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No net insect abundance and diversity declines across US
- m4r35n357 6y agoFeed bees; grow Lavender!
- hanniabu 6y agoI believe they also like clover lawns, and gardens... really anything besides the sterile grass and concrete structures that have been marketed to be idolized.
- angst_ridden 6y agoOur (non-native) fennel plants seem to be a significant attractor of bees and other pollinators. They also serves as a host plant for Anise Swallowtail butterflies. The bees also really like the citrus (oranges, lemons, citron, grapefruit), cuphea, milkweed, buddleia, lavender, and lantana.
- hinkley 6y agoOn the fennel, or any umbel flower for that matter, you should also be seeing adult ladybugs and lacewings (both eat aphids during part of their lifecycle) as well as hoverflies and predatory wasps.
- angst_ridden 6y agoYup, we see all of those. As well as the occasional assassin bug.
- hinkley 6y agoLavendar is great, but umbels hit a broad variety of insects, especially predatory species. Yarrow, fennel, Queen Anne's Lace, hemlock (do not grow this please), and many others. If you are on the west coast, Ceanothus is even more popular among bees of all kinds than is lavender (also bigger, and with better life expectancy). Just don't plant it along a walkway, or people will be brushing past the 'bee bush'.
- hn_check 6y agoA prior discussion had some solid evidence[1] that insect populations naturally fluctuate, and we tend to notice when they wane, holding it as harbingers, but dismiss it when they wax. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24071745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24071745
- hyperpape 6y agoAm I wrong in reading that the solid evidence is your anecdote, in a post that links to itself? My hat is off to you.
- oh_sigh 6y agoI don't think that is fair - I've seen the argument being made in other places than the link OP provided. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133975
- MiroF 6y agoSeems like your test of this theory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899565 failed, since you've been downvoted to the nether yourself.
- hn_check 6y agoNah, I was actively soliciting people to follow it, doubly so given that it is an internal HN link and not an abstract article. It was just a subtle little chuckle of a post.
- blakesterz 6y ago"Some taxa and sites showed decreases in abundance and diversity while others increased or were unchanged, yielding net abundance and biodiversity trends generally indistinguishable from zero. " That's very interesting, and REALLY surprising. Even the citations listed there has this one: "More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas." Hoping to see the details on how they did things.
- hinkley 6y agoThis all gets really complicated really fast. Which is not to say we shouldn't discuss it or even take preliminary actions, but it does mean the answers will evolve. One of the profound moments for me reading 1491 is the assertion that the collapse of buffalo and passenger pigeon populations was at once tragic and overblown - the absence of anthropomorphic pressure on the environment caused these populations to explode, draw more attention, and ultimately collapse through predation. Meanwhile, many of the chemicals we banned post-Silent Spring affected insects and birds. Insect numbers are affected by many ecological stressors, from range, to pollution, to predation by birds. If you kill or drive away all of the barn swallows and purple martins, you get more mosquitoes. If the barn swallows come back, you get fewer mosquitoes. If you set up martin houses, fewer mosquitoes. Fewer mosquitoes? Fewer dragonflies. All along the food chain things shift.
- paulcole 6y agoWhen I was a teenager, I caught a bunch of beetles and put a dot of white out on some of them. Then I went back a week later, caught a bunch of beetles again, and counted how many had white out on them. Used that to estimate the beetle population. This wasn't a school project.
- chris1993 6y agoYou might have been inadvertantly measuring how white dots make beetles more susceptible to predation.
- joshvm 6y agoEcology is incredibly difficult because everything is horrendously under-sampled. Essentially all ecology reduces to counting species over time and somehow extrapolating to huge areas. So-called total count surveys are extremely expensive. I can only speak from a megafauna perspective (eg not insects), but there were recently some results that suggested that animal decline in Africa was overestimated. Caused quite a stir. And it makes sense when you learn how people count animals in aerial surveys - photographic interpretation is novel because most ecologists are not used to dealing with that level of data, nor the complexity in designing the camera systems, and it was impractical to do with film in the past. The gold standard is someone with a voice recorder in a plane. When you actually go through aerial photographic surveys, you spot all sorts of things that the observers missed, because they're not superhuman. That's not to say there is no decline - poaching has still decimated populations - but for some species it might not be as bad as you think. In theory the methods (things like JOLLY2) are supposed to correct for you missing a certain percentage, and distance to the animals etc, but that relies on you knowing what those uncertainties are. I don't know how insect surveys are performed, but you have to understand that you're always trying to make sweeping assumption about "the whole of the US" based on very sparse sampling. Not to mention controlling for different environments. For example in the paper you cited, they try and control for a ton of stuff like habitat. I'm not an entomologist so I won't comment on the paper beyond that, but do be aware that "standard techniques" may well be something that we've done since the 60s and nobody questions it.
