3 ms·

A looming 'insect apocalypse' could endanger global food supplies

54 points by Brajeshwar 1y ago

onetokeoverthe 1y ago
[dead]
mschuster91 1y ago
There's one reason not mentioned - habitat loss, be it caused by urbanization [1] or by land consolidation ("Flurbereinigung") [2][3]. It used to be the case that rural areas were splintered into many small farms, with bushes being used to mark borders, and these bushes in turn provided harbor and food for insects and cover for small rodents and other mammals. "Thanks" to mechanisation however, which prefers large uniform land because thats easier for ever larger machines to process, a lot of these splinters were consolidated together and so there is nothing left to support any wildlife, be it insects or small animals, which in turn also causes bird populations to drop - when there are no mice because they don't have any place to build their nests, the birds don't have food as well. [1] https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/insekten-im-klima-und-landschaftswandel/ https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/... [2] https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/flugbegleiter-umfrage-insektenschwund https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/flugbegleiter-umfrage-... [3] https://naturschutz-initiative.de/aktuell/neuigkeiten/landwirtschaft-fuer-insekten-schaedlicher-als-klimawandel/ https://naturschutz-initiative.de/aktuell/neuigkeiten/landwi...
- ben_w 1y ago
  Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century. Now sure, the causes could be multipliers, insect_pop = base * (cause_0 * cause_1 * …), or even exponential, insect_pop = 1/e^(cause_0 + cause_1 + …), so I'm not saying none of that stuff matters, but also there's definitely something nee.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century. Sure, but the real push came over the last few decades, (IMHO) closely correlating with the utter decline of employment in the primary sector [1], that was all machines and efficiencies of scale. [1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Wirtschaft/Konjunkturindikatoren/Lange-Reihen/Arbeitsmarkt/lrerw13a.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Wirtschaft/Konjunkturindik...
- epolanski 1y ago
  The thing that gets on my nerves is that this is really an unsolvable political problem. When governments do try to push and make it law to have X amount of bushes and unfarmed land in a way that makes sense for wildlife to thrive you instantly get angry farmers on your roads, lose their votes and get publicly accused to starve the nation. And farmers, due to the difficulty of their job (in time, investments and returns) and their role in a society's lifecycle get instant empathy. There's areas in Italy where farms have absolutely polluted water to insane level, and this further compounds with heavy pollution of drinkable water wells (which should always be at least 120 meters from the closest farm from what I know). Regular citizens, which end up getting heavily sick from all these farms (often in mortal ways) never get any kind of support as they lack the political and financial weight, and as soon as the argument scales, you're back at populist "you want to starve our people and kill our economy" arguments. I had a house in the country, by law there shouldn't be more than one chicken farm in a 4 miles radius, yet they built two in less than 2 miles, one of them 300 meters from my house. It literally smells in disgusting ways 24/7, from ammonia to rot I had to sell it for pennies (5'000 euros, renovated), as nobody but the farmers in the area had the slightest intention to moving to such a beautiful yet disgusting place. And I haven't even mentioned that to avoid having to bring the hundreds of dead animals to a registered incinerator (as the law requires) they just dig mass graves in 5 minutes and cover the entire land. Wildlife has absolutely disappeared. It's really a tough, tough political battle. Everything from agriculture to cattle to fishing is insanely polluting and bad for the environment, but the idea of really tracking and controlling how those industries operate is beyond naive. The labels on your tuna can saying it didn't kill dolphins are worthless, there's no way to check what happens on these boats, so are the labels for your coffee or cocoa not using child labor or your food being organic. It's all absolutely fake and a matter of money.
  - maybewhenthesun 1y ago
    Tell it like it is! Here in the netherlands as soon as you try to do something, the farmers start flyingh upside down flags. I call them the 'head in the sand' flags since they stand for ignoring the problems. I fear the problem is just that the earth suffers from an infestation of humans and the equilibrium will be restored in the same way all infestations end. It won't be pretty (already isn't in lots of places).
- terminalshort 1y ago
  But that isn't true in all areas. And the particular study in Germany that found a 76% decline was done in forest areas.
jmclnx 1y ago
Plus I heard somewhere song birds are declining due to this apocalypse. But mosquitoes are not declining, the one insect I wish would decline real fast :)
- terminalshort 1y ago
  Actually I feel like they are. I would get mosquito bites all the time as a kid when I went outside in the evening. Now I almost never do.
- PaulKeeble 1y ago
  They are spreading further north now, places that have mostly been free of them are starting to see mosquitoes now due to the increased temperature.
  - rc_mob 1y ago
