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'Alarming' loss of insects and spiders recorded
- LegitShady 7y agoThe main question is where have the spiders gone, and how far away from there is it physically possible to be?
- corey_moncure 7y agoTry this. Go outside at night, and take your smartphone with you. Turn the flashlight on, and shine it away from your face while holding the LED right above and between your eyes. Look at the lawn. If your lawn is like mine, you will see 4-5 shiny reflections from the grass in every square meter of your land. They're not dew drops. They're ground spiders.
- taneq 7y agoYour last line carries the horrifying implication of air spiders. :S
- shantly 7y agoI think that's mostly as opposed to, say, tree-dwelling spiders... but then again, you know about ballooning, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballooning_(spider) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballooning_(spider) Key quote: "Even atmospheric samples collected from balloons at five kilometres altitude and ships mid-ocean have reported spider landings."
- choeger 7y agoHoly shit. Someone needs to do something! These little critters sneaked into that position with no one noticing. They are definitely up to something! Think about the children!!!
- LegitShady 7y agosorry all i see are armies of skunks. no spiders.
- davmar 7y agoonly about half of the species of spiders spin webs. the others are hunters.
- cgriswald 7y agoAlternatively just come to my house and try not to trip over a zoropsis.
- skolskoly 7y agoJust don't go to Brazil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-9KPe3nwaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-9KPe3nwaQ
- kylebenzle 7y agoPretty amazing that we get to be alive to see the collapse of a global ecosystem that took millions of years to build. Awesome time to be alive :(
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- brer 7y agohttps://youtu.be/018C2oG2Rcs https://youtu.be/018C2oG2Rcs nobody wants to talk about it, but unmitigated proliferation of wireless technology has increased the ambient background RF by an estimated one quintillion times (in urban areas compared) to pre-industrial levels. while not the only cause, there are dozens of studies demonstrating effects in insects, especially related to absorbtion with regards to their size.
- HenryKissinger 7y agoI'm sorry to go against the grain, but forgive me for not shedding a tear at the impending disappearance of insects and shudders spiders. 1: I am aware of the importance of insects in the food chain. I know that many animal species, like small birds, feed on insects. I fully accept the consequences. The extinction, or near extinction, of insects is worth the disappearance of some animals. 2: I'm carving an exception for bees. We need bees for pollination (for now).
- bdamm 7y agoWhat if all wild animals died? Would insect extinction still be worth it?
- HenryKissinger 7y agoNo, it would not be worth it.
- hanniabu 7y agoWell there's your answer
- not_kurt_godel 7y agoI for one find insects and spiders to be a profoundly beautiful part of our world, and would severely regret their extinction even if it wouldn't be catastrophically consequential for humans (which to be clear, it absolutely would be). Some of my favorite insects/spiders are: dragonflies, butterflies, praying mantises, ants, cicadas, crickets and orb spiders. Appreciating their delicate beauty is an essential part of the human experience.
- xvilka 7y agoNot only beautiful, they are worth to study: the knowledge of spider's silk gave us better materials, spiders can fly with the electrostatic fields, Portia spider has a unique 3D-dimensional thinking of usually more complex creatures. And more secrets to discover in the future, I think.
- webwielder2 7y agoI would vote for any candidate who made this a pillar of their campaign. I wish we cared about important things :-(
- agumonkey 7y agoa caterpillar
- markdown 7y agoThe worst kind of candidate. You're think you're voting for a caterpillar but post-elections it reveals itself to be a butterfly. And not just any butterfly, but a migratory species that flies to Russia in the winter.
- loktarogar 7y agono butterfly that made this a pillar of their campaign would be flying to russia
- dmos62 7y agoIf people believed that, you'd have 10 candidates like that. Thus is the nature of populism.
- EGreg 7y agoTom Steyer I personally met Andrew Yang in 2018 and tried to get his campaign to be about two things: UBI and the Environment. I wanted him to embrace at least the Carbon Tax and Dividend bill. But they didn’t listen. So Yang isn’t an environmental candidate. I even care less about the CO2 than destruction of ecosystems: corals, insects, birds, fish, kelp forests and etc.
- WilliamEdward 7y agoBernard Sanders is also a good candidate if only for the fact that he would make a beeline for environmental change the second he's elected. He's been fighting for this his whole working life.
- peterwwillis 7y agoSo they're taking one thing they can measure and then kind of hand-wavey suggesting agriculture is the problem, and that's it. In the past, we have been overly eager to right the wrongs in nature, arrogant enough to believe we knew how, and as a result caused massive ecological destruction. Every time we intervene, we screw up, because we really don't have a handle on the complexity theory of nature. But none of that makes it into a story that's mainly there to fill the space that an advertisement doesn't take. I'm sure that the loss of insect populations is a major problem. But I'm also sure we have no clue how to fix it, and that the attempts will be very messy, possibly even worse. To me that's more scary than the immediate problem.
