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The scariest news I heard last year was not the North Korea nuclear testing, but the insect mass collapse by 82%. This is insane. We need to seriously reconside

The scariest news I heard last year was not the North Korea nuclear testing, but the insect mass collapse by 82%. This is insane. We need to seriously reconsider the use of all insecticides, not just the bee-harming ones. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-of-ecological-armageddon-after-dramatic-plunge-in-insect-numbers https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-...

Angostura 8y ago
It is scary. The good news is that I would expect this measure to have at least some beneficial effects for other bugs.
senorjazz 8y ago
appropriate image https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/e3/00/48e300bd908c68932c864cee1f282eda.gif https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/e3/00/48e300bd908c68932c86...
- Lxr 8y ago
  Any idea where that is?
  - justbees2 8y ago
    East London: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/03/save-the-bees-mural-project/ http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/03/save-the-bees-mural-pr... (The building and wall looked very British to my British eyes, but a Google image search by the URL brought that article straight up.)
hanniabu 8y ago
What's more worrisome is that I haven't heard of this and haven't seen it on the news, yet I've seen reports on Kim Kardashian's fragrance bottle being shaped like her and Kanye private texts with John Legend about Trump. And these are on so-called "news" stations, it just blows my mind....
- abritinthebay 8y ago
  It was on national news... for like a day. Most people seem to know about it but not how serious it is.
- DelightOne 8y ago
  Its not actionable either I think. Or What would you have done? Voted differently? Started an argument on reddit or here? Write an app? Whats the impact of that.
  - seer 8y ago
    Well you could plant more flowers in your garden, or any other place like that you have access to. Its not much but if enough people do it, it can get people aware of this issue and help build political will. You know “grass roots” movement. I just heard this in a recent TED podcast that this is what some people were doing :)
    - jeena 8y ago
      My mom did that a coupple of years ago, she took a big chunk of where formally only was gras which my dad cut often and has sown flowers there. Tons of insects came by, I have a coupple of pictures from back then on flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeena/albums/72157634192672920 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeena/albums/72157634192672920
    - DelightOne 8y ago
      The sentiment is appreciated and I doubt its impact on anything is measurable at all.
      - MattBlissett 8y ago
        Don't just speculate! http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature21709 http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature21709 It had a measurable impact when planting "wild"flowers on 2% of the land alongside English fields, with a little more searching there's probably a study on gardens. (From the paper: "Here we show that the survival of family lineages from the summer worker to the spring queen stage in the following year increases significantly with the proportion of high-value foraging habitat, including spring floral resources, within 250–1,000 m of the natal colony.") However, the jury's out on "insect hotels": http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122126 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
blanderman 8y ago
Maybe they've been catching most of the members of each species that are susceptible to the type of trap they use leaving only trap resistant specimens in the wild to breed.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  Windscreen resistance and the car avoidance genes have been selected for?
mattmanser 8y ago
Doesn't it look like the initial reading was the anomaly? Like the 1989 number is twice as big compared to 1991. In 1991 they could have reported "insects numbers drop 50% in two years!!!!". I mean there's a definite decline, but it doesn't look like an imminent collapse.
- bitL 8y ago
  Last year when I left my kitchen window open at around this time, in a couple of hours I had dozens of flies everywhere. This year - silence. Way less birds as well. When I visit my parents that retired to a village valley without any industry, insects of all types are everywhere.
  - notatoad 8y ago
    Same here. Except this year we still have snow on the ground and last year it had all melted a month ago, so that's probably why there's no insects. Anecdotes aren't helping anything.
    - goatlover 8y ago
      The insect splatter or lack thereof has been noticed by a lot of people in different countries though.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - notatoad 8y ago
        Still though, "being noticed" is not evidence of anything. Studies count, people noticing things don't.
        bitL 8y ago
        There is a significant latency between an observation and scientific study, often in years.
tptacek 8y ago
The actual report that's based on largely pins the reduction on habitat loss.
- thaumaturgy 8y ago
  The paper by Hallmann et. al. studied insect biomass in nature-protected areas in Germany over a period of 27 years. They didn't refer to "habitat loss" in their paper, but do refer to "land use" as a broader generalization describing the overall biodiversity of foliage in areas surrounding the insect traps. They measured a number of variables during the study (different aspects of weather and climate and land use), but failed to find a single explanatory variable to match the trend they were seeing. They proposed that the cause was something they weren't measuring. Abstract: "We show that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot explain this overall decline." Results: "There was substantial variation in trapped insect biomass between habitat clusters (see Materials and methods), with nutrient-rich grasslands, margins and wasteland containing 43% more insect biomass than nutrient-poor heathland, sandy grassland, and dunes. Yet, the annual rate of decline was similar, suggesting that the decline is not specific to certain habitat types (S5 Fig)." "On average, cover of arable land decreased, coverage of forests increased, while grassland and surface water did not change much in extent over the last three decades (S3 Fig). Overall, adding land use variables alone did not lead to a substantial improvement of the model fit..." "These interactions, which were retained in our final model (Table 4), revealed higher rates of decline where coverage of grassland was higher, while lower declines where forest and arable land coverage was higher." Discussion: "In light of previously suggested driving mechanisms, our analysis renders two of the prime suspects, i.e. landscape [9, 18, 20] and climate change [15, 18, 21, 37], as unlikely explanatory factors for this major decline in aerial insect biomass in the investigated protected areas." "Agricultural intensification [17, 20] (e.g. pesticide usage, yearround tillage, increased use of fertilizers and frequency of agronomic measures) that we could not incorporate in our analyses, may form a plausible cause. The reserves in which the traps were placed are of limited size in this typical fragmented West-European landscape, and almost all locations (94%) are enclosed by agricultural fields. Part of the explanation could therefore be that the protected areas (serving as insect sources) are affected and drained by the agricultural fields in the broader surroundings (serving as sinks or even as ecological traps)." i.e., they're finding that habitat type is insufficiently correlated with the observed effects, and suggesting that some other effect related to nearby agriculture is the predominant cause. The paper is free to download and very readable: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
avip 8y ago
The previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15502074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15502074 has lots of interesting links and anecdotes. [E: if you ever wanted to know how data and anecdote differ, dive into that thread]
dawnerd 8y ago
Guess all the bugs came to my house, this year has been absolutely awful for far and its just now starting to warm up. Not really looking forward to the spider invasion this summer. I don't get why people go crazy with poisons. I just do some minor house perimeter treatment but try to make sure it wont run off. I keep everything else natural.
PeterStuer 8y ago
We live in the countryside. It"s scary how few bees there are this year. Everything is in bloom and usually the plants are buzzing with bees. This year you just see the occaasional bumblebee or wasp.
bwb 8y ago
I saw a few scientists on a thread in reddit point out that those numbers are misleading, as the way they collected the data was suspect and it was driven by amateurs. I didn't verify but quite a few chimed in that it wasn't a great study...
DenisM 8y ago
We could start using more GMO products, bred to resist insects without killing them.
- freeflight 8y ago
  They'd still die as they can't feed off the GMO plants.
- bencollier49 8y ago
  Most GMO products are altered to be resistant to powerful weedkillers, meaning farmers use loads more, which leaches off into rivers and destroys ecosystems. Using more of this sort of GMO is a terrible idea.

