12 ms·

Critique of the recent study on insect decline

93 points by simonsarris 8y ago

pvaldes 8y ago
I wonder why nobody has though in the obvious wordplay: "artropogeddon".
- nkurz 8y ago
  Not a bad suggestion, but maybe better in English as "arthropogeddon"?
vixen99 8y ago
'...an ecologist who works on insects: this study simply does not show evidence that global insect declines are happening, nor does it provide evidence that insects will be extinct in 100 years... but it is a wakeup call.'
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
from the comment section of this article: > Might this be a case of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy? I notice the lead author on the paper relates a windshield anecdote in The Guardian article. Is it possible that his observation of fewer insects on the windshield led to the original biased search terms? > There’s at least one paper describing localized declines along busier roadways. It makes sense that day after day, year after year, road traffic will cause a lot of mortality. > Martin, Amanda E., et al. “Flying insect abundance declines with increasing road traffic.” Insect Conservation and Diversity 11.6 (2018): 608-613. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/icad.12300 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/icad.12300 pretty interesting article altogether (sadly so).
ars 8y ago
It seems too preposterous to be real, did this meta study really only search for studies containing the word decline? If that's actually true then obviously the results would show a decline. It doesn't even make any sense. Why would they do that if they want a real study?
sgc 8y ago
I did not expect the issues brought up about this study to be basic undergrad level research errors. Since all it takes is some db access and a short time, it would have been nice to get more info on studies that would have been worth including. Of course the study in question is inconclusive because done very sloppily, but there is no indication by the critic as to whether there is reason to believe the data is available to reach a more verifiable conclusion.
tedunangst 8y ago
Was expecting this to be about the great insect robbery: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/06/stolen-insects-7-000-animals-vanish-philadelphia-museum-heist/1211887002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/06/st...
decasia 8y ago
So… My first instinct when I read debunking efforts like this is to try to check out who is doing the debunking. I'm not an ecologist, so I don't have the necessary background knowledge to evaluate the merits of the studies in question. But here's the author's CV: https://ecologyisnotadirtyword.com/research/ https://ecologyisnotadirtyword.com/research/ She got a PhD the same year as me, 2014, so that's pretty early career in academic terms. She's published a series of pretty standard sounding academic papers in a range of standard sounding journals, which is a positive credibility signal for sure. She does a bunch of public outreach work for the environmental sciences, which is great. I liked her effort to explain in plain language what scientific evidence is: https://theconversation.com/scientific-evidence-what-is-it-and-how-can-we-trust-it-14716 https://theconversation.com/scientific-evidence-what-is-it-a... So in general, as an academic in social science, I tend to find her post credible here on general this-looks-like-a-fellow-academic grounds. This being said, I hadn't heard of the institution where she got her PhD before (Charles Sturt University), and I find it a little bit interesting that on google, pretty much the first hit says "#CSU works closely with industry, ensuring our courses keep pace with change." Like it or not … when an institution positions themselves like that, it makes me wonder a little bit about whether they really can support unbiased environmental science, since industry has huge financial stakes in the outcomes of environmental research.
- michaelneale 8y ago
  Charles Sturt Uni is a fairly well regarded Australian university. It isn't one of the so called "sandstone club" but I believe it does legitimate stuff (it isn't that easy to be called a university here). They also often specialise in rural/earth science matters (I always thought of them as a rural uni). If that helps? Yeah it is my instinct to to use credentials but then I pull myself up and think "is this a high brow ad-hominem thing" but it probably makes sense to be curious/skeptical at first.
  - decasia 8y ago
    Absolutely, this is useful context, thanks! I completely agree there's a lot of danger of ad hominem analysis in these kinds of cases. From my perspective, I probably would not post about this sort of thing at all, if it were a more mundane issue. But there seems to be a lot at stake in the climate crisis issues, so I'm trying harder than usual to figure out how to get my bearings.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
My daughter who did her master's thesis in computational biology on modelling the western pine beetle would agree with this. Her research showed that western pine beetle populations were expanding (no need to tell Californian's this but there it is) in part because their available habitat is expanding with changes in the climate. Her take was that the mix is changing because the climate is changing. It takes time for ecosystems to adapt and as they do some species "lose" and some "win".
- rb808 8y ago
  You're right, it also highlights another of the problems, the new insects cause more problems than the old ones they're replacing. Seems we lose stable populations of friendly insects we're familiar with, and replace them with aggressive new ones like pine beetles, stink bugs, disease carrying mosquitos and ticks etc
  - matis140 8y ago
    Looking at extinction and new niches created like our happy little stickle back fish sees an advantage. The stickle back fish contains the genes of past versions fresh water adapted or salt water adapted. Maybe more (alkilin vs acidic vs high o2 or low 02)? These happen within a generation or few. I wish we were longer lived to see what happens. it seems like it would be very interesting to watch. I cannot imagine the stickleback is the only invertebrate carrying this genetic baggage. Watching the niches change and genetic variations of current creatures fill them would be very interesting. I wish we had some form of stacis we could put ourselves in to observe what happens.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  “We are replacing all of the pollinators with bark beetles as our forests die of heat/drought, and the latter don’t seem to be getting wiped out by pesticides” is not an especially encouraging take. Though I guess it’s better than “nearly all insects on earth will die out in the next century” or whatever.
  - gizmo686 8y ago
fallingfrog 8y ago
She's right, the media does tend to pick up anything that spurs the amygdala and run with it. I would consider insectageddon to be nowhere near the kind of established science as say, climate change. We have some suggestive studies, but no clear and definitive proof, so further study is very important right now.
johnny313 8y ago
> We don’t know anything about most insect species on Earth. Only about one-fifth of the estimated number of insect species are known to science. This is simultaneously incredible and unsurprising. There is still so much to discover about the world!
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  I believe something like 80%+ of them are exclusive to tropical rain forests, with a massive chunk living only in the Amazon rainforest.
iheartpotatoes 8y ago
For a rebuttal, the author lists numerous facts with no citations. Am I wrong for wanting citations in a rebuttal that is adamant about misleading facts in another paper? Why believe one set of uncited facts over another? It is clear that the search terms were problematic (what an awful regex!), so I can understand the issues there. And the author does a great job emphasizing science is complex. However, it seems a tad hypocritical to criticize a paper and make the same sins.
iceninenines 8y ago
This article is predicated on a strawman: it's not all the insects that have declined, and not all insects that splatter into moving vehicles, but a limited subset of flying insects.