- option 6y agothis is great news! Insects population decline would mean almost immediate catastrophic consequences.
- antisthenes 6y agoCertainly true for mosquitoes in the Northeast. Despite me improving drainage on the property, there seems to be at least a dozen of them hovering near my legs as soon as I go outside. N=1, however.
- mohaine 6y agoIf you live near others, good luck. Too many people leave buckets other containers out.
- sgt101 6y agoI have noticed a sharp upswing in insect life in the UK this year - but perhaps because I was really thrown by the talk of decline last year so have been looking hard since.
- Loughla 6y agoI've noticed a sharp downturn in invasive species in my portion of the US this year (Japanese Beetles and Asian "Lady" Beetles especially) with an upturn in native species. I attributed it to the really late frost. Maybe there's something else to this? I don't know anymore, everything is upside down anyways.
- sgt101 6y agowe had the opposite - an early and warm spring that didn't end with a sharp surprise in April or May. Loads of butterflys and moths as a result.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eecc 6y agoYes, less fireflies and ladybugs, yet plenty of bloody tiger mosquitoes... I’d say is a typical case of “half chicken statistics”
- MereInterest 6y agoI'm not familiar with the phrase "half chicken statistics", and a basic google search was unhelpful. What does that generally refer to?
- m4r35n357 6y agoI think it might be an in-joke about modelling animal populations with floating point numbers. [EDIT] Just realized the poster said _less_ fireflies, so my guess might be correct ;)
- KineticLensman 6y agoI'm guessing stats where the basic question doesn't reflect reality. "If a chicken and a half lays an egg and a half in a day and a half, how many eggs will three chickens lay in thirty days".
- Recursing 6y agoIt's a famous saying in in Italy on the problem of losing information when averaging "If one person eats a chicken and another person doesn't eat anything, on average they both ate half a chicken" Or in a similar way something like: "If I eat two chickens and you eat none, statistically we both ate one"
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoThis reminds me of this old joke: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089588
- skocznymroczny 6y agoIn Poland we use "on average, me and my dog have three legs"
- hguant 6y ago>Recent reports of dramatic declines in insect abundance suggest grave consequences for global ecosystems and human society. Most evidence comes from Europe, however, leaving uncertainty about insect population trends worldwide. This makes me wonder how much of the decline in Europe is due to the ecological side effects of two highly destructive world wars. Mechanized, combined arms combat moves a lot of dirt around, via explosions, and tracked vehicles ripping up the soil, which would kill or disrupt a lot of insect's breeding/eggs. Large swaths of mainland Europe were carpet bombed, or subject to intense artillery fire. Additionally, after the war, reconstruction efforts would have disturbed even more soil and insect habit, coupled with the Green Revolution's increase in fertilizers, pesticides, etc. If the insect population in Europe was previously devastated, or diminished by physical upheaval, then it wouldn't surprise me that the population as a whole hasn't recovered from, and is still losing ground to, the more pervasive insecticide and manufactured pollutants (ie all the plastic derivatives, BPAs, etc) that have become part of our environment.
- MiroF 6y agoAt least in many of the European studies I've seen, the numbers point to a 75% decline in flying insect mass over the past 30 years. Certainly a whole lot of the loss has at least been in the post-war period.
- dmix 6y agoIsn’t Europe making much greater use of their land than in most other continents? With larger populations in smaller countries geographically. Wide swaths of the US (particularly in the west) and the vast majority of Canada are relatively untouched.