Angostura 8y ago

It is scary. The good news is that I would expect this measure to have at least some beneficial effects for other bugs.

senorjazz 8y ago

appropriate image https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/e3/00/48e300bd908c68932c864cee1f282eda.gif https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/e3/00/48e300bd908c68932c86...

Lxr 8y ago
Any idea where that is?
- justbees2 8y ago
  East London: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/03/save-the-bees-mural-project/ http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/03/save-the-bees-mural-pr... (The building and wall looked very British to my British eyes, but a Google image search by the URL brought that article straight up.)

hanniabu 8y ago

What's more worrisome is that I haven't heard of this and haven't seen it on the news, yet I've seen reports on Kim Kardashian's fragrance bottle being shaped like her and Kanye private texts with John Legend about Trump. And these are on so-called "news" stations, it just blows my mind....

abritinthebay 8y ago
It was on national news... for like a day. Most people seem to know about it but not how serious it is.
DelightOne 8y ago
Its not actionable either I think. Or What would you have done? Voted differently? Started an argument on reddit or here? Write an app? Whats the impact of that.
- seer 8y ago
  Well you could plant more flowers in your garden, or any other place like that you have access to. Its not much but if enough people do it, it can get people aware of this issue and help build political will. You know “grass roots” movement. I just heard this in a recent TED podcast that this is what some people were doing :)
  - jeena 8y ago
    My mom did that a coupple of years ago, she took a big chunk of where formally only was gras which my dad cut often and has sown flowers there. Tons of insects came by, I have a coupple of pictures from back then on flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeena/albums/72157634192672920 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeena/albums/72157634192672920
  - DelightOne 8y ago
    The sentiment is appreciated and I doubt its impact on anything is measurable at all.
    - MattBlissett 8y ago
      Don't just speculate! http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature21709 http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature21709 It had a measurable impact when planting "wild"flowers on 2% of the land alongside English fields, with a little more searching there's probably a study on gardens. (From the paper: "Here we show that the survival of family lineages from the summer worker to the spring queen stage in the following year increases significantly with the proportion of high-value foraging habitat, including spring floral resources, within 250–1,000 m of the natal colony.") However, the jury's out on "insect hotels": http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122126 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

blanderman 8y ago

Maybe they've been catching most of the members of each species that are susceptible to the type of trap they use leaving only trap resistant specimens in the wild to breed.