93 points by simonsarris 8y ago

pvaldes 8y ago

I wonder why nobody has though in the obvious wordplay: "artropogeddon".

nkurz 8y ago
Not a bad suggestion, but maybe better in English as "arthropogeddon"?

vixen99 8y ago

'...an ecologist who works on insects: this study simply does not show evidence that global insect declines are happening, nor does it provide evidence that insects will be extinct in 100 years... but it is a wakeup call.'

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago

from the comment section of this article: > Might this be a case of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy? I notice the lead author on the paper relates a windshield anecdote in The Guardian article. Is it possible that his observation of fewer insects on the windshield led to the original biased search terms? > There’s at least one paper describing localized declines along busier roadways. It makes sense that day after day, year after year, road traffic will cause a lot of mortality. > Martin, Amanda E., et al. “Flying insect abundance declines with increasing road traffic.” Insect Conservation and Diversity 11.6 (2018): 608-613. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/icad.12300 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/icad.12300 pretty interesting article altogether (sadly so).

ars 8y ago

It seems too preposterous to be real, did this meta study really only search for studies containing the word decline? If that's actually true then obviously the results would show a decline. It doesn't even make any sense. Why would they do that if they want a real study?

sgc 8y ago

I did not expect the issues brought up about this study to be basic undergrad level research errors. Since all it takes is some db access and a short time, it would have been nice to get more info on studies that would have been worth including. Of course the study in question is inconclusive because done very sloppily, but there is no indication by the critic as to whether there is reason to believe the data is available to reach a more verifiable conclusion.

tedunangst 8y ago

Was expecting this to be about the great insect robbery: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/06/stolen-insects-7-000-animals-vanish-philadelphia-museum-heist/1211887002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/06/st...

