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The Insect Apocalypse Is Here
- apatters 8y agoI clicked mainly because the clickbaitiness of the headline annoyed me and I wanted to inform myself a bit before complaining about it. The NYT rewarded me by telling me I have one less free article this month. That annoyed me even more so I hit back. They are very smart over there, and the NYT didn't get where it is thanks to short term thinking. Surely they have thought about what a bad experience clickbait is and how much it damages their brand.
- SolaceQuantum 8y agoI'm a little confused by this comment- I was under the impression that the title is pretty accurate to drastic decrease in insect population recorded in multiple studies. Apocalyptic wouldn't be an exaggeration given the studies I've read (>=75% insect loss). If 75% or more of the human population declined over 30 years, I'd be pretty confident that it'd be catastrophic to human society.
- imglorp 8y agoClear your cookies.
- blowski 8y agoNewspapers have been writing attention-getting headlines since there were newspapers. The problem with clickbait is when the article doesn’t support the headline. Arguably, in this case, the headline is true.
- mikeash 8y agoI would say that clickbait is where the headline is designed to draw people in without giving them information. A well written headline gives you the most important part of the story. A clickbait headline deliberately avoids it. Consider the stereotypical “one weird trick!” clickbait. It avoids telling you what it is, so you have to click to find out. This headline gives you the most pertinent fact up front. You can skip the story and still have some knowledge of what’s being discussed. It’s the opposite of clickbait.
- bbddg 8y agoI love that 90% of the top comments on hn are people complaining about website design. Extremely relevant and not at all boring.
- apatters 8y agoI mean, this is a forum filled with web developers...
- newsbinator 8y agoThis is silly, but in some ways the design and flaws of major news and content sites is a topic more relevant/interesting to a discussion forum for hackers than ongoing environmental collapse is. Sure, the latter is a much bigger deal and affects hackers as much as it affects all life on Earth. But doctors talk about medicine and care. Teachers talk about education and learning. Hackers talk about design, UX, etc. We should all be talking about ecosystem collapse. Yet it's not a thing we interact with every day (yet), whereas NY Times' paywall is. Human brains are lousy at risk, it's true.
- brianlweiner 8y agoIs it not possible to breed insects to try and replace some portion of the natural base population? Obviously other changes causing the population loss would also have to occur (e.g more responsible use of insecticides, less reliance on monoculture agriculture) - but insects are pretty good at reproducing so I'd think this is at least something we could try and ameliorate.
- dmitriid 8y ago> Is it not possible to breed insects to try and replace some portion of the natural base population It is possible. If you recreate habitats necessary for breeding of each of the hundreds of thousands of insect species.
- gambler 8y agoThis is a problem likely caused by humans trying to manage too much in nature. Does it really sound reasonable to respond by taking over the working of even larger chunk of nature? I think a much more reasonable approach would be to scale down pesticide use, scale down our overall biomass footprint by reducing meat consumption and scale down anything that involves cutting down "wild" trees or "re-purposing" forest landmass.
- akiselev 8y agoWe may already be so deep in the uncanny valley of geoengineering, so to speak, that we're past the point of no return and our only chance for survival is to take control of the unintented consequences of human civilization with intentional large scale action. At this point, the losses we've seen so far and our predictions seem so bad that it may be worth the risk of even more damage to gain valuable experience in geoengineering that could be eventually used to turn our planet around.
- zenkat 8y agoNatural selection will do that far more efficiently than we ever could artificially. Insects have a rapid reproductive cycle, and create huge numbers of spawn each cycle.
- verytrivial 8y agoPlausibly one of the Horsemen of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction . Edit: Actually, I regret being flippant with this. I find this development gravely troubling.
- almost_usual 8y agoBiomass of mammals on Earth as of 2018 - Livestock, mostly cattle and pigs (60%) - Humans (36%) - Wild animals (4%) Wow.
- anfilt 8y agoKeep in mind we are able to sustain our livestock populations beyond what a natural ecosystem for the same area could support. What would be more interesting is to see how the natural mammal biomass has changed.
- thrower123 8y agoThe Times is really going hard on the gloom and doom lately https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com
- verytrivial 8y agoHow do you know you're not just complaining about reality?