lostlogin 8y ago
Windscreen resistance and the car avoidance genes have been selected for?

mattmanser 8y ago

Doesn't it look like the initial reading was the anomaly? Like the 1989 number is twice as big compared to 1991. In 1991 they could have reported "insects numbers drop 50% in two years!!!!". I mean there's a definite decline, but it doesn't look like an imminent collapse.

bitL 8y ago
Last year when I left my kitchen window open at around this time, in a couple of hours I had dozens of flies everywhere. This year - silence. Way less birds as well. When I visit my parents that retired to a village valley without any industry, insects of all types are everywhere.
- notatoad 8y ago
  Same here. Except this year we still have snow on the ground and last year it had all melted a month ago, so that's probably why there's no insects. Anecdotes aren't helping anything.
  - goatlover 8y ago
    The insect splatter or lack thereof has been noticed by a lot of people in different countries though.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - notatoad 8y ago
      Still though, "being noticed" is not evidence of anything. Studies count, people noticing things don't.
      - bitL 8y ago
        There is a significant latency between an observation and scientific study, often in years.

tptacek 8y ago

The actual report that's based on largely pins the reduction on habitat loss.

thaumaturgy 8y ago
The paper by Hallmann et. al. studied insect biomass in nature-protected areas in Germany over a period of 27 years. They didn't refer to "habitat loss" in their paper, but do refer to "land use" as a broader generalization describing the overall biodiversity of foliage in areas surrounding the insect traps. They measured a number of variables during the study (different aspects of weather and climate and land use), but failed to find a single explanatory variable to match the trend they were seeing. They proposed that the cause was something they weren't measuring. Abstract: "We show that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot explain this overall decline." Results: "There was substantial variation in trapped insect biomass between habitat clusters (see Materials and methods), with nutrient-rich grasslands, margins and wasteland containing 43% more insect biomass than nutrient-poor heathland, sandy grassland, and dunes. Yet, the annual rate of decline was similar, suggesting that the decline is not specific to certain habitat types (S5 Fig)." "On average, cover of arable land decreased, coverage of forests increased, while grassland and surface water did not change much in extent over the last three decades (S3 Fig). Overall, adding land use variables alone did not lead to a substantial improvement of the model fit..." "These interactions, which were retained in our final model (Table 4), revealed higher rates of decline where coverage of grassland was higher, while lower declines where forest and arable land coverage was higher." Discussion: "In light of previously suggested driving mechanisms, our analysis renders two of the prime suspects, i.e. landscape [9, 18, 20] and climate change [15, 18, 21, 37], as unlikely explanatory factors for this major decline in aerial insect biomass in the investigated protected areas." "Agricultural intensification [17, 20] (e.g. pesticide usage, yearround tillage, increased use of fertilizers and frequency of agronomic measures) that we could not incorporate in our analyses, may form a plausible cause. The reserves in which the traps were placed are of limited size in this typical fragmented West-European landscape, and almost all locations (94%) are enclosed by agricultural fields. Part of the explanation could therefore be that the protected areas (serving as insect sources) are affected and drained by the agricultural fields in the broader surroundings (serving as sinks or even as ecological traps)." i.e., they're finding that habitat type is insufficiently correlated with the observed effects, and suggesting that some other effect related to nearby agriculture is the predominant cause. The paper is free to download and very readable: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

avip 8y ago

The previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15502074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15502074 has lots of interesting links and anecdotes. [E: if you ever wanted to know how data and anecdote differ, dive into that thread]

dawnerd 8y ago

Guess all the bugs came to my house, this year has been absolutely awful for far and its just now starting to warm up. Not really looking forward to the spider invasion this summer. I don't get why people go crazy with poisons. I just do some minor house perimeter treatment but try to make sure it wont run off. I keep everything else natural.

PeterStuer 8y ago

We live in the countryside. It"s scary how few bees there are this year. Everything is in bloom and usually the plants are buzzing with bees. This year you just see the occaasional bumblebee or wasp.

bwb 8y ago

I saw a few scientists on a thread in reddit point out that those numbers are misleading, as the way they collected the data was suspect and it was driven by amateurs. I didn't verify but quite a few chimed in that it wasn't a great study...

DenisM 8y ago

We could start using more GMO products, bred to resist insects without killing them.

freeflight 8y ago
They'd still die as they can't feed off the GMO plants.
bencollier49 8y ago
Most GMO products are altered to be resistant to powerful weedkillers, meaning farmers use loads more, which leaches off into rivers and destroys ecosystems. Using more of this sort of GMO is a terrible idea.