3 ms·
I'm pretty convinced that this is due to drainage. Over the last 30 years ditches have been cluveted and ponds drained on all farms, irrigation is now an art -
by sgt101 8y ago
I'm pretty convinced that this is due to drainage. Over the last 30 years ditches have been cluveted and ponds drained on all farms, irrigation is now an art - very tightly managed - and farmers round here have dug deep reservoirs to run it. Hedgerows and roads used to have long swampy bits that were ideal for insect breeding, but that's all gone. Farmers here now farm arable or intensive pig/chicken. The mixed economy farms are gone - and with them the small ponds and wallows that were common.
I've got two ponds in my garden, they are a source of head shaking from keen urban gardeners because they are shallow, muddy and a bit smelly - but they team with life and now, in the summer, the air is thick with insects.
- Roritharr 8y agoVery interesting... is there somewhere I can donate so someone with cheaper access to land can create a muddy pond for me? I'd love to support biodiversity, but i've got a wife that hates bugs and space on my balcony comes at a premium... would be much more sensible to create a muddy pond somewhere outside of the city.
- FreeFull 8y agoHow do you deal with mosquitoes? Also, have frogs/toads also made use of the still water?
- sgt101 8y agoWe live with the mosquitoes as an annoying price of organic gardening. They are a pain, but they are... The frogs and toads make plenty use of it! Also newts and grass snakes.
- dumbneurologist 8y agothat's a great hypothesis i hadn't heard. interesting to consider... and a bit less scary than insecticidal effects.
- gonzo41 8y agoPretty easy(heroic estimate) to check this, You could link a few sets of time bounded landsat images of an affected area to see if the land use change correlates with the rise in this problem. Depending on the granularity of the data you could go pretty deep with something like quickbird images as well. Though I'm not sure how long they have been running off hand.
- ams6110 8y agoFor the past several decades there has also been a concerted effort to eliminate standing water almost anywhere practicable, in order to reduce mosquito breeding.
- sgt101 8y agoGood point. In Africa and southern Europe this makes sense, but in Germany and the UK and Northern France... not so much. But clearly this is an effective way of reducing insect life.