- kbutler 8y ago"on virtually all of the key dimensions of human material well-being—poverty, literacy, health, freedom, and education—the world is an extraordinarily better place than it was just a couple of centuries ago." https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why-the-world-is-getting-better-why-hardly-anyone-knows-it/#2da495147826 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why-the... Lots more examples. But if you primarily get your impression of the "state of the world" from news sources, you get exactly the opposite impression. "If it bleeds, it leads" Or from the Forbes article, "The media does not tell us how the world is changing, it tells us where the world is going wrong. It tends to focus on single events particularly single events that have gone bad. By contrast, positive developments happen slowly with no particular event to promote in a headline. “More people are healthy today than yesterday,” just doesn’t cut it."
- IshKebab 8y agoPeople are much better off. The world (the natural environment) is not. And the effects of its destruction haven't started affecting people too much yet but it will.
- kibwen 8y agoCiting that source is a bit tone-deaf considering that it concludes with the following: "Obviously big problems remain. Having 1 out of 10 people living in extreme poverty today is unacceptable. Humanity’s impact on the environment is at a level that is not sustainable and we urgently need to reduce our impact. Continuing threats to our political freedom and liberty must be dealt with." Considering that the NYT articles that get the most traction here are about the environment (such as this very one), poverty/income inequality, and politics, trying to wave away these articles as fearmongering with "don't worry, the world is better!" is particularly counter-productive to actually making the world a better place.
- nakedrobot2 8y agoThere is not one mention of glyphosate (or Roundup) in this article. Why? If I had to bet on one overriding cause of this, it's glyphosate.
- odovdor 8y agoGlyphosate is a herbicide. Why blame it when there are dozens of insecticides used in agriculture?
- radiorental 8y agoThere's recent reporting that Glyphosate affects insect gut bacteria. https://cen.acs.org/environment/pesticides/Glyphosate-disrupts-honey-bee-gut/96/web/2018/09 https://cen.acs.org/environment/pesticides/Glyphosate-disrup... I think the larger point being, the more chemicals we insert into the environment without a holistic understanding of their interactions and impact on various ecosystems, the more we run the risk of collateral damage.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vixen99 8y ago...and insects have no interest in plants.
- m0skit0 8y agoWhat is your reference that glyphosate is more toxic to insects than other pesticides? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Glyphosate_alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Glyphosate_alone
- dTal 8y agoThe 80% insect loss is also documented in protected tropical rainforest, in a country where pesticide use has plummeted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18222888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18222888
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- dmitriid 8y agoWhat is it with modern journalism that everything has to start with two screens of personal stories? The article stands on its own without the story of a boy, and his father, and their ancestors, and personal experiences.
- post_break 8y agoIt's like they are getting ideas from recipes. Want to know how to make muffins? My grandmother died and left me the recipe. She was a nice old lady, etc etc.
- bohadi 8y agoI know you're just kidding, but to the OP, this is from the magazine section. I haven't read the article yet, but sometimes at least, enjoy the occasional story in my news.
- thefifthsetpin 8y agoI think they're serious. Recipe websites make for great content farms as they naturally get page views that last for several minutes while requiring no creative writing skills for the recipe content. Prefixing the pages with some prose that the user has to skim through while searching for the start of the recipe affects engagement for the ads which monitor that.
- enraged_camel 8y agoIt's actually pretty simple: people can relate to stories much more easily than to abstract ideas. Today's journalists sometimes overdo it, though.
- post_break 8y agoI forget where I was reading about this but it was a trucker commenting on this. He had been driving trucks since the 70's supposedly and everyone was saying how there are no bugs on the windshields. He said he noticed that it came in waves. Some years, tons of bugs, others none. Now I know this is some unverified person on the internet that I can't find the source to, but it was interesting to hear if true.
- UI_at_80x24 8y agoThat really is accurate to all animal (humans notwithstanding) populations. Personal anecdote: I live in the Great Lakes region. Every spring Fish Flys [1] would swarm over every exterior surface and especially congregate near light sources. Some years were worse then others, and one particularly bad year I had to take a snow-shovel to clear the gas-station I worked at because the cars (and us workers) were slipping on the carpet that their bodies made. The piled-mass of bodies was as big as a snow-bank. And other years would pass and I would hardly notice that the 'season' had come & gone. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayfly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayfly
- stallmanite 8y agoI don’t know if there’s a reason that they’re bucking the trend but I live in the Great Lakes region as well and the population of eagles is doing crazy good. I’d never seen one before the year 2000 or so and now see then probably weekly. I realize eagles are not insects but just an observation on a wild animal population that seems to be doing well.