- dakna 6y agoMost studies I read about the decline in insect population in Europe compared to a baseline from around 30 years ago. Here is one source (written in English) about areas in Germany: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- AMerrit 6y ago
- giardini 6y agoThe classic Predator-Prey Model demonstrates drastic swings in both predator and prey populations: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Predator-prey_model http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Predator-prey_model This model was one of my favorite revelations in high school.
- belly_joe 6y agoIs there a way to check local insect levels without harming their populations? A lot of comments in here have been anecdotal observations of pretty big population swings and I too (in the northeast of the USA) have noticed the insect populations have increased over the past two years after a nadir in prior years, but I have no real way of determining what's going on scientifically. Wondering if anyone has experience doing something like this: https://rodaleinstitute.org/science/articles/how-to-monitor-insect-populations-on-your-farm/ https://rodaleinstitute.org/science/articles/how-to-monitor-...
- ianai 6y agoStamets is hoping to make smart bee feeders eventually to help count them while nurturing their populations too: https://fungi.com/pages/bees https://fungi.com/pages/bees
- giardini 6y agobelly_joe asks: "Is there a way to check local insect levels without harming their populations?" Hire a Buddhist to go camping and keep a log of bites/hour.
- makerofspoons 6y agoWith a decent (perhaps high speed?) camera and a trained computer vision model, couldn't a contactless study be performed of flying insects? It should be possible to count the common species in an area with reasonable accuracy and flag photographs of unknown species for human review. Definitely not as cheap as a trap, but perhaps with solar power could be just as easy to place. Unless someone with experience with these studies can make the case that the number of insects killed by these traps is negligible and all this effort isn't worth it of course.
- veddox 6y agoThe problem is you simply cannot identify most insect species from photographs of them flying. Depending on which taxon you're working on, you have to do things like count the number of tarsi (foot segments) on each leg, look at the vein pattern on their wings, count the hairs on their thorax, or other minutiae. Also remember that most insects are only a few millimeters in size. Some taxa can readily be identified in the field (butterflies, most grasshoppers, some beetles and true bugs). Others (dipterans and hymenopterans and pretty much anything smaller than 5mm) need to be done in the lab, with a good stereoscope and big identification books. It helps to have a steady hand and lots of experience... (In fact, several taxa are so difficult to identify down to the species level that there might only be one or two experts in the whole country that can reliably do so.)
- TheMagicHorsey 6y agoI know anecdote is not data, but I’ve been driving through rural California for decades. I definitely noticed that in the last few years I have significantly less insects caking my windshield after a long drive than I did ten years ago. This could be explained by changes to windshield design, changes to car lights, and changes to the land adjacent to highways.
- oh_sigh 6y agoOr the insects are learning...
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoDenser bits of the air, like insects, will have a much harder time abruptly changing direction so vehicles with worse aerodynamics tend to pick up insects for the same reasons that water trap style air filters work. While windshield angles haven't changed much over the years car front ends tend to get much more aerodynamic treatment than even 20yr ago.
- robocat 6y agoI’m not sure about windscreens, but research disagrees overall with your point: “The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.” From https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-spla...
- viraptor 6y agoThis makes sense to me. A flat box design will push a thicker pillow of air in front of it than an angled surface. I wouldn't expect it to matter for a bumblebee for example, but would think the small mosquitoes get pushed away more easily with airflow.
- mrlonglong 6y agoIndeed, this has been my experience in the 1990s, in the UK I would be regularly cleaning dead squished bugs off the front of my car at the time. I very rarely see any of that nowadays. Maybe they have evolved ...
- durbatuluk 6y agoThis type of measurement using quantitative data should be interpreted with care. At least here in Brazil most of places where some impact occur have an increase in net diversity and abundance. Many new sp. invade the niche left open by the former community and what you see is a shift of the entire community.
- ImaCake 6y agoWhich, while terrible to see the loss, gives me some hope that we have less power over nature than we think. A housing suburb is undeniably a less wonderful place than the forest it replaced. But life will inevitably find a way to colonise that suburb. Black birds and Camel crickets bring me hope. But I wish we would stop burning down rainforests and building boring suburbs.
- rcoveson 6y ago> A housing suburb is undeniably a less wonderful place than the forest it replaced. Agreed, though with the notable exception of my own housing suburb, which I prefer over whatever it may have replaced.
