My dad and I take (usually) yearly road trips west to visit various national parks. We’ve been doing this for nearly 2 decades now. We’ll typically drive through the night with just a short, few-hour stop at a rest area if we are both too tired to drive.
I distinctly remember some of our earlier trips where by the time we got fuel in the morning after driving through the night there were SOOO many bug guts all over the front of the car no amount of car washes would get them clean.
Our last trip to South Dakota/Colorado there was almost none and I was actually thinking about this. It is very unsettling…something is changing and it’s not for the better…
A global apocalypse has already happened (and is continuing, within what wreckage remains) in the insect and amphibian populations. Almost no one outside a small community of scientists that are specifically in that field has even noticed, let alone has a theory for why, or a guess as to whether it is an urgent problem.
But yes it seems like an urgent problem.
People have noticed…the majority just don’t give a flying fuck
Most people i know are happy about less insects in the summer.
The older i get, the more i learn about insects and the more i like them. Also, knowing more about their importance, makes me want to have many more insects around me, instead of less.
Nobody has a theory why insect populations are catastrophically falling? I highly doubt that.
I mean, wouldn’t the prolific use of pesticide be a pretty damn obvious cause? Wherever humans go, we spray for bugs.
Yeah; I should have said no one has a compelling proven explanation. There are a lot of theories obviously. This article goes into a little bit of detail about it, although in my opinion is proffering its “death by a thousand cuts” theory without that being the consensus of the scientists i.e. “yes this is exactly the combination of factors responsible and they are all significant, we are confident.” It’s more just that things are collapsing too completely and quickly to even be able to coherently study for root cause(s).
I mean we used to have giant frog spawns every spring where we would have to be careful walking or we would step on several frogs at a time.
We haven’t had one in 5 years.
Yeah, it’s getting worse. I specifically have been trying to grow plants to bring in pollinators; the only bugs I’ve seen on them are flies and aphids. I live in an area of California that’s a seasonal wetland; it’s now possible to drive an hour in any direction and hit no bugs. The bugs and ecological collapse might get us before the fossil fuel companies manage to murder us all for their investors.
Keep going - I see little individual bees, wasps, and butterflies pollinating things in my garden. Purple colored flowers really seem to draw in the bees.
Yeah we’re probably totally cooked. I wasn’t even alive in the 90’s, so I wouldn’t know firsthand, but you can listen to nature recordings around certain locations and what was once many birds is now not very many birds.
I dunno. I think everyone looks at climate change and the destruction of ecosystems and habitats as a kind of, instantly apocalyptic issue, like that’s just a turning point and then suddenly everyone dies. I don’t think it’s so simple. I don’t really know if corn or many of the crops we rely on can weather 2 degrees celsius global warming or whatever, but I think it’s probably pretty likely that humanity, or more likely, some well-meaning asshole, ends up terraforming a bunch of shit before that really happens, which will probably kill a bunch of other animals and decrease overall biodiversity to an even greater extent. I think probably humanity at large would rather kill almost every other lifeform on the planet for survival before we allow ourselves to be threatened. Or, before we allow our structures to threaten dissolution, so probably “other lifeforms” also includes like, people in third world countries who rely on more local ecology and depend on local ecosystems for their foodstuffs. More interdependent.
So I dunno, we’re probably totally cooked.
deleted by creator
Insect biomass declined by ∼47% and abundance declined by ∼61.5% over the last 35 years.
When people around here mentioned there are no more insects on the wind screens of car a local biologists checked the number of insects - and it was more or less the same (~5% less)
But what he found out was pretty interesting: Nowadays insects avoid streets. Evolution seems to have breed an inherent fear of streets into insects.