- throwaway5752 8y agoProbably true on small enough scales, but this seems to be a much more large scale phenomenon (based on the article it's international & multi-decade)
- Ensorceled 8y agoWell, I grew up in northern Ontario and we were talking about it at my family reunion and EVERYBODY remarked how few bugs there were these days compared to when we were kids. June Bugs, moths, grasshoppers ... every species has been hit. And this is all across Ontario; Kenora to Toronto, Sault Ste. Marie to Ottawa.
- kakarot 8y agoI'd always thought the Insect Apocalypse would be a little different. You know, like Evolution or Killer Bees or basically any scenario where we're the ones dying.
- wowzap 8y agoMan, I'm 25 and I feel like I've survived 10 apocalypse's already. What happened to Gore's prediction about the polar ice caps disappearing in 5 years?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wahlis 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Sea_Route https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Sea_Route
- EastLondonCoder 8y agoThey are fairly quickly disappearing: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2510/see-how-arctic-sea-ice-is-losing-its-bulwark-against-warming-summers/ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2510/see-how-arctic-sea-ice-is...
- endorphone 8y agoThis is the sort of dismissive commentary that people say to feel better about things. They might even vote for Trump to further cement the notion that they can will it into not being true. Yet the ice caps are disappearing. The Earth is warming. Extraordinary and troubling changes to the Earth are underway.
- esarbe 8y agoI guess it's easier to just shut ones eyes, put ones fingers into ones ears and sing 'La lala la lalala' very loudly than to actually question the viability of ones own consumption and its impact on the environment. I guess...
- OpenBSD-reich2 8y agoI would have voted for Uncle Adolf, but he wasn't running. :^)
- madshiva 8y agolol, the guy never suffer from war and say I've survived 10 apocalypse it's too much millenial dramatic
- dawnerd 8y agoNoticed fewer spiders in my house this year. Last year I couldn’t go a day without a couple on the walls. Other bug populations seem higher though here in the PNW. Been finding a lot of little beetles? On my walls, plenty of ants and flys.
- jason46 8y agoWhy won't all the fleas die
- Koshkin 8y agoBecause if they do, something even more nasty will come in their stead.
- williamstein 8y agoI remember being a kid in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. Whenever we went to a pond or lake in the woods, there would be little frogs and salamanders everywhere in the water. Now there aren't and I find this mass extinction right before my eyes really, really disturbing. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/amphibians-declining-alarming/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/am...
- novaleaf 8y agoGoing to a Pacific Northwest beach today vs 30-40 years ago, You may also notice a lack of seagulls on beaches. I remember Kalaloch on the Olympic Peninsula used to have thousands of the vermin. Go there now, and you are lucky to see 10 in an entire day.
- brohee 8y agoIn the case of seagulls, it may be better trash management since they love to strive on the stuff...
- novaleaf 8y agoexactly what I was wondering! My hatred of them stems from being pooped on as a kid every summer. Perhaps thats why I remember them so well.
- tjr225 8y agoWhile I find all of this stuff totally disturbing - claiming that you'd be lucky to see 10 seagulls at Kalaloch Beach is insane. I used to live in Olympia and would visit Kalaloch/Ruby Beach on a monthly basis - even camped there a couple weekends ago. There are seagulls(and Bald Eagles, and even Pelicans) all around there to this day. I even have photographic evidence(shot on a medium format toy camera right in front of Kalaloch Lodge earlier this year): https://i.imgur.com/hMwDuXs.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hMwDuXs.jpg I'm not sure what these birds' patterns are wrt to collecting food but a cursory dig in my photos shows that I've captured pictures of anywhere from a handful to hundreds of birds on this strip of coast on different occasions over the course of the last year and a half or so.