- zeofig 7y agoWe know exactly how to fix it: stop destroying their habitats and messing with the climate. Any other "fix" is going to be feelgood techno-fetishism.
- peterwwillis 7y agoWe don't actually know how to do those things. If we try to, we cause unintended side effects. Complex problems do not have simple solutions.
- vermontdevil 7y agoI know it’s anecdotal but driving long trips in the summer usually ends with a splattered windshield of bugs. Nowadays not so much.
- leggomylibro 7y agoPeople keep saying this, and I have to wonder where they're driving. In cities and along highways I agree, but when I get into the weeds and drive by farms / orchards / prairies, my windshield gets to the point where I can barely see out of it. I might not have to clean my windshield once in several months of city/hiking drives, but when I explore it's a different story. This article also says that the declines they observed were primarily driven by intensive agriculture. I wonder if it would behoove us to zone more wild spaces. Why not set up some new national forests, parks, and wildlife reserves? It's not like people don't also enjoy those things.
- petre 7y agoPrecisely that. Also slowing down intensive agriculture practices that also deplete the topsoil and doing actual crop rotation instead.
- hyperpallium 7y ago> it's alarming to see that such a decline happens not only in intensively-managed areas but also in protected areas
- unexaminedlife 7y agoMy anecdata says otherwise. I used to live in one of the most rural areas of the entire US. Farms galore. Can't recall, during the entire ~8 years ever having significant (or any for that matter) windshield issues.
- vermontdevil 7y ago8 years? Try 20 years. I started driving in the 90s. It’s very much different in that time span. And I drove through rural areas all the time (have family in those areas).
- mindfulhack 7y agoI sit on both coin sides of loving technology and loving the natural environment. We have to decide what we want, and what is important to us. We're only just at the beginning of our civilisation's development. We, the AI, and/or the AI we'll be connected to will be able to recreate and terraform, to bio-engineer species, environments and food however we want. I suppose until such time that we can do that, we do need to take the natural environment very seriously. I am increasingly concerned about climate change, but also human health. I also care about animals. We're only one of many, and I don't care how more 'evolved' I am than another species.
- FuckButtons 7y agoi Would argue we may be at the zenith of our civilization, environmental and ecological collapse seem not just possible but likely in the medium term if you look at the trends in co2 and biodiversity loss.
- flycaliguy 7y agoYour comment reads a bit like that of a cult member.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- spraak 7y agoI don't get that at all. Can you explain? How is it cultish to want to preserve the environment?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoThere's a thing that archaeologists do. Sometimes they come across a site that may be valuable but that they can't be sure they will be able to recover things without damaging them. Maybe there are pockets of empty space in the ground whose shape is very important, and they don't have the right kind of imaging technology. What they'll do is just stop and note it for the future, so that in a few decades new tools may become available that will allow us to get the information. To do otherwise would be to risk losing that information permanently. Nature is not dissimilar. Sure, it's conceivable that one day we might be so technologically advanced that we can easily modify the environment on a whim, recreating extinct species or being able to perfectly model the ecosystem and tweak it. And maybe we will opt to not have an environment and live off of solar energy or something. But we're centuries from that, and we don't know for sure that we'll ever be able to do those things. So, what's the responsible thing to do? Like the archaeologists, we must keep the environment around until we're sure we'll be okay without it.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoI am still old enough to remember “Silent Spring” and the fear that all the birds were disappearing. This lead to the banning of DDT. Unfortunately at the time there was not as good a substitute for mosquito control that matched the low human toxicity and persistence of DDT. As a result, millions of people, mostly children died from malaria and other mosquito borne illnesses.
- bwb 7y agoWow got a link? Millions and where was this?
- nngrey 7y agoAfrica has been the hardest hit. Progress has been made in reducing deaths in recent years, but millions is not an exaggeration and children have often been the victims. While most of us have a negative attitude towards DDT because of its impact on the wildlife, it did play an important role in controlling mosquitoes and reducing malaria infections in the past. https://www.who.int/news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/malaria https://www.who.int/news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/malar... http://www.healthdata.org/research-article/global-malaria-mortality-between-1980-and-2010-systematic-analysis http://www.healthdata.org/research-article/global-malaria-mo... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ddt-use-to-combat-malaria/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ddt-use-to-combat...
- bwb 7y agoThanks all, reading!
- _Microft 7y agoGo have a lot at https://www.ourworldindata.org https://www.ourworldindata.org, they definitely have articles on Malaria and progress over time.