    and higher altitudes. its nuts. ticks also are doing this.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  One day, humankind will force a full mosquito extinction. That day can't come soon enough.
  - exasperaited 1y ago
    Why get rid of all mosquitoes when only about one in every fifteen mosquito species bites us?
acessoproibido 1y ago
Archive Link: https://archive.ph/mpOkK https://archive.ph/mpOkK
Retric 1y ago
The windshield test is somewhat deceptive as improved aerodynamics plays a role, but the difference is still quite noticeable when driving around in a classic car.
- magicstefanos 1y ago
  But a lot of people drive old as shit cars.
  - TulliusCicero 1y ago
    "Old as shit" is still a moving target. An old as shit car from 30 years ago is not the same model year as an old as shit car today.
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      To memory, cars started getting a lot more aerodynamic through the 90s. You have to go back to the 80s to find boxy designs throughout mainstream cars, at which point you’re looking at vehicles somewhere in the ballpark of 40 years old. Anecdotally, I’ve not seen many of those on the road. It’s not too unusual to see a late 90s something puttering around town, but 80s and older is unusual, even in rural areas.
    - rjsw 1y ago
      Someone driving the same car for a long time will have seen the change in numbers of insects getting stuck to it.
    - dlcarrier 1y ago
      I drive a car that was released 25 years ago (a 7th-gen Celica) and it has a coefficient of drag of 0.32, which beats many vehicles currently in production, including multiple electric vehicles.
      - Retric 1y ago
        Now compare that to a car which would have been 25 years old, 30 years ago.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
WillAdams 1y ago
Habitat seems to play a large role --- I've always raked leaves and piled up sticks which fall from trees in our yard into a compost pile in a shady area, which I've been careful to disturb as little as possible from from fall through spring, since fireflies lay eggs in such piles, and their larvae mature in such conditions. My kids would invite their friends over on nice summer evenings to see fireflies, since none of the McMansion neighborhoods had nearly as many.
exe34 1y ago
I moved to the countryside in the last year. it's night and day as compared to the nearby town that I lived in, when it comes to insects and spiders. I constantly find corpses of insects on the window sill and the spiders are chunky, given how well they feed.
terminalshort 1y ago
> The second driver is habitat loss — the inexorable creep of urbanization, deforestation and sterile suburban lawns, which host fewer and less-diverse ranges of insects. I don't buy this as a cause of a global decline, though. In many areas things have gone in the opposite direction. The Appalachian mountains were clear cut in the 1800s and now are back to forest. If this theory is correct, I would expect there to have been a massive increase in insect populations on the east coast.
- snypher 1y ago
  Forest isn't some Boolean you can toggle 0 and 1. It's not the same forest, why would we expect the same inhabitants?
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    If you want to claim that the forest that is there now is somehow dramatically worse for insects than the forest that grew there before, that's going to need some evidence behind it.
    - samschooler 1y ago
      There was a study done. I’m not sure exactly the study, but it’s from a book called Natures Ghosts. It talks about a Roman farm from around 0AD. The farm plot was clear cut, while the forest around it was never touched, including up to this day. The scientists cataloged the plant and animal species from both the farm plot and the untouched forest. Even though the farm plot had massive trees, and hasn’t been disturbed for 2000 years, the difference in species was massive. On the ancient farm plot: many parasitic species/invasive, off the plot: more prominence of delicate or unique species; just a few hundred meters apart. This is what “different forest” is. Edit: found the study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17601136/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17601136/
      - terminalshort 1y ago
        The study describes it like this, which sounds like it's the opposite: > Plant species richness strongly increases toward the center of the settlements, and the frequency of neutrophilous and nitrogen-demanding species is higher. When I hear things like "delicate or unique species" I get the feeling it's not a particularly scientific conclusion.
PaulKeeble 1y ago
We keep getting these warnings, for decades now insect biomass has been in sharp decline and so far we have done very little to try and reverse it. At some point ecosystems are going to go into collapse including ones critical for our food chain.
- amelius 1y ago
  Thanks for another warning.
cryptonector 1y ago
^Fpesticide Nothing here in this thread. We're overusing pesticides. It's a problem. We should stop. Here in the Texas hill country we don't have much agricultural use of pesticides, but out in East Texas we do. In the hill country I see plenty of insects.
Tanoc 1y ago