- gmoes 8y agoI think the American suburban yard may be equally responsible with agriculture for a lot of this in the US. The use of herbicides and pesticides is completely unregulated. Additionally lawns are an unnecessary waste of time for most people and have a large carbon footprint. I had a small native plant yard that attracted hundreds of pollinators and arachnids. I was treated like and criminal forced to cut most of it down. I still get a fair amount of terrestrial arthropods but not as much. It sickens me when I see workers with those sprayer packs or trucks that look like small chemical plants. Before I decided to comment I submitted my write up, if you are interested you can read that you can read here: http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban-yard-to-reverse.html http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban-ya... Edit: I did want to mention that I definitely seen a massive decline in butterflies and moths over the last 15 years. Update: I quoted 40 million acres below, which is for turf grass which probably includes athletic fields. I am not against everyone having a lawn or athletic fields. I do think people should be able to cultivate their native environment on their suburban property and this should be encouraged and even incentivized. My neighbor’s kids play in their backyard, so they have a need for it. Of course a non herbicide non monoculture lawn should work ok too. That’s what I grew up with. Also I think that gas powered devices need to be replaced with electric devices. I think something like 17 million gallons of fuel are spilled alone in relation to lawn maintenance. The thing that scares me is the normality of spraying for mosquitoes. In my area it’s the invasive Aedes mosquito species, the native species are a lot less aggressive. Also with some of these other very scary invasive species like the marmorated stink bug, ash borer, lantern fly, that new Asian tick, etc. Are we going to end up using more and more insecticides and subsequently kill more and more of our native fauna?
- mkirklions 8y ago>Additionally lawns are an unnecessary waste of time for most people and have a large carbon footprint. I made a serious attempt to do ANYTHING but a lawn. Here are the issues- No grass= erosion. This + weeds makes a dirt yard impossible. If you want to 'farm' there is tremendous maintenance involved Turf is expensive, but might have been a solution. More concrete= hotter. This is bad for the environment. --- So is the solution to let native plants grow all over your yard? We did this for 1 year, but my wife ended this.
- lixtra 8y agoCan this be explained due to changed land usage? For example [1]? Anecdotaly, I experience huge differences. The wild places seems to be humming as 20 years ago but there are less and less wild places. [1] http://archive.is/UUgzj http://archive.is/UUgzj Edit: Improved English.
- justin66 8y agoIt's a problem for sure, but it's not the problem. It's not like there's just one thing that we're changing in a way that effects ecosystems.
- PavlovsCat 8y agoHow would one donate money to these specific people? What others are similarly no-nonsense and worthy of support? > For some scientists, the study created a moment of reckoning. “Scientists thought this data was too boring,” Dunn says. “But these people found it beautiful, and they loved it. They were the ones paying attention to Earth for all the rest of us.” Why don't we support that more? That was my first thought, and then I remember we instead kinda empower those that subvert it, e.g > In particular, domestic surveillance has systematically targeted peaceful environment activists including anti-fracking activists across the US, such as the Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition, Rising Tide North America, the People's Oil & Gas Collaborative, and Greenpeace. Similar trends are at play in the UK, where the case of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy revealed the extent of the state's involvement in monitoring the environmental direct action movement. > A University of Bath study citing the Kennedy case, and based on confidential sources, found that a whole range of corporations - such as McDonald's, Nestle and the oil major Shell, "use covert methods to gather intelligence on activist groups, counter criticism of their strategies and practices, and evade accountability." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j... Collectively, we're kinda like a youth on a motorbike riding without a helmet because their peers might find that "gay". By that I mean, the main hindrance is in our head, it's not that it's so hard to put a helmet on, compared to the power of habit, memes, peer pressure. And yes, when you actually are in that situation, it can be powerful -- but in hindsight, you sometimes realize all the options you had but dismissed. > It's pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advantaged' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction. -- Noam Chomsky Just take that "paying for popularity can be fraud" article. I found it interesting from a technical/legal perspective, but the discussion itself is in big parts around the morality of it, namely how it's fine because "everybody does it, that's what a startup needs to do, etc.". My point isn't that that's so horrible and the reason the insects are gone, but compare that with this: > And his insect work is really all he wants to talk about. “We think details about nature and biodiversity declines are important, not details about life histories of