- viburnum 7y agoTobacco companies promoted this myth about how great DDT is because they were trying to undermine health science generally. It’s a right-wing scam. Don’t fall for it. http://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/30/ddt-tobacco-and-the-parallel-universe/ http://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/30/ddt-tobacco-and-the-para...
- tropdrop 7y ago> However, some insect species, such as houseflies and cockroaches, appear to be on the up. If this trend continues, I wonder if we will see some species previously reliant on spiders for food (birds?) switch to more cockroaches and houseflies. More likely, we will see a radical restructuring of what we consider to be "common" species. For instance, hedgehogs and sparrows - incredibly common in my own childhood - are apparently quietly disappearing from places where they were previously abundant. What will replace them?
- Areading314 7y agoNothing will replace them, there will just be less life. It's the result of spraying toxic chemicals everywhere.
- SyneRyder 7y agoAustralia's "Foreign Correspondent" ABC TV program did a 30 minute documentary recently on this, interviewing the scientists involved, showing the methodology and features some beautiful German scenery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKpknKwbKsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKpknKwbKsI The farmers had an interesting response - since farming without chemicals results in much lower yield & less income, they were letting people "sponsor" chemical-free areas of their farm (think Patreon for farming). The more sponsorship they received, the more areas of farmland they converted. At a certain threshold, people could even pay to have the farmland replaced entirely with flowerbeds for bees.
- y4mi 7y agoThat approach sadly doesn't scale, however. Especially going forward. Wages in non tech industries have already stagnated for years and inflation continues to rise. Give it another ten to twenty years and there won't be enough money in the working class to sponsor such initiatives. Heck, it can't scale even short term. The more farmers take part in that initiative, the less money there will be to actually do something with it.
- kick 7y agoGive it another ten to twenty years and there won't be enough money in the working class to sponsor such initiatives. Luckily, (in the US, at least,) the DoA has been paying landowners for decades not to plant things on their land, so the working class doesn't need to foot the entire bill. It's a reasonable and scalable approach, assuming government cooperation.
- y4mi 7y agoI was specifically talking about farmers taking donations to stop using chemical pesticides and similar. Having a department sponsored by tax money could scale, if the lawmakers deem it necessary to increase their budget. It's a very different approach from the parents example though
- 7y ago
- hyperpallium 7y agoSo alarmist! Like after the Great Oxygenation Event, which wiped out the organisms who caused it, new organisms evolve. Life goes on, folks! Just, without us and our ecosystems.
- pfdietz 7y agoSo if there were (for sake of argument) a Great Cyanidation Event, we shouldn't be worried about it? :)
- rhegart 7y agoWe need to tackle environmental issues at the local level too. Small cities are homogeneous and easier to deal with
- natmaka 7y agoThis. Centralization causes many problems. Everything is nowadays decided "far away". Facing whatever problem, most now think that "the government has to do something" or one of the usual variants (the most common one being "with SOMEBODY as president, this would already be fixed!"). The government/president won't fix anything, as usual. Gov/prez are too far away, too absorbed by being re-elected and cronyism, reigning on a too big and therefore heterogeneous and complicated territory... Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. Leopold Kohr described it clearly (~60 years ago)!
- lotsofpulp 7y agoThe single biggest problem in America is excess consumption due to single family homes with garages and zoning separating residential and business areas. That’s definitely not getting solved on a local level.
- natmaka 7y ago"zoning separating residential and business areas" is absolutely not "local". Back to local, then most problems will be fixed.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoWhen I've had to appeal zoning laws, I've had to do it on a city or county level. No state I've worked in has involved higher level governments, at least not for homes/small businesses, unless there were environmental concerns.
- natmaka 7y agoAre those cities or counties populated by more than a few hundred souls? They are too big. This is not 'local' in my book, whatever the denomination (city, county...). Moreover some/many underlying principles of many "local" laws are induced by higher level governments, either by direct or indirect pressure (no funds granted without such and such law), or by "culture" (local public servants being, or willing to be/resemble, like the big guns).
- walkingolof 7y agoSomething I've come to think about when reading about the loss of insect biomass, and this is purely anecdotal, but it would be interesting to see if anyone else seen this. When I was young in the 70s/80s and the family was on a car vacation, it seemed like we often would stop to clear our windshield from bugs, the radiator would be full of them also, what is scary is that I do not see that now when my family is out on a car trip...
- mvdwoord 7y agoI remember this particular data point being refuted by cars becoming more and more streamlined. The bugs don't die anymore, they whoosh over ;) Anecdotal: after driving at normal speeds, very few bugs indeed, also compared to 30 years ago. After prolonged driving on the autobahn at high speeds (200kph+) there are more bugs on the front of my car than ever. I am quite sure there is a significant decline in insects, and we should be worried and act upon that, but the bugs on car thing is not the best way to measure.