decasia 8y ago

So… My first instinct when I read debunking efforts like this is to try to check out who is doing the debunking. I'm not an ecologist, so I don't have the necessary background knowledge to evaluate the merits of the studies in question. But here's the author's CV: https://ecologyisnotadirtyword.com/research/ https://ecologyisnotadirtyword.com/research/ She got a PhD the same year as me, 2014, so that's pretty early career in academic terms. She's published a series of pretty standard sounding academic papers in a range of standard sounding journals, which is a positive credibility signal for sure. She does a bunch of public outreach work for the environmental sciences, which is great. I liked her effort to explain in plain language what scientific evidence is: https://theconversation.com/scientific-evidence-what-is-it-and-how-can-we-trust-it-14716 https://theconversation.com/scientific-evidence-what-is-it-a... So in general, as an academic in social science, I tend to find her post credible here on general this-looks-like-a-fellow-academic grounds. This being said, I hadn't heard of the institution where she got her PhD before (Charles Sturt University), and I find it a little bit interesting that on google, pretty much the first hit says "#CSU works closely with industry, ensuring our courses keep pace with change." Like it or not … when an institution positions themselves like that, it makes me wonder a little bit about whether they really can support unbiased environmental science, since industry has huge financial stakes in the outcomes of environmental research.

michaelneale 8y ago
Charles Sturt Uni is a fairly well regarded Australian university. It isn't one of the so called "sandstone club" but I believe it does legitimate stuff (it isn't that easy to be called a university here). They also often specialise in rural/earth science matters (I always thought of them as a rural uni). If that helps? Yeah it is my instinct to to use credentials but then I pull myself up and think "is this a high brow ad-hominem thing" but it probably makes sense to be curious/skeptical at first.
- decasia 8y ago
  Absolutely, this is useful context, thanks! I completely agree there's a lot of danger of ad hominem analysis in these kinds of cases. From my perspective, I probably would not post about this sort of thing at all, if it were a more mundane issue. But there seems to be a lot at stake in the climate crisis issues, so I'm trying harder than usual to figure out how to get my bearings.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

My daughter who did her master's thesis in computational biology on modelling the western pine beetle would agree with this. Her research showed that western pine beetle populations were expanding (no need to tell Californian's this but there it is) in part because their available habitat is expanding with changes in the climate. Her take was that the mix is changing because the climate is changing. It takes time for ecosystems to adapt and as they do some species "lose" and some "win".

rb808 8y ago
You're right, it also highlights another of the problems, the new insects cause more problems than the old ones they're replacing. Seems we lose stable populations of friendly insects we're familiar with, and replace them with aggressive new ones like pine beetles, stink bugs, disease carrying mosquitos and ticks etc
- matis140 8y ago
  Looking at extinction and new niches created like our happy little stickle back fish sees an advantage. The stickle back fish contains the genes of past versions fresh water adapted or salt water adapted. Maybe more (alkilin vs acidic vs high o2 or low 02)? These happen within a generation or few. I wish we were longer lived to see what happens. it seems like it would be very interesting to watch. I cannot imagine the stickleback is the only invertebrate carrying this genetic baggage. Watching the niches change and genetic variations of current creatures fill them would be very interesting. I wish we had some form of stacis we could put ourselves in to observe what happens.
jacobolus 8y ago
“We are replacing all of the pollinators with bark beetles as our forests die of heat/drought, and the latter don’t seem to be getting wiped out by pesticides” is not an especially encouraging take. Though I guess it’s better than “nearly all insects on earth will die out in the next century” or whatever.
- gizmo686 8y ago

fallingfrog 8y ago

She's right, the media does tend to pick up anything that spurs the amygdala and run with it. I would consider insectageddon to be nowhere near the kind of established science as say, climate change. We have some suggestive studies, but no clear and definitive proof, so further study is very important right now.

johnny313 8y ago

> We don’t know anything about most insect species on Earth. Only about one-fifth of the estimated number of insect species are known to science. This is simultaneously incredible and unsurprising. There is still so much to discover about the world!

b_tterc_p 8y ago
I believe something like 80%+ of them are exclusive to tropical rain forests, with a massive chunk living only in the Amazon rainforest.

iheartpotatoes 8y ago

For a rebuttal, the author lists numerous facts with no citations. Am I wrong for wanting citations in a rebuttal that is adamant about misleading facts in another paper? Why believe one set of uncited facts over another? It is clear that the search terms were problematic (what an awful regex!), so I can understand the issues there. And the author does a great job emphasizing science is complex. However, it seems a tad hypocritical to criticize a paper and make the same sins.

iceninenines 8y ago

This article is predicated on a strawman: it's not all the insects that have declined, and not all insects that splatter into moving vehicles, but a limited subset of flying insects.