entomologists,” Sorg explained after he and Werner Stenmans, a society member whose name appeared alongside Sorg’s on the 2017 paper, dismissed my questions about their day jobs. Leery of an article that focused on him as a person, Sorg also didn’t want to talk about what drew him to entomology as a child or even what it was about certain types of wasps that had made him want to devote so much of his life to studying them. That's not sexy, that's not "how it's done in the modern world" -- but it could be argued that it's how it should be done, and if we were more serious, too, then being so "dry" would be no problem at all. Just like not paying for popularity would be fine if nobody does it, and might make the marketplace a lot more efficient and friendly, as well save a lot of energy and resources. The notion of Kant's categorical imperative doesn't have to be completely absent from our thinking, we could rediscover it. Then maybe we could be talking about our survival as a species in a world that's worth living in. Sorry for being being polemic, but frankly, my initial reaction to this article was to actually sob for a few minutes. This hurts like hell. I was alarmed by talk of bees disappearing over 10 years ago, but like everybody else I had "other shit to do", and I simply can't bear see it all play out in my lifetime. Because I know all the CRAP we distracted ourselves with, and I see how we lie about that later on. First the smug condescion towards those taking anything "too seriously" we don't want to take seriously or don't understand yet, and then instantly jumping to "oh well, it's too late, nothing anyone could have done". There always were and are small little voices, and we always mostly ignore them, and pretend that's being mature and realistic, instead of cowardly or foolish. Let's change. We actually can. And let's start with stopping to excuse our own (in)actions with what everybody does, or "how humans are". Let nothing be called natural In an age of bloody confusion, Ordered disorder, planned caprice, And dehumanized humanity, lest all things Be held unalterable! -- Bertolt Brecht, "The Exception and the Rule" (1937) But go not "back to the sediment" In the slime of the moaning sea, For a better world belongs to you, And a better friend to me. -- Voltairine de Cleyre
- agumonkey 8y agoShould we build tiny insect/animal greenhouses ? to compensate and restart their population ?
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIf we stop spraying them with stuff specifically designed to kill them hopefully they'll come back all on their own.
- agumonkey 8y agoobviously but so far industrial farming is not near pesticide-free, so maybe people who have time can create small pockets of biodiversity
- mikestew 8y agoReading this in the NYT this morning, added to other coming global disasters, it occurred to me that given there isn't a whole lot I can do, my only regret is that I won't live long enough to see the end of the movie. Choke ourselves with CO2? Kill all the insects and the crops die off? (Maybe that was the disaster in _The Road_.) Something else even worse that we're currently fucking up, and don't even know it yet? Growing up, I thought it was going to be nuclear war, but I'm starting to think it will be not with a bang, but a whimper. But unfortunately, I can't flip to the last chapter. I just want to know how it ends. :-)
- umanwizard 8y ago> my only regret is that I won't live long enough to see the end of the movie. Unless you’re very elderly, I think there’s a good chance you will.
- mikestew 8y ago55, and I plan to see the start of the third act (which is arguably, umm, now), but I'm confident I won't get to see the credits roll. For the sake of everyone else, OMG I hope I don't, at least.
- hueving 8y agoA good chance humans will be extinct or killed off enough for civilization to end in the next 70 years? Highly unlikely. Even worst case global warming scenarios would just cull the population back a hundred years or so.
- spurcell93 8y ago"Just"
- hueving 8y agoYep, scary but still nowhere near extinction.
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- bambax 8y agoOT, but as I grow older I find it harder and harder to read those hyper-storified newspaper "stories". I don't care about the life story of all those people and their kids and how and why they were riding a bike in the forest 30 years ago. It's supposed to be a great progress in journalism to put people first and make stories relatable, but it's gone too far -- and it always sound the same. Bugs population is in sharp decline, here are the numbers, here are what scientists think are the causes, and the possible consequences, and the possible remedies -- is what I want to read. Sorry for the rant.
- jniedrauer 8y ago> I don't care about the life story of all those people and their kids and how and why they were riding a bike in the forest 30 years ago. I couldn't agree more. I find wikipedia to be the most terse and to the point way of consuming information (that is still accessible for me as a non-scientist). It's not always as current as I'd like but it's better than this. It would be nice if journalism could go back to being journalism.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jawilson2 8y agoThis is what I hate about watching the Olympics. It is 30 minutes sappily listing every tragic event in an athlete's life, and 1 minute of competition. If you didn't have anything to overcome (aside from relentlessly training for decades to become the best in the world) you probably won't be covered.