- rvp-x 6y agoI am under the impression that rain forests are primarily burned down for cattle ranching or cattle feed.
- partiallypro 6y agoAnecdotal, but I've seen so many insects this year in the US, more than other years. It could be a factor of being home more and also a resurgence. I'm not sure.
- mfer 6y agoSome things to think about... It's important to look at total diversity and changes within that total. They don't need to happen together. Noting differences between the US and other places like EU is useful. Might there be something happening in one place that's not happening in another? Identifying differences can provide insight.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoGotta love the way that good environmental news is greeted with caution and skepticism, while bad news is greeted with immediate acceptance and acclamation. This is good news! Let's hear it for the bugs! woohoo!
- adventured 6y agoIt entirely obliterates the insect collapse myth in the US. It's not skepticism and caution it's being met with, it's in denial mourning and willful head-in-the-sand'ing at the destruction of a critical piece of propaganda. Accordingly the remarkable, honest, rational, brave and scientifically sound study must be attacked and stopped no matter the cost.
- ncmncm 6y agoOne study does not obliterate anything, even if the methods were not questionable. Look at the bumper of any long-haul truck and tell me insect populations are not down vs 40 years ago, and I will laugh in your face.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoAs others have said, that's got a lot more to do with improvements in truck design than changes in insect population.
- ncmncm 6y agoLook at the bumper of an actual truck and repeat that. I will laugh in your face again.
- marcus_holmes 6y agohttps://www.jstor.org/stable/44718756?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/44718756?seq=1 First paragraph "...during the late 1970's and early 1980's considerable effort was expended in the improvement of truck aerodynamics..." And stop laughing in my face. Or at least put a mask on first.
- ball_of_lint 6y agoGood on these scientists to post a "No change" result, even if it is surprising.
- ngold 6y agoIt's supposed to be science, not am opinion piece.
- folli 6y agoYou underestimate the value of surprising and unexpected results for one's academic career.
- asdff 6y agoValidation is everything.
- cryptonector 6y agoValidation rarely happens nowadays for many many results.
- asdff 6y agoIn biology, if you don't have validation you aren't getting published in Nature. Maybe other fields play faster and looser, but this field demands evidence for claims and support from other sources validating these findings before they are seriously accepted by the community.
- refurb 6y agoHow is the validation done? If you discover a brand new biological phenomenon, are you saying you can get it published unless someone else does the same experiment and gets the same result?
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
- sradman 6y ago> The US National Science Foundation initiated the establishment of a network of Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites in 1980, and these now encompass a web of 25 monitoring locations across each of the country’s major ecoregions (Fig. 1). The paper includes both source data and source code (R data analysis) [1]. [1] https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.cc2fqz645 https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.cc2fqz...
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoHow do they take into account the insects that were in areas turned into fields, industries and cities ? Are there traps there as well ?
- nkurz 6y agoFull article: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41559-020-1269-4 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/s41559-020-1269-4 Fun sentence about the breadth of the data: "Types of arthropod data include grasshoppers per sweep in Konza Prairie (Kansas), ground arthropods per pitfall trap in Sevilleta desert/grassland (New Mexico), mosquito larvae per ovi-trap in Baltimore (Maryland), pelagic macroinvertebrates per tow and crayfish per fyke net in North Temperate Lakes (Wisconsin), aphids per suction trap sample in the Midwestern United States, crab burrows per quadrat in Georgia Coastal Ecosystems, ticks per person/hour in Harvard Forest (Massachusetts), caterpillars per plot in Hubbard Brook (New Hampshire), arthropods per pitfall trap and sweep net in Phoenix metro area (Arizona) and stream insects per rock scrub in the Arctic (Alaska) (Table 1)." The crayfish and crabs surprised me, considering the title mentions only insect abundance.
- throwaway5752 6y agoFrom the paper's abstract, "The apparent robustness of US arthropod populations [...]"
- quercusa 6y ago'ticks per person/hour' - there's a fun stat!
- mistrial9 6y ago.. did not read, serious BS radar alarms.. lifelong California resident and this absolutely does not match my observed experience.. Particularly since the Malathion spray event, which showed massive elimination of larger spiders and colorful insects, by direct observation with my own eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_California_medfly_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_California_medfly_attack
- lopmotr 6y agoIt agrees with you - "Some taxa and sites showed decreases in abundance and diversity" But rejecting science in favor of personal anecdote is ridiculous bad thinking when an anecdote doesn't disprove it.
