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Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car,
by mads 8y ago
Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...
- azinman2 8y agoCould the design of cars be the driving factor?
- zizee 8y agoSame car? Could improved aerodynamics play a part?
- mads 8y agoMight be it.. Ford Mondeo back then and an Opel Meriva today.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoI noticed the effect motorcycling. With an aerodynamically unchanged helmet and headlight, riding mainly naked bikes. Last time I saw this crop up in a thread another comment claimed they actually were using the same car. Maybe 50 years of these rivers of metal boxes reliably taking out trillions of insects yearly has played a part too.
- johndough 8y agoI also observe less insects on my windshield, same car as 25 years ago.
- black-tea 8y agoYou drive too far. That's insane.
- paulddraper 8y agoTime wise though, it might be a faster commute than in Silicon Valley.
- mads 8y agoAround 1.5 hours today each direction, but I am commuting to a different country and have to cross a bridge. Back then it was 1 hour or so - maybe a little less if traffic was good.
- black-tea 8y agoHow can you waste that much of your life? You've spent almost an entire year over the past ten years just moving your body around because other people want you to.
- kasey_junk 8y agoThis would be considered a long but not especially noteworthy commute in the US. 1.5 hours each way gets you into the “supercommuter” level but 1 hour each way is fairly common.
- black-tea 8y agoI did just over an hour each way for three months and questioned what the point was. I was wasting my life just so I could live in one place and work in another, but for what? My "living" basically consisted if eating and sleeping and my body started to become fat and unhealthy due to not having the time to exercise. What's the point of transporting a fat, useless body 100 miles every day?
- kasey_junk 8y agoOh, I'm 100% onboard that one of the quickest ways to improve your life is to lower your commute time. I'm just saying commuting that long is not a particularly odd thing to do.
- lazyjones 8y agoI guess you eradicated all insects along your commute route. More seriously, my car is full of dead insects just from a few trips to the airport and I live in a metro area with almost 2 million people.
- BaronMingus 8y agoPossibly a factor. I think it's quite likely insect numbers are declining but some amout of the windscreen affect could be accounted for by good old Darwin - all those insects you scraped off your windscreen found their reproductive success curtailed with extreme prejudice.
- manmal 8y agoYes, insects are also vastly reduced. In my region, there’s an increase in ticks (and tick-borne disease) because there are less insects, leading to less birds, leading to thriving ticks. So, an annoying side effect of reduced insect count is that we have lots of ticks in our gardens. BTW we have non-organic agricultural fields in 50m distance of our house, so that _might_ be a factor for the dying insects. Oh, and organic agriculture also uses pesticides. They just use different („natural“) ones.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoYou'd think there'd also be an uptick (ha!) in animals that eat ticks, but maybe that takes a lot longer to correct itself. If it wasn't for the prevalence of pesticides, insect populations would restore due to a shift in balance - that is, less insects = less predators eating them, less predators = more insects, etc.
- manmal 8y agoI’m afraid a couple ticks per garden are not enough for any animal to survive..
- m-i-l 8y agoThe dramatic reduction in insects on car windscreens could be "explained away" by technological advances in car design (getting windscreens covered in insects could conceivably have been a problem great enough for someone to have invested time and money into resolving with more efficient aerodynamics of windscreens or whatever). Not saying that is actually the cause, just that many people could rationalise it as such. The earthworms on a path or road is slightly more troubling though. Not something I'd thought about before, but there is a path through a park where I grew up that used to be covered in earthworms after every rain when I was a child, but the odd times I've been back up since in similar conditions I've not noticed any at all. Being a park it wouldn't have been exposed to more intensive farming or anything else. Same park, just a different time. Chilling thought that there could be significant and detrimental changes underway in nature, happening on generational timescales so slowly that no-one notices, a little like the proverbial frog in boiling water.
- Rotareti 8y ago> The dramatic reduction in insects on car windscreens could be "explained away" by technological advances in car design I have been driving the same car for 20 years with the same roof-rack. 20 years ago the roof-rack was crusted with insects after each trip on the autobahn. I had to clean them off with a bucket of water and a sponge after each trip. I remember this because it was a standard routine. These days, when I come back from a trip, there is nothing. I haven't cleaned the rack for years.
- wnkrshm 8y agoWith the introduction of LED lighting and lighting becoming cheaper with it, the amount of artificial light at night has increased over the last decades and may be contributing to declining insect populations as has been noted in the UK and Germany.