- androidgirl 8y agoI agree, though I'm in my early 20's. News stories are often exhausting to read now, they require filtering out hypersensationalism and identifying what's fluff and what's not. I personally wish more news was written like copy, and followed style guides focused on making information easy to find and consume.
- rsync 8y ago"I don't care about the life story of all those people and their kids and how and why they were riding a bike in the forest 30 years ago." Actually, the New York Times is particularly bad about this - not only about gratuitous background but also about gratuitous attribution ... very common to see an inch of column preceded by over an inch of attribution of a quote or whatever. I also find it very distracting and difficult to read. If you're interested, the Financial Times is the opposite - very concise, very pointed and even restricts front page stories to only their front page space. You can read more deeper in the issue, but the front page item is a self contained story with no page jumps.
- christophilus 8y agoI think we could fix this before it's too late. Anectdata, but I have my own yard, and a big chunk of it is now overgrown with strawberries (it basically looks like ivy, so the neighbors think it's fine). Insects love that patch of the yard. Combined with a handful of "wild" areas where I let the natives and wildflowers grow untended all season, my yard was swarming with fireflies, June bugs, butterflies, random pollinators I've never seen before and the occasional chipmunk. None of my neighbor's yards are remotely close to the biodiversity I have. My neighbors all spray for weed and mosquito control. If we mandated that a certain portion of our green spaces had to be reserved for insect and bird life, if we mandated a certain portion be meadows, basically, unsprayed, untreated, untouched, I think it'd go a long way to improving things.
- maxnocker 8y agoI live in northern Italy and cannot confirm this thesis and I would say even the opposite for my region. I never noticed so many insect than now and every year are coming new species. The population of this new species is multiplying rapidly!
- dreamcompiler 8y agoI just drove across central Italy from Rome to the Adriatic--mostly at night on the Autostrada--and got maybe two bug strikes on my windshield. That seems pretty thin to me.
- maxnocker 8y agoI know it because we have a farm at home and I see the diversity of insects constantly and the amout of some new species causes problems in the farms
- enraged_camel 8y agoWhat you are saying is literally no different than, "it's so cold outside, I thought there was supposed to be global warming!"
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoThey specifically said that it wasn't that way for their region. Which could be useful info...if this is occurring at different rates in different areas, we might be able to more easily pinpoint the causes.
- mpfundstein 8y ago‘They’ - we ruin our language ...
- hyperion2010 8y agoI wonder whether there might not also be additional factors that we have not considered. For example, insect viruses. We know that when human populations mixed between continents upwards of 95% of one population vanished due to disease. Very few people study insect diseases (and are usually just happy that a 'pest' has been killed), and there are so many species it would be a nearly impossible task to study them all. Globalization is now mixing members of all species and their diseases with them. It would not surprise me if part of this drastic decline was also due to massively virulent diseases sweeping through completely unprepared populations just as European diseases did to the indigenous populations of the Americas.
- sdenton4 8y agoPossible... But we know from a previous pesticide problem - DDT - just how disastrous a single chemical can be. And that was in the seventies: Big Ag has only gotten bigger since. I think agriculture has to be treated as the main cause unless definitive evidence to the contrary is produced. (And at the scales we're talking about, that evidence should be pretty easy to turn up, if it exists...)
- nyolfen 8y agothis is some really weak reasoning, lol. it most likely has many causes. as others have said elsewhere, it impacts rural uncultivated areas like rainforests as well
- acdanger 8y agoIn an ecological sense, what are the downsides of humanity killing itself off in the very near future? It seems like nothing but a net-positive for the rest of life residing on earth.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jeffmcmahan 8y agoSo what you're saying is, "in an ecological sense" you're fine with it if my children die of starvation? Well good for you.
- draw_down 8y agoGood grief, nobody cares about your kids in either direction. Sorry.
- outlawjwales 8y agoOn a long enough timeline, this world will face one extinction event after another: an ice age that covers our hemisphere, world killer astroid strike, super volcano eruption, etc. It is Human ingenuity that stands a chance of preventing or mitigating some of this. Maybe it will be preserving some level of biodiversity - even it if is just DNA samples.