- Rotareti 7y ago> I remember this particular data point being refuted by cars becoming more and more streamlined. I've been driving the same car for 20 years. I remember cleaning the bugs from the roof rack after each longer trip. There were so many bugs, the front of the rack was entirely covered with a dark coat. These days the roof rack stays completely free of bugs. I simply don't have to clean the rack any more.
- krig 7y ago> I remember this particular data point being refuted by cars becoming more and more streamlined. This hypothesis is commonly offered as a possible explanation, but it's not a refutation and doesn't seem to hold up against evidence.
- raphman 7y agosee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon
- Erlich_Bachman 7y agoBut biodiversity loss has happened many times in the past, and the system is still here. More importantly, we are still here. The species loss has occured many times even in the recent history while Homo Sapiens were already out there, and a lot more times if we include very close relatives of most advanced primates. It's not just that "system continues", primates even continue. Other species thrive, new ones come up and evolve, new niches form etc. Why would this time be any different? How do we know that this is somehow worse than the previous times? How do we know that this is not the natural process of evolution? Why do we assume that the graph of number of species has to go straight up all the time? How do we know there aren't supposed to be plateaus and dips? So yeah, if you can you consider answering seriously before downvoting, that would be great. I can't understand what in the history of science of species should make me believe that this event is bery bad on the long-term scale? Will there be many adjustments and problems? Yes? Will we adapt? Most certainly? Or why not?
- DoreenMichele 7y agoIf we wipe out "everything," Mother Nature will deal herself a new hand and continue playing solitaire with herself. But we wouldn't be around to see it. We worry about this stuff because we fear we might not survive.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y agoIn the worst case scenario, couldn't most of us just become vegan (with some supplements of course)? There seems to be many plants which are not entirely reliant on insects, or which could survive on minimal number of them, or which could be easily agricultured to thrive without them. Wouldn't this be even better morality-wise?
- GVIrish 7y agoIn the worst case scenario weather patterns will shift enough that large scale agriculture will fail in parts of the world that are currently productive. Heat waves, floods, and drought can and will destroy entire crops. Furthermore, sea level rise and stronger storms will destroy ports and transportation infrastructure, making it harder and more expensive to transport crops.
- ElDji 7y agoWhy the BBC chose to quote the alarming word ? In my opinion, quote usage have the effects to minimize something (= strong decline in insect population) that is quite well established by facts.
- Tharkun 7y agoAnother anecdata-point: I am seeing waaaay more mosquitos than 20 years ago, but a lot fewer of every other kind of insect.
- GVIrish 7y agoThat may be because mosquito predators have been hit very hard by pesticides whereas the mosquitos have developed resistance. A dragonfly eating mosquitos ends up with a higher concentration of a pesticide because it eats a lot of other insects that may have been exposed to a pesticide. The other problem for the dragonfly is that it has a longer lifecycle and produces less offspring per generation than a mosquito. So it has far less ability to achieve pesticide resistance than the mosquito does. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/05/how-pesticides-actually-increase-mosquito-numbers/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/05/how-p...
- christophilus 7y agoFrom what I can tell, all of the spiders have moved to my garage.
- koheripbal 7y agoThis site is turning into Reddit. Do the people with more informative comments now frequent another site? Back to slashdot?
- huffmsa 7y agoAre we sure that it's not just a case of being able to measure more accurately?
- Symbiote 7y agoYes. The academics behind the study are not idiots, and understanding measurement and the relevant measuring instruments is a foundation of pretty much every field of science.
- huffmsa 7y agoSure, which is why 60-70% of research findings are difficult to impossible to reproduce. Which is why "economists" are all filthy rich from their highly accurate, highly precise predictions about economic trends. Which is why stories about a software bug potentially skewing the results of thousands of studies was at the top of this site all of last week.
- Symbiote 7y agoThrowing unfounded doubt onto the work of some experts is about as useful as shouting "fake news!".
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bufferoverflow 7y agoBut let's use more insecticides. What can possibly go wrong?
- Colt45RPM 7y agoDid you look under the couch cushions?
- pers0n 7y agoStop mowing your lawn for 6 months or more. And you'll see more insects than you have for decades
- StanislavPetrov 7y agoUnless and until most people are willing to accept that the earth's resources are finite and our massive overpopulation is not sustainable this problem will simply accelerate until we die off from starvation (or killing each other from the wars over resources that will inevitably occur). You can only squeeze so many people onto a spaceship with finite resources. At some point, no matter how efficiently or responsibly you try to allocate those finite resources there will not be enough resources to sustainably support an ever-increasing population. Earth is the spaceship. Unfortunately everyone would rather keep their head in the sand and pretend that technology will solve all of our problems while the ecosystem we literally depend on to survive is being depleted and destroyed in front of our very eyes.