshield afterwards (it was even common to stop just for that). In the past few years, I've driven thousands of km across Europe in summer with barely a dead bug on my windows.

11235813213455 9y ago

more pets, less wildlife, welcome to idiocracy

rb666 9y ago

And in the meantime here we are, spending 200 kWh in energy per Bitcoin transaction. Planet is doomed :(

keymone 9y ago
why would you single out bitcoin? did you do any calculations as to how much material and human resources are spent^Wwasted maintaining fiat systems around the world? there are whole industries around designing, printing, securing and transporting money. banks, financial institutions, government institutions. all of that would be 90% obsolete if we switched to cryptocurrencies. bitcoin is literally drop in the bucket.

titzer 9y ago

It's not only a consequence of direct habitat destruction, but also the use of pesticides. According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946087/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2946087/, more than a billion pounds of pesticides are used on lawns in the US every year. There is little regulation there. All of those pesticides are designed to kill bugs. Why are we now surprised that bugs are disappearing? We are sterilizing the planet. According to this (http://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/lawn/factsheets/LAWNFACTS&FIGURES_8_05.pdf http://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/lawn/...), we use up to 3.5x more pesticides per acre on suburban lawns than on agriculture.

moultano 9y ago
Per acre doesn't seem like the right metric.
- wott 9y ago
  The right metric would be per hectare, indeed :-)
- titzer 9y ago
  This article (http://scienceline.org/2011/07/lawns-vs-crops-in-the-continental-u-s/ http://scienceline.org/2011/07/lawns-vs-crops-in-the-contine...) is about water usage, but it states that there is more lawn acreage in the US than the 8 top irrigated crops combined. (Discussed here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lawn-largest-crop-america_us_55d0dc06e4b07addcb43435d_ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lawn-largest-crop-ameri...) (original here: http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf)
  - immutable_ai 9y ago
    This article seems very misleading, at least for California. If you look at aggregate water usage for California agriculture uses 4X "urban" and "urban" includes industrial, golf courses, parks, etc. So even if lawns are using more area they are much less water intensive than agriculture. http://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ http://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/

keymone 9y ago

this thread is full of doom and gloom. is there really no non-apocalyptic perspective on this? consider: any other "apex" predator in history never stopped to research and ponder on effects of him demolishing the ecosystem. the fact that this makes rounds in media and grabs attention and creates social pressure gives at least a glimmer of hope that something will be done about it. if it's not too late.

arethuza 9y ago

We move at the start of the year to a house in the country here in Scotland that is pretty much surrounded by farmland and I've been amazed at the amount of insect life in our garden - particularly the amount of bees and butterflies. However, because the area round us is rather hilly it is all low intensity cattle and sheep rearing. It's probably at least 15 kms (mostly over sea) to the nearest arable farming - who are presumably the heaviest users of insecticides.

samastur 9y ago
Sounds lovely, but what is the net connection like? (asking as someone who needs it for work)
- arethuza 9y ago
  20Mbps - which isn't nearly as fast as what we had in central Edinburgh but fast enough for my work and Netflix/iPlayer etc. Mind you finding a house we liked with a decent internet connection was very difficult. [Weirdly we did find a house in rural Perthshire that had 450Mbps - full BT FTTP - but we didn't like the house!]

opilionesman 9y ago

I think I might have found a way to reverse this at the local level in an individual yard. The problem is that is illegal and I was basically told that I was a scumbag for doing this. You can read more about my native yard experiment here: http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share-some-things-that-i.html http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share-so...

Gravityloss 9y ago

Well, it's not worth doing anything now. We can engineer them out of diamonds with boutique DNA later. Or something.

gilbetron 9y ago

The company I work for has a big portion of it's land devoted to nature meadow, and it is amazing how much more insects you see and hear, and I find it 9000x prettier than grass. We're letting most of our lawn at home get overtaken by a clover-like plant called Germander. People call it "lawn cancer", but I like it better than grass. More life in it, it gets pretty purple flowers in the spring, and it is hardy as hell. My wife hates spiders in the house, but I love them - they take care of all the other critters I hate more, and they are interesting little buggers, especially the jumping spiders and wolf spiders.

miceeatnicerice 9y ago
Our flat is the same - I enjoy letting the mould grow on the wall, in its pretty, grey shapes. And every Summer, as the world turns in its natural course, there's the seasonal infestation of fruit flies around the bin. Nature's lovely. Maybe our romantic adoration could be rediscovered if we admitted more things as being 'natural'? People, too, provide a kind of undergrowth, and their greater structures form some very fetching accretions.
- gilbetron 9y ago
  Hyperbole, the first resort of trolls.

Gnarl 9y ago

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/electronic-smog-is-disrupting-nature-on-a-massive-scale-921711.html https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/electronic-... http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378.2015.1043557 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378.2015.104... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22367734 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22367734 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383571806003202 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383571806...

ainiriand 9y ago

When I was a kid I used to play with ladybugs that where almost everywhere. Not anymore. Now the only thing that I see are spiders and wasps.

navigator01 9y ago

I dislike most insects. So long as this doesn't impact humanity's ability to thrive on the planet I don't mind. Since we're doing just fine in the face of such significant losses in biomass I don't really worry.

briantakita 9y ago

Tech like Permaculture & Regenerative Agriculture utilize ecosystems & food webs to manage pests. Better to design natural processes to create more food than to manage natural processes by destroying them. There's a saying, "You don't have a bug problem, you have a lack of (insert appropriate bug predator here) problem."

abacate 9y ago

Which is one of the reasons I don't understand a few "pro-science" folks that go against organic by equating things like anti-vaxxers to people that believe sustainable and organic farming are better for our health and for the planet as a whole. Sure, people defend all kinds of things with stupid arguments, but just because stupid arguments may be used to argue for something doesn't mean that other arguments are not correct.