- giardini 8y agoThis study appears to be yet another alarmist rehash of what has been 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%2.. 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. 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.
- moultano 8y agoThere have been many subsequent studies in different regions all cited in the article and all finding a precipitous decline.
- giardini 8y agomoultano says>"There have been many subsequent studies in different regions all cited in the article and all finding a precipitous decline.". Nope, wrong on both counts. All the article says is that professional researchers are _looking_for_data_sets_! From the article [underscores mine]: "Since the Krefeld study came out, researchers have begun searching for other forgotten repositories of information that might offer windows into the past. Some of the Radboud researchers have analyzed long-term data, belonging to Dutch entomological societies, about beetles and moths in certain reserves; they found significant drops (72 percent, 54 percent) that mirrored the Krefeld ones. Roel van Klink, ...is _looking_for_ historical data sets... So far he has found forgotten data from 140 old data sets for 1,500 locations that _could_be_resampled_. In the United States, one of the few long-term data sets about insect abundance comes from the work of Arthur Shapiro, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. In 1972, he began walking transects in the Central Valley and the Sierras, counting butterflies. He planned to do a study on how short-term weather variations affected butterfly populations. But the longer he sampled, the more valuable his data became, offering a signal through the noise of seasonal ups and downs. “And so here I am in Year 46,” he said, nearly half a century of spending five days a week, from late spring to the end of autumn, observing butterflies. In that time he has watched overall numbers decline and seen some species that used to be everywhere — even species that “everyone regarded as a junk species” only a few decades ago — all but disappear. Shapiro believes that Krefeld-level declines are likely to be happening all over the globe. “But, of course, I don’t cover the entire globe,” he added. “_I_cover_I-80_.” ... One is a pilot project in Germany similar to the Danish car study.
- bumble_ 8y agoWhile it seems sensible to turn and look at our use of pesticides for the cause of the decline in insect populations there appears to be another, much more sinister, element at play. "Goldenrod, a wildflower many consider a weed, is extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for bees as they head into the harshness of winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven’t bred it into new strains, it hasn’t changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian Institution also happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive—which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how one plant has changed over time. They found that the protein content of goldenrod pollen has declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in CO2. Scientists have been trying to figure out why bee populations around the world have been in decline, which threatens many crops that rely on bees for pollination. Ziska’s paper suggested that a decline in protein prior to winter could be an additional factor making it hard for bees to survive other stressors." I suspect there are multiple vectors involved in the observed declines and we have reached the tipping point where past colony sizes can simply no longer be sustained given the increasing pressures on multiple fronts. Source: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511 https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrie...
- pbreit 8y agoIsn't there an "insect apocalypse" every few years and never actually coming to any sort of fruition?
- ska 8y agoI don't think so. What makes you say that? The only thing I can think of that might be confused look like this is the ongoing discussion of bee colony collapses, that seems to have a "news cycle" of every few years. However, the problem is ongoing - it's just the lay reporting that is cyclical. And the impact has been very real, and very expensive to mitigate so far.
- pbreit 8y agoThis is the part that I wonder about: "And the impact has been very real, and very expensive to mitigate so far." Is there a good read for the actual impact, if any?
- steego 8y ago> Isn't there an "insect apocalypse" every few years and never actually coming to any sort of fruition? Would you call an 82% drop "coming to any sort of fruition" or are you holding out for a higher threshold? Seriously, what's your threshold for giving the idea a second thought? Do you need an actual full-on insect apocalypse with tangible and irrefutable economic consequences before you utter the words, "I'm not saying I'm sold on this whole insect apocalypse thing, but I think we ought to at least listen to what the entomologists are saying." I'm not going to pretend I know anything about the subject, but what's your threshold for simply not dismissing it?
- pbreit 8y agoThis is the fruition I'm referring to: "could alter the planet". Never seems to be the case.
