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Alarming study shows massive insect loss
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jfk13 8y agoDuplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18222888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18222888
- dschuetz 8y agoYou're right :O I wonder why the submission wasn't merged... EDIT: Different URLs, oh well.
- gmjoe 8y agoKey paragraphs: > The food web appears to have been obliterated from the bottom. It’s credible that the authors link the cascade to arthropod loss, Schowalter said, because “you have all these different taxa showing the same trends — the insectivorous birds, frogs and lizards — but you don’t see those among seed-feeding birds.” > Lister and Garcia attribute this crash to climate. In the same 40-year period as the arthropod crash, the average high temperature in the rain forest increased by 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures in the tropics stick to a narrow band. The invertebrates that live there, likewise, are adapted to these temperatures and fare poorly outside them; bugs cannot regulate their internal heat.
- smackay 8y agoSeed-eating birds spend a lot of time gathering insects to feed their young. I presume also seed plants are dependent on pollinators. Certainly this is just an armchair comment but I would have expected the effect to show up across the board.
- ocschwar 8y agoThe reason it isn't is that this study is based in Puerto Rico, where the bugs don't have the option of migrating north. In the US mainland, yes, this is happening, and it's harming insects, but the main result is migration, not extinction.
- CalRobert 8y agoI am currently trying to buy a few acres of land. It's currently grazing land, but I'd like to rewild most of it. By any chance, can someone suggest a good source for learning how to do so in a way that encourages insect, bee, and bird populations? It's near a bog so I'm hoping it can have a bigger impact than it would in isolation.
- bbddg 8y agoYou want to look into permaculture. You should check to see if there's any permaculture groups in your area. They will have the best localized experience and will be a huge help.
- nikels 8y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Wilding-Return-Nature-British-Farm/dp/1509805095 https://www.amazon.com/Wilding-Return-Nature-British-Farm/dp...
- jfk13 8y agoThis is a truly awesome project! (It's just a few miles from where I live.)
- tyu1000 8y agoNature Conservancy in North America, you can try Rewilding Europe in the EU.
- ip26 8y agoI don't know where you live but the USFS has guides on the native species of plants that live in various parts of the US. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_PLANTMATERIALS/publications/nmpmctn9432.pdf https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_PLANTMATERIALS/public... https://cpw.state.co.us/Documents/CNAP/RevegetationGuide.pdf https://cpw.state.co.us/Documents/CNAP/RevegetationGuide.pdf Edit: fixed the links
- maxwell 8y agoBoth of those links are broken for me.
- Proven 8y agoI still have a fly problem at home, it hasn't abated a bit
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y agoit's too profitable to change direction now
- titzer 8y agoPaywall-free article from The Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/insect-population-decrease-hyper-alarming-puerto-rico-rainforest-invertebrate-bugs-america-a8586126.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/insect-population...
- JulianMorrison 8y agoAsk someone over 50 who drives, do you remember bugs on your windshield? Having to run the wipers because it was that bad? Ask them when they last remember that being an issue. I'm guessing some time in the 1980s. There are kids who drive these days and never had bugs on their windshield. They don't realize it's not normal.
- jvreagan 8y agoI remember driving 6 hours from home back to college during August in the midwest and having to stop every couple hours at a gas station just to clean the windshield. Now its rare to hit an insect on the road.
- JulianMorrison 8y agoFor you, when in retrospect do you remember it changing?
- LeifCarrotson 8y agoWhat car were you driving then? What car or cars have you driven recently?
- bryan11 8y agoI've noticed the same thing when driving
- josefresco 8y agoDrove from MA to FL this summer with a very un-aerodynamic truck. Plenty of bugs.
- ingenium 8y agoI drove across the country a couple years ago. Driving across South Dakota in May was awful for bugs. I had to stop multiple times at gas stations to clean them off. But otherwise, yeah, there aren't too many bugs on my windshield normally.
- paulcole 8y ago
- macawfish 8y agoThis is devastating. Surely our dumbass (monoculture) agricultural and (monoculture) development methods bear blame for this. Surely our obsession with hierarchical power structures is a driver. There is also a mass microbial extinction occurring right now: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2094423-microbial-mass-extinctions-were-kicked-off-by-human-evolution/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2094423-microbial-mass-... I'm exhausted of this consumer society that quashes all appreciation for the dynamic, the non-linear, the relationships of the micro to the macro, of the individual to the mass, of ecologies. Words can't express my irritation for the blindness of techno-utopians who think we should aim to be happier on Mars. Get a clue! This is our chance to terraform earth back to health! If we can't do that now, there really isn't a chance in hell we could do it with Mars. We need to fall in love with earth again, with all of its creatures, including humans, and even mosquitoes. By perpetuating that live-in-space fantasy, you're sealing the fate of peoples' hearts, crushing the precious seeds of hope and trust in earth's fragile life system, and in humans' potential to bond with earth sustainably. (Sometimes I do wish ignorant power mongerers and unrepentant rapists would go take a long time-out in the void of space. Maybe that would catalyze the spiritual realization we desperately need them to have. The risk, of course, is alienation.) Okay... So everything you and I do and say right now matters tremendously. We are at a critical point. It's all that ever has mattered but it especially matters now. I saw someone below talking about rewilding some spent grazing land. That's real stuff, thank you.