A large portion of the habitat loss I suspect isn't actually lawns, which have been decreasing in size as suburbs have been increasing in density. Many suburbs built since the 1990s are so tightly packed that you can't fit a car between the houses to get to the back yard, and the back yard itself is two thirds of the footprint of the house itself. What I suspect is driving it is actually pavement and development ready property. The footprint for pavement for a building is usually three times the footprint for the building itself. This includes parking lots, connecting roads, sidewalks, and even the concrete slabs needed to place things like air conditioning units or tall signage. That pavement denies undergrowth and pioneer species that small insects thrive on seasonally. It also denies water runoff. Without the water being able to saturate the ground it gets redirected to elsewhere. There's several issues with that, including unnatural subsidence and runoff pollution. The ground has some ability to naturally filter out small amounts of pollution as water seeps down through the soil and to the water table. But if there's pavement all of that water torrents to a single area which gets oversaturated. The soil can't hold any more, and so the water is rejected and pools above the surface. This is why you see so many puddles at the edges of parking lots or road intersections. This allows the pollutants to concentrate, and when the ground finally does absorb the excess water it pulls in those pollutants all the way down to the water table as they're in too high a concentration for the soil to capture. And development ready property is an actual serious problem. Companies buy real estate and then deforest and regrade it in anticipation of someone eventually buying it. They don't have a buyer lined up, they're just expecting someone to eventually want to settle there, be it a business or a home. In the meantime they keep the land stripped, with no trees or shrubbery, no native plants, and sometimes without even grass. There are places I've seen that were turned into development ready property that have sat hollow and scarred for twenty years. Even in places where there's native plants, undergrowth, and pioneer species that overcome this, the continual removal of trees makes it almost impossible for animals to stay there for long. Part of this is that with the heat island effect of nearby pavement you get constant blowing lateral winds. Winds which birds can't use as updrafts, winds which blow away rodent ground nests, and winds which scatter colonies of insects. But even if they survive all of that, the constant grooming of the land to keep it "presentable" means zero turn mowers rolling over all of that and destroying it, irrigation being dug that drains naturally forming ponds that house insects and amphibians, and the turfing that chokes out everything with fast growing non-native grasses.
CheeseFromLidl 1y ago
I wonder what the influence of wind is on survival of flying insects. Over here - W. Eu. - we’ve seen storms on a monthly base now. I don’t think the energy balance of foraging adds up if there’s too much wind.
Helmut10001 1y ago
This is an even bigger issue than climate change because the intensity of the change is even harder to notice. I still see glimpses of biodiversity loss all around me, and it scares me.
metalman 1y ago
it will likely come as a double wammy, polinator/benificial/comensual insects will be reduced past self sustaining number and destructive bugs will increase to uncontrolable levels. plants have been managing this for millions of years, needing polinators and preditory insects, but fighting destructive and seed eating bugs the fight is older in animals, where there is a direct connection in the amount of abrasive silica in plants, and the development of teath and dental enamil is parellel in the fossil record we humans, fucking with shit big time is not going to go good, nature negotiates in ways and time frames that quite clearly exclude our direct partisipation, with nature ready, at any time, for a complete reset.
warpspin 1y ago
While I support protecting insects and I literally see how their amounts decreased since I've been a child, I wished people would stop the alarmist "food supply in danger" headline. It's not, at least not because of the insects. Most of our food supply is not dependent on wild insects, instead people usually pay for cultivated bees to pollinate their plants. Business is too serious to rely on circumstance. The real problem is that loads of the wild plant life depends on wild insects, and we do not want to lose that. Don't get me wrong. Neither I deny climate change, nor do I say we should destroy nature as much as we do. But we need to start talking the truth instead of invented talking points, or people won't take science serious anymore... even more than they already ignore it.
- yummypaint 1y ago
  Interactions between species are scarcely understood in general, if they are known at all. It's only very recently that the existence of mycelial networks was discovered. It's only very recently that the importance of micro biome and it's role in health is starting to be recognized. It's only in hindsight that impact of the near extinction of vultures in India on human health was understood. History has shown industrialized humans to be dangerously ignorant of environmental systems, and almost every action we take with regard to these systems is destructive. Every extinction is irreversible. Things are so wildly out of equilibrium now that it's no longer possible to return to the equilibria from our past. Ecological collapse isnt some mild inconvenience that makes milk more expensive. Once it has happened, ecological collapse cannot and will not be undone by the seriousness of "business." This type of thinking embodies exactly the kind of arrogant hubris that led us into this situation. The negative feedback loops that have kept earth habitable for us so far aren't laws of nature, and no-one knows how far they can be bent before breaking, or how they even work.