- partiallypro 8y agoStrangely I've been reading the opposite should be occurring: https://www.uvm.edu/gund/news/global-warming-more-insects-hungrier-crops https://www.uvm.edu/gund/news/global-warming-more-insects-hu... Global warming should be increasing insect metabolism and their populations. I think it's very possible that we actually don't know what's happening, or if our solutions are making things worse as we try to engineer nature back to what we believe to be the "natural state." The only thing we can do is try to be as clean as possible, but I often wonder if what we find as solutions now are just going to cause massive problems in the future. There is no way to really tell.
- Diederich 8y agoGlobal warming/climate change is, above all, one result of an experiment of unprecedented scope. "What happens to this planet when we release vast quantities of heat trapping material into the air?" This is the very first time we've run this experiment, and the experiment is ongoing. In other words, there are and will continue to be enormous uncertainties about the details of what's ahead of us. > if our solutions are making things worse as we try to engineer As what one might call a 'climate change alarmist', going back a couple of decades now, I hear you and I don't necessarily disagree. I am far less eager to push forward with, for example, geoengineering and other grand responses than my fellow climate change 'true believers', simply because of how uncertain all of this is. Having said that, we as a civilization need to increase all manner of related research 100x or 10,000x, as soon as possible. In the same way that we have been forced to directly manage all kinds of natural resources because of our actions (for example: deer populations), so also will we be likely required to directly manage our atmosphere in various ways. But we need to be really fucking careful about it.
- hulton 8y agoBegs the question: What will 5G frequencies do to insects, birds and other animals? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5834628/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5834628/
- LiterallyDoge 8y agoIn case you were as annoyed as me by the verbosity: "[A] 2014 review in Science tried to quantify these declines by synthesizing the findings of existing studies and found that a majority of monitored species were declining, on average by 45 percent."
- crispinb 8y agoAnyone still think a hominid with cognitive facilities honed by evolutionary processes for small group interactions is (magically) up to the task of managing a global civilisation?
- jeffmcmahan 8y agoThey're evidently capable of doing advanced mathematics and of producing microprocessors among many other things, so whatever we think about them managing the globe, their intellectual equipment goes well beyond "small group interactions".
- crispinb 8y agoThat's fair: we have managed a pretty remarkable act of scaffolding up from an impressive evolved set of cognitive abilities. My sloppy throwaway line didn't capture my thought, which should have encompassed far more than 'cognitive', and made clearer that it's specifically large group decision-making I don't believe us to be capable of. We only survived the 20th century by the skin of our teeth (it was dumb luck), few ecosystems (which constitute our home) will survive the 21st, and I doubt global civilisation can survive for long as their collapse proceeds apace.
- scottlocklin 8y agoI like how the conversation here degenerated into arguments about watering your lawn; something which isn't really done in Germany, where this phenomenon was first noticed. FWIIW I noticed the lack of bugs mostly by noticing Spain seems to still have a lot of bugs sticking to the windshield (not so in Germany). Also the total lack of lightning bugs when I moved back to New England after two decades.
- agumonkey 8y agoAnother thing that strikes me is that this 'science' comes from informal~ groups of passionated people. No market to be seen here. Yet it's the foundation of our lives..
- mensetmanusman 8y agoThis would seem like a good time to invest in urban, vertical, pestacide-free farming enterprises. Anyone have recommended trading companies? On another note, evolution is an interesting discussion point. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/are-birds-evolving-to-avoid-cars-3530859/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/are-birds-evolving... I’m reminded of Henry Ford’s attempt to industrialize natural rubber production and the evolution of the insects in response that made his endeavor very challenging. Are some insects simply avoiding ‘grey patches of death’ ?
- therealdrag0 8y agoI think vertical, pesticide-free farming could be beneficial. But I don't see any reason to make it urban. We benefit from farming being very specialized, and it seems like putting it around other human activity would just make it more difficult than it needs to be.
- mensetmanusman 8y agoUrban would just reduce time/cost of transport of food to cities. Would also increase resiliance of cities to catastrophies to be entirely food supply independent assuming it can generate sufficient energy.
- fallingfrog 8y agoI’m seeing a lot of people giving anecdata here but it’s very easy to fool yourself and imho this feels like a story that is going to need a lot more study for us to understand what’s really going on. I can’t think of any obvious reason that either climate change or pesticide use in areas hundreds of miles away would affect insect populations. But, there’s a lot I don’t know. So let’s find out but not panic.