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In an otherwise healthy environment, even killing billions of bugs on car windshields probably doesn't even dent the overall population. It would just free up t
by theonemind 5y ago
In an otherwise healthy environment, even killing billions of bugs on car windshields probably doesn't even dent the overall population. It would just free up that amount of resources in their carrying capacity in their ecological niche and they'd get replaced. The real problem comes when you start destroying the carrying capacity of their ecological niche itself with chemical pollution, and/or damaging each and every member of the whole species with ubiquitous chemical pollution, not just even a large number of unlucky individuals that end up in front of car windshields.
We splattered them on windshields incidentally, but the stuff coming out of the tailpipes probably did more damage.
- 14 5y agoI often wondered how much of an effect it has had all the bugs hitting cars. How fast do they reproduce? At what rate were they dying on cars? If an average drive remembers their car being plastered with hundreds of bugs a trip surely they don’t reproduce faster then all the cars combined kill. It has to be a net negative, right?
- dahfizz 5y agoTaking mosquitos as an example: a female mosquito can lay ~100 eggs each time it feeds, and those eggs take < 10 days to mature into adults. Assuming each female only lays one batch of eggs (conservative), A single female mosquito can spawn over 125,000 other females per month. I'm not sure that every single bug is like that, but the exponential growth is pretty crazy. As your parent said, the carrying capacity of the environment is all that really matters. If a population can multiple 125,000x per month, it is basically guaranteed to fill the environment's carrying capacity no matter how many you kill. https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/resources/factSheets/MosquitoLifecycleFINAL.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/resources/factSheets/MosquitoLife...