- Guzba 6y agoWe should probably let researchers know to check their results against your observed experience to ensure they line up.
- xvedejas 6y agoIs it not consistent with your personal observations that the relative concentrations of diversity have maybe moved? I'm not sure how that possibility would contradict you, given your honestly limited geographical experience.
- mistrial9 6y agoclarification - I read actual science and large, sourced reports routinely. I also read the history of science obfuscation paid for by companies facing new, legal liability, btw. I don't mean to suggest "ignore science" .. I mean to say "I think I will announce prima facia suspicion and get on with other tasks now"
- esarbe 6y agoThis is such an amazing finding. The data from Europe is really scary, so having such a positive finding from the USA is dearly needed, good news. It's a shame that there seems to be some valid criticism with regards to the paper, I'll have to dig in further. I hope we get more data soon so we get a fuller picture of where we stand in matters of insect population and diversity.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stx 6y agoThis sounds pretty surprising to me since I thought I kept hearing that insects were in decline globally. This made me curious. One thing I often check is who the author(s) are and what their links to industry might be. For example if the paper claims that "Smoking is good for you in moderation" and then after googling the author I find they have ties to Marlboro I start to doubt the authenticity of the research. In this case the authors are mostly organizations that from what I can tell do not have any affiliation with for example an insecticide company or even a company. The only non organization author I see listed is Michael S. Crossley. I googled him and did not find anything suspicious. He does not appear to have a background in entomology or ecology. I am not really sure if that is reason to be suspicious but just thought I would share. Here is a link about one of the authors: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/education/people/michael-w-crossley/index.html http://www.bristol.ac.uk/education/people/michael-w-crossley...
- AlotOfReading 6y agoYou've linked Michael W. Crossley, the lead author is Michael S. Crossley. The google scholar profile for the latter matches the contact email in the paper and shows a history of related work. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=X5W_3dYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=X5W_3dYAAAAJ&hl=en...
- P4wl0w 6y agoI suppose it all comes down to the methods to measure - just like with COVD statistics. Because one method does not come to the same conclusion others do does not automatically prove that it really is that way.
- spiderfarmer 6y agoThe research that says insects are in decline seems highly questionable to me. They don’t differentiate per species and measure per kilogram. If some heavier species like moths have a successful couple of years, they heavily skew the statistics. There also is not a lot of data on insect populace and the data that is there doesn’t go back for a very long period. I think most articles cite one local German research project on the topic.
- afrcnc 6y agoScientific research coming from the US, country of all climate-change deniers and big corps. Yeah, I'll pass.
- lopmotr 6y agoYou disregard all US science? Really? Good luck knowing anything about the world at all.
- BurningFrog 6y agoOne way we're all misinformed is because "things are pretty OK" studies like this never go viral.
- wozer 6y agoSo maybe it's only in Europe. Could there be some influence in Europe which is not observable in the US, not even in the densely populated areas?
- etangent 6y agoMy best guess is some specific pesticide.
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoAnother aspect, beyond potential differences in pesticides or pesticide application methods might be Air pollution. Europe has very small footprint compared to the US but proportionally a very high PM2.5 particle concentration and NO2 concentrations (specially Northern Europe) in particular around major port trading hubs and petro-chemical facilities, the market share of Diesel engines in Europe is also a major NO2 contributor. The US is heavily industrialized but sites are actually much more spread out and most of the pollution above recommended levels is concentrated on the East coast of the US. If the air pollution aspect is a factor in insect population than it would follow that we would see huge insect population losses in large parts of China and Southeast Asia but I don't have data that supports or denies this?
- lostmyoldone 6y agoSeems there is a fair bit of non-flying insects in the data, and seems also to be only few sites, so might be hard to compare with European data? European decline is afaik mostly related to flying insects. Short on time, but it would be interesting to compare population densities, as that's quite likely a major factor.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoI wonder if it is the dramatic difference in population density.
- ur-whale 6y agohttps://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1269-4 https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1269-4