- seren 8y agoIt is probably a lot easier and cheaper to colonize the Sahara desert than Mars, but since there are less incentive to do it we won't. Mars surface area : about 144.8 million km² Earth Desert area* : about 44 million km² [*] including Antarctica & Arctic
- ben_w 8y ago> but since there are less incentive to do it we won't. I dunno about that, but I agree with everything else: we could easily end up “terraforming” the deserts (including Antarctica) just to prove the tech for a Mars colony is viable. Putting a full city, complete with self-sustaining farms, on the top of Mt Everest or at the south pole is technically easier than Mars, though perhaps not politically.
- jenks 8y agoThis is absolutely horrifying. Insects are mother nature's sex organs! In 1945 after world war 2, the US had an abundance of ammunition supply and decided do make use of it in other means than warfare. They used that ammunition supply to make Chemical NPK fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and rodenticides. This was the onset of commercial farming and - not so ironically - exactly when the world insect popluation started decreasing! Now we are just seeing it in its most drastic potential. Pesticides not only destroy the detoxifying organs in our body upon consumption, they also destroy the basis of every ecosystem on Earth! They don't stop at just killing insects though. Ever hear of the phrase of war "Salt the earth", where countries would pour salt over airable land to knock out the enemies food supplies? Pesticides are salts! They destroy the Humus of the soil which contains all of the microfungi and microorganisms which have a symbiotic relationship with the roots of the plant to send filaments of nutrients through the roots and receive sap from the roots in return. When you realize that the food you're getting is so much less nutrient dense than food that was farmed organically which actually obeys the laws of nature, you begin to realize that this commercially farmed food literally takes more energy and nutrients out of your body in the processes of digestion, metabolization, assimilation, and elimination than you get from the food!
- majos 8y ago>Pesticides not only destroy the detoxifying organs in our body upon consumption What? Do you mean by direct consumption or residually on food? > you begin to realize that this commercially farmed food literally takes more energy and nutrients out of your body in the processes of digestion, metabolization, assimilation, and elimination than you get from the food! Confused by this too. By this logic those of us who rely on commercially farmed food (most of us) should be continually wasting away and soon dying, which is not the case
- jenks 8y agoAs i mentioned, commercial farming leads to less nutrient dense food. The processes of digestion, metabolization, assimilation, and elimination each take energy and nutrients to work. Foods grown in low-vitamin dense soil inherently have less nutrients to provide the organism which consumes them. Be cautious in your assumption that everything is great with commercially farmed food. Widespread disease, reliance on stimulants like coffee, energy drinks, and even as extreme as ADHD medicine being given to children - even though the effects are almost identical to those of people being on cocaine - are becoming more widespread the more prevalent commercial farming becomes. The rate of cancer in 1900 was 1 in 30, 1980 it was 1 in 5, 1990 1 in 4, 1995 1 in 3, 2000 1 in 2. Correlation? causation? It's impossible to tell, but the idea that engineering mother nature to make her work more efficiently than the way she has engineered life over millions of years has yet to ever work in our favor each time we have tried throughout history.
- qwerty456127 8y agoI wish we could loose mosquitoes and ticks...
- aninteger 8y agoAnd cockroaches.
- qwerty456127 8y agoIt seems we've already lost cockroaches in Europe, I haven't seen any since the end of the 20th century. Whatever, I don't really mind them as they don't bite.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y agoThere are still a lot of them in southern Europe.
- Oletros 8y agoBarcelona is full of them
- mike_ivanov 8y agoThat's the thing, it is not like all bugs disappear in equal proportions, more like some (agricultural related) go, some other -- come. And those are not necessarily nice ones.
- lisper 8y ago> the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold. This sentence made it hard for me to take the article seriously. What does a 60-fold decrease even mean? I understand what a 60-fold increase means: it means that there is now 60 times more than before. But it's not possible for there to be 60 times less than before for a quantity that cannot be negative. So we are left to wonder. Does it mean that there is now 1/60th as much as before? That is a peculiarly precise number. Is it really 1/60th i.e. 1.67% and not, say, 1/59th (1.69%)? Whatever the truth is, this sentence is obscuring it. I don't mean to cast any doubt on the proposition that there is a serious problem here. This is a criticism of the journalism, not the science.
- hw_penfold 8y agoI think the natural interpretation is that the January 1977 numbers showed a value 60 times greater than the January 2013 value. (the dry weight of all the captured invertebrates) Here's a direct link to the relevant graph: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/10/09/1722477115/F2.large.jpg http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/10/09/1722477115... Full publication: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/10/09/1722477115 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/10/09/1722477115
- lisper 8y agoThat would indeed be a not-entirely-unreasonable interpretation except for two things: 1. Why not just say that the numbers went down by 98% (i.e. 59/60)? 2. If you look at the graph, the numbers clearly went down by less than 98%.
- fallingfrog 8y agoSo, we have one study in Puerto Rico, and one in Germany. I think we really need to figure out whether this effect is real, if it is global, and what is the cause. I guess I'd advocate not panicking until we know more- this isn't on the level of certainty of climate change yet, where we are absolutely certain that the Earth is warming.