54 points by Brajeshwar 1y ago

[dead]

There's one reason not mentioned - habitat loss, be it caused by urbanization [1] or by land consolidation ("Flurbereinigung") [2][3]. It used to be the case that rural areas were splintered into many small farms, with bushes being used to mark borders, and these bushes in turn provided harbor and food for insects and cover for small rodents and other mammals. "Thanks" to mechanisation however, which prefers large uniform land because thats easier for ever larger machines to process, a lot of these splinters were consolidated together and so there is nothing left to support any wildlife, be it insects or small animals, which in turn also causes bird populations to drop - when there are no mice because they don't have any place to build their nests, the birds don't have food as well. [1] https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/insekten-im-klima-und-landschaftswandel/ https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/... [2] https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/flugbegleiter-umfrage-insektenschwund https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/flugbegleiter-umfrage-... [3] https://naturschutz-initiative.de/aktuell/neuigkeiten/landwirtschaft-fuer-insekten-schaedlicher-als-klimawandel/ https://naturschutz-initiative.de/aktuell/neuigkeiten/landwi...

ben_w 1y ago
Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century. Now sure, the causes could be multipliers, insect_pop = base * (cause_0 * cause_1 * …), or even exponential, insect_pop = 1/e^(cause_0 + cause_1 + …), so I'm not saying none of that stuff matters, but also there's definitely something nee.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century. Sure, but the real push came over the last few decades, (IMHO) closely correlating with the utter decline of employment in the primary sector [1], that was all machines and efficiencies of scale. [1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Wirtschaft/Konjunkturindikatoren/Lange-Reihen/Arbeitsmarkt/lrerw13a.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Wirtschaft/Konjunkturindik...
epolanski 1y ago
The thing that gets on my nerves is that this is really an unsolvable political problem. When governments do try to push and make it law to have X amount of bushes and unfarmed land in a way that makes sense for wildlife to thrive you instantly get angry farmers on your roads, lose their votes and get publicly accused to starve the nation. And farmers, due to the difficulty of their job (in time, investments and returns) and their role in a society's lifecycle get instant empathy. There's areas in Italy where farms have absolutely polluted water to insane level, and this further compounds with heavy pollution of drinkable water wells (which should always be at least 120 meters from the closest farm from what I know). Regular citizens, which end up getting heavily sick from all these farms (often in mortal ways) never get any kind of support as they lack the political and financial weight, and as soon as the argument scales, you're back at populist "you want to starve our people and kill our economy" arguments. I had a house in the country, by law there shouldn't be more than one chicken farm in a 4 miles radius, yet they built two in less than 2 miles, one of them 300 meters from my house. It literally smells in disgusting ways 24/7, from ammonia to rot I had to sell it for pennies (5'000 euros, renovated), as nobody but the farmers in the area had the slightest intention to moving to such a beautiful yet disgusting place. And I haven't even mentioned that to avoid having to bring the hundreds of dead animals to a registered incinerator (as the law requires) they just dig mass graves in 5 minutes and cover the entire land. Wildlife has absolutely disappeared. It's really a tough, tough political battle. Everything from agriculture to cattle to fishing is insanely polluting and bad for the environment, but the idea of really tracking and controlling how those industries operate is beyond naive. The labels on your tuna can saying it didn't kill dolphins are worthless, there's no way to check what happens on these boats, so are the labels for your coffee or cocoa not using child labor or your food being organic. It's all absolutely fake and a matter of money.
- maybewhenthesun 1y ago
  Tell it like it is! Here in the netherlands as soon as you try to do something, the farmers start flyingh upside down flags. I call them the 'head in the sand' flags since they stand for ignoring the problems. I fear the problem is just that the earth suffers from an infestation of humans and the equilibrium will be restored in the same way all infestations end. It won't be pretty (already isn't in lots of places).
terminalshort 1y ago
But that isn't true in all areas. And the particular study in Germany that found a 76% decline was done in forest areas.

jmclnx 1y ago

Plus I heard somewhere song birds are declining due to this apocalypse. But mosquitoes are not declining, the one insect I wish would decline real fast :)

terminalshort 1y ago
Actually I feel like they are. I would get mosquito bites all the time as a kid when I went outside in the evening. Now I almost never do.
PaulKeeble 1y ago
They are spreading further north now, places that have mostly been free of them are starting to see mosquitoes now due to the increased temperature.
- rc_mob 1y ago
  and higher altitudes. its nuts. ticks also are doing this.
ACCount37 1y ago
One day, humankind will force a full mosquito extinction. That day can't come soon enough.
- exasperaited 1y ago
  Why get rid of all mosquitoes when only about one in every fifteen mosquito species bites us?

