4 ms·

There have been many subsequent studies in different regions all cited in the article and all finding a precipitous decline.

giardini 8y ago
moultano 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.
- moultano 8y ago
  I don't think you even read the quotes you posted, let alone the whole article. How does the second one you posted not meet your criteria? You also missed one. a study just out from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he labeled, “Krefeld comes to Puerto Rico.” The study included data from the 1970s and from the early 2010s, when a tropical ecologist named Brad Lister returned to the rain forest where he had studied lizards — and, crucially, their prey — 40 years earlier. Lister set out sticky traps and swept nets across foliage in the same places he had in the 1970s, but this time he and his co-author, Andres Garcia, caught much, much less: 10 to 60 times less arthropod biomass than before. (It’s easy to read that number as 60 percent less, but it’s sixtyfold less: Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams.)
  - giardini 8y ago
    You said> "_many_ subsequent studies in different regions _all_ cited in the article and _all_ finding a _precipitous_ decline." There aren't "many" there are only a few. Those are scattered in content, some are unpublished, some are unpublished data, all by varying types of researchers in different fields and with varying methodologies. One study is about spiders, another about insects, etc. This is hardly "Insect Apocalypse" - it is just "Insect Madness". I'm willing to wait until more serious research is done and collated. The fact is this article and many others about "Insect Armageddon/Apocalypse" were triggered by a single study of a a single 220-acre area of German wilderness by a bunch of amateur bug-chasers. Here they are: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/world/europe/krefeld-germany-insect-armageddon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/world/europe/krefeld-germ... And here's their paper that started it all: http://www.bouldercountybeekeepers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Orbrioch-Nature-reserve.pdf http://www.bouldercountybeekeepers.org/wp-content/uploads/20... Read it and weep. A study of 220 acres in Germany. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 for criticisms and notes. Not that their work isn't worthwhile (I'll leave that for others to decide). But from their original article we now have many, many misleading and alarmingly shrill articles, all predicting a worldwide insect population collapse based on very little scientific evidence.

giardini 8y ago

moultano 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.

moultano 8y ago
I don't think you even read the quotes you posted, let alone the whole article. How does the second one you posted not meet your criteria? You also missed one. a study just out from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he labeled, “Krefeld comes to Puerto Rico.” The study included data from the 1970s and from the early 2010s, when a tropical ecologist named Brad Lister returned to the rain forest where he had studied lizards — and, crucially, their prey — 40 years earlier. Lister set out sticky traps and swept nets across foliage in the same places he had in the 1970s, but this time he and his co-author, Andres Garcia, caught much, much less: 10 to 60 times less arthropod biomass than before. (It’s easy to read that number as 60 percent less, but it’s sixtyfold less: Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams.)
- giardini 8y ago
  You said> "_many_ subsequent studies in different regions _all_ cited in the article and _all_ finding a _precipitous_ decline." There aren't "many" there are only a few. Those are scattered in content, some are unpublished, some are unpublished data, all by varying types of researchers in different fields and with varying methodologies. One study is about spiders, another about insects, etc. This is hardly "Insect Apocalypse" - it is just "Insect Madness". I'm willing to wait until more serious research is done and collated. The fact is this article and many others about "Insect Armageddon/Apocalypse" were triggered by a single study of a a single 220-acre area of German wilderness by a bunch of amateur bug-chasers. Here they are: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/world/europe/krefeld-germany-insect-armageddon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/world/europe/krefeld-germ... And here's their paper that started it all: http://www.bouldercountybeekeepers.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Orbrioch-Nature-reserve.pdf http://www.bouldercountybeekeepers.org/wp-content/uploads/20... Read it and weep. A study of 220 acres in Germany. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14323533 for criticisms and notes. Not that their work isn't worthwhile (I'll leave that for others to decide). But from their original article we now have many, many misleading and alarmingly shrill articles, all predicting a worldwide insect population collapse based on very little scientific evidence.