acessoproibido 1y ago

Archive Link: https://archive.ph/mpOkK https://archive.ph/mpOkK

Retric 1y ago

The windshield test is somewhat deceptive as improved aerodynamics plays a role, but the difference is still quite noticeable when driving around in a classic car.

magicstefanos 1y ago
But a lot of people drive old as shit cars.
- TulliusCicero 1y ago
  "Old as shit" is still a moving target. An old as shit car from 30 years ago is not the same model year as an old as shit car today.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    To memory, cars started getting a lot more aerodynamic through the 90s. You have to go back to the 80s to find boxy designs throughout mainstream cars, at which point you’re looking at vehicles somewhere in the ballpark of 40 years old. Anecdotally, I’ve not seen many of those on the road. It’s not too unusual to see a late 90s something puttering around town, but 80s and older is unusual, even in rural areas.
  - rjsw 1y ago
    Someone driving the same car for a long time will have seen the change in numbers of insects getting stuck to it.
  - dlcarrier 1y ago
    I drive a car that was released 25 years ago (a 7th-gen Celica) and it has a coefficient of drag of 0.32, which beats many vehicles currently in production, including multiple electric vehicles.
    - Retric 1y ago
      Now compare that to a car which would have been 25 years old, 30 years ago.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

WillAdams 1y ago

Habitat seems to play a large role --- I've always raked leaves and piled up sticks which fall from trees in our yard into a compost pile in a shady area, which I've been careful to disturb as little as possible from from fall through spring, since fireflies lay eggs in such piles, and their larvae mature in such conditions. My kids would invite their friends over on nice summer evenings to see fireflies, since none of the McMansion neighborhoods had nearly as many.

exe34 1y ago

I moved to the countryside in the last year. it's night and day as compared to the nearby town that I lived in, when it comes to insects and spiders. I constantly find corpses of insects on the window sill and the spiders are chunky, given how well they feed.

terminalshort 1y ago

> The second driver is habitat loss — the inexorable creep of urbanization, deforestation and sterile suburban lawns, which host fewer and less-diverse ranges of insects. I don't buy this as a cause of a global decline, though. In many areas things have gone in the opposite direction. The Appalachian mountains were clear cut in the 1800s and now are back to forest. If this theory is correct, I would expect there to have been a massive increase in insect populations on the east coast.

snypher 1y ago
Forest isn't some Boolean you can toggle 0 and 1. It's not the same forest, why would we expect the same inhabitants?
- terminalshort 1y ago
  If you want to claim that the forest that is there now is somehow dramatically worse for insects than the forest that grew there before, that's going to need some evidence behind it.
  - samschooler 1y ago
    There was a study done. I’m not sure exactly the study, but it’s from a book called Natures Ghosts. It talks about a Roman farm from around 0AD. The farm plot was clear cut, while the forest around it was never touched, including up to this day. The scientists cataloged the plant and animal species from both the farm plot and the untouched forest. Even though the farm plot had massive trees, and hasn’t been disturbed for 2000 years, the difference in species was massive. On the ancient farm plot: many parasitic species/invasive, off the plot: more prominence of delicate or unique species; just a few hundred meters apart. This is what “different forest” is. Edit: found the study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17601136/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17601136/
    - terminalshort 1y ago
      The study describes it like this, which sounds like it's the opposite: > Plant species richness strongly increases toward the center of the settlements, and the frequency of neutrophilous and nitrogen-demanding species is higher. When I hear things like "delicate or unique species" I get the feeling it's not a particularly scientific conclusion.

PaulKeeble 1y ago

We keep getting these warnings, for decades now insect biomass has been in sharp decline and so far we have done very little to try and reverse it. At some point ecosystems are going to go into collapse including ones critical for our food chain.

amelius 1y ago
Thanks for another warning.

cryptonector 1y ago

^Fpesticide Nothing here in this thread. We're overusing pesticides. It's a problem. We should stop. Here in the Texas hill country we don't have much agricultural use of pesticides, but out in East Texas we do. In the hill country I see plenty of insects.

Tanoc 1y ago

A large portion of the habitat loss I suspect isn't actually lawns, which have been decreasing in size as suburbs have been increasing in density. Many suburbs built since the 1990s are so tightly packed that you can't fit a car between the houses to get to the back yard, and the back yard itself is two thirds of the footprint of the house itself. What I suspect is driving it is actually pavement and development ready property. The footprint for pavement for a building is usually three times the footprint for the building itself. This includes parking lots, connecting roads, sidewalks, and even the concrete slabs needed to place things like air conditioning units or tall signage. That pavement denies undergrowth and pioneer species that small insects thrive on seasonally. It also denies water runoff. Without the water being able to saturate the ground it gets redirected to elsewhere. There's several issues with that, including unnatural subsidence and runoff pollution. The ground has some ability to naturally filter out small amounts of pollution as water seeps down through the soil and to the water table. But if there's pavement all of that water torrents to a single area which gets oversaturated. The soil can't hold any more, and so the water is rejected and pools above the surface. This is why you see so many puddles at the edges of parking lots or road intersections. This allows the pollutants to concentrate, and when the ground finally does absorb the excess water it pulls in those pollutants all the way down to the water table as they're in too high a concentration for the soil to capture. And development ready property is an actual serious problem. Companies buy real estate and then deforest and regrade it in anticipation of someone eventually buying it. They don't have a buyer lined up, they're just expecting someone to eventually want to settle there, be it a business or a home. In the meantime they keep the land stripped, with no trees or shrubbery, no native plants, and sometimes without even grass. There are places I've seen that were turned into development ready property that have sat hollow and scarred for twenty years. Even in places where there's native plants, undergrowth, and pioneer species that overcome this, the continual removal of trees makes it almost impossible for animals to stay there for long. Part of this is that with the heat island effect of nearby pavement you get constant blowing lateral winds. Winds which birds can't use as updrafts, winds which blow away rodent ground nests, and winds which scatter colonies of insects. But even if they survive all of that, the constant grooming of the land to keep it "presentable" means zero turn mowers rolling over all of that and destroying it, irrigation being dug that drains naturally forming ponds that house insects and amphibians, and the turfing that chokes out everything with fast growing non-native grasses.

CheeseFromLidl 1y ago

I wonder what the influence of wind is on survival of flying insects. Over here - W. Eu. - we’ve seen storms on a monthly base now. I don’t think the energy balance of foraging adds up if there’s too much wind.

Helmut10001 1y ago

This is an even bigger issue than climate change because the intensity of the change is even harder to notice. I still see glimpses of biodiversity loss all around me, and it scares me.

metalman 1y ago

it will likely come as a double wammy, polinator/benificial/comensual insects will be reduced past self sustaining number and destructive bugs will increase to uncontrolable levels. plants have been managing this for millions of years, needing polinators and preditory insects, but fighting destructive and seed eating bugs the fight is older in animals, where there is a direct connection in the amount of abrasive silica in plants, and the development of teath and dental enamil is parellel in the fossil record we humans, fucking with shit big time is not going to go good, nature negotiates in ways and time frames that quite clearly exclude our direct partisipation, with nature ready, at any time, for a complete reset.

warpspin 1y ago

While I support protecting insects and I literally see how their amounts decreased since I've been a child, I wished people would stop the alarmist "food supply in danger" headline. It's not, at least not because of the insects. Most of our food supply is not dependent on wild insects, instead people usually pay for cultivated bees to pollinate their plants. Business is too serious to rely on circumstance. The real problem is that loads of the wild plant life depends on wild insects, and we do not want to lose that. Don't get me wrong. Neither I deny climate change, nor do I say we should destroy nature as much as we do. But we need to start talking the truth instead of invented talking points, or people won't take science serious anymore... even more than they already ignore it.

yummypaint 1y ago
Interactions between species are scarcely understood in general, if they are known at all. It's only very recently that the existence of mycelial networks was discovered. It's only very recently that the importance of micro biome and it's role in health is starting to be recognized. It's only in hindsight that impact of the near extinction of vultures in India on human health was understood. History has shown industrialized humans to be dangerously ignorant of environmental systems, and almost every action we take with regard to these systems is destructive. Every extinction is irreversible. Things are so wildly out of equilibrium now that it's no longer possible to return to the equilibria from our past. Ecological collapse isnt some mild inconvenience that makes milk more expensive. Once it has happened, ecological collapse cannot and will not be undone by the seriousness of "business." This type of thinking embodies exactly the kind of arrogant hubris that led us into this situation. The negative feedback loops that have kept earth habitable for us so far aren't laws of nature, and no-one knows how far they can be bent before breaking, or how they even work.