Insect Populations Collapse in Protected Nature Reserves (theguardian.com) 69
Insect populations are crashing in supposedly protected nature reserves worldwide with climate change emerging as the primary driver of biodiversity loss for the first time in human history. Ecologist Daniel Janzen, who has monitored Costa Rica's Guanacaste conservation area since the 1970s, documented the collapse through light trap photographs that showed 3,000 moth species in 1978 versus virtually none today using identical methods.
Similar declines are occurring globally with flying insects dropping 75% across 63 German reserves in under 30 years, US beetle numbers falling 83% over 45 years, and Puerto Rico experiencing up to 60-fold biomass losses since the 1970s. Recent research published in BioScience found climate change now drives decline in 91% of imperiled US species, narrowly surpassing habitat destruction.
Similar declines are occurring globally with flying insects dropping 75% across 63 German reserves in under 30 years, US beetle numbers falling 83% over 45 years, and Puerto Rico experiencing up to 60-fold biomass losses since the 1970s. Recent research published in BioScience found climate change now drives decline in 91% of imperiled US species, narrowly surpassing habitat destruction.
Re:Please (Score:5, Informative)
The order "Flies" (Diptera) encompasses about 160,000 species in more than 200 families, and all of them are important pollinators. Of the Culicidae, or mosquitos, we know about 3800 species. Ceratopogonidae or sand flies are related, another 5000 species. But of the black flies (Simuliidae), nearly all 2400 species are obligatorily blood-sucking, that means both sexes suck blood, while of mosquitos and sand flies, only the female do. On the other hand, t the closely related Chironomidae or non-biting midges don't suck blood at all. But they are more closely related to sand flies and black flies than to mosquitos.
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It's possible English is your second language.
It may be his, but at least he can read it. It seems you put zero effort into reading or understanding the post you replied to.
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I'm old enough to remember (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that's fine and I'm sure we can focus on important issues like woke and trans instead of part of our entire food chain collapsing... Ain't moral panics fun?
Re:I'm old enough to remember (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, on the plus-side, there was never a better time to observe with fascination how completely incapable the human races is, how immature and without insight. In the past, doing stupid things could be attributed to knowledge not being available. No such excuse this time. The willing helpers of the perpetrators of the evil are ignorant by choice.
Light sheet and camera (Score:2)
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
"Inspired, he decided to erect a sheet for a light trap with a camera – a common way to document flying insect numbers and diversity. In that first photograph, taken in 1978, the lit-up sheet is so thickly studded with moths that in places the fabric is barely visible, transformed into what looks like densely patterned, crawling wallpaper."
"Scientists identified an astonishing 3,000 species from that light trap"
Build a "light trap"
1. Take a bed sheet and tack it up to
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i have had the same experiences lately in certain areas, and my garden is full of all sorts of bugs and snails, and birds are chirping literally 24/7... but i cannot compare with 10, 20 years ago, and anyway that wouldn't diminish the gravity of sensible reductions having actually been measured on vast other areas. however annoying, insects are quite at the bottom of the entire food chain, if anything they should be thriving when predators are driven out. this is unexpected. it might mean that as bigger pre
Re:I'm old enough to remember (Score:4, Funny)
But look on the bright side, with any luck nature will collapse far enough to wipe us out before the AIs mess up everything.
Re: I'm old enough to remember (Score:2)
I blame farming monoculture and Monsanto for that.
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Cleaning bugs off my car windshield periodically. That doesn't happen anymore because those bugs are dead and gone permanently.
I'm sure that's fine and I'm sure we can focus on important issues like woke and trans instead of part of our entire food chain collapsing... Ain't moral panics fun?
I think this is also due to cars becoming more aerodynamic for fuel efficiency. My newer cars will get bugs on the flatter areas of the front, but rarely the windshield anymore, unless it's a particularly large one that the slipstream can't get out of the way fast enough.
The windshield test (Score:5, Insightful)
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I like to think of it as they've run out of feature ideas for the Matrix, and now the machines are just working on removing the bugs.
Re: The windshield test (Score:3)
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> I believe the windshield test
Almost, it's the license plate test. same surface area, not washed during journey etc...
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1. Better vehicle aerodynamics.
2. Farmers have gotten smart about not setting their hives along the edge of the orchard adjacent to the highway.
Re: The windshield test (Score:2)
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SUV's are not nearly as aerodynamic as almost all cars from the late 60's and 70's.
True. But then the results of any test would be invalid unless it was repeated over time with the same vehicle. Sure, a Hummer will squash more bugs. But you can't use that to say anything about insect populations over time unless you've been driving that same Hummer for the past 20 or 30 years.
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My windshield this Spring is just as messy with bug splats as ever. There's no change. It's so bad that I have to use a scrubber or razor blade to get them off.
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Lots. And I have an advantage that most other people don't. Still driving a now 46 year old vehicle with a vertical windshield.
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For at least the last 20 years, I've noticed I no longer have to pull over to clean my windshield because it was covered by bug corpses. Not even in the Spring. I do not miss them, but at the same time I know they *should* be there, and their almost total absence is an ominous portent of the future.
I always figured a big part of that was expanded use of agricultural pesticides. The thing that gets me with this story is it's inside the nature preserves, so the answer isn't local pesticide use, it's something much larger.
Which does feel weirdly foreboding. I don't think most bugs have a particularly large range. Give them enough local plant life and they should thrive.
And the nature preserves should be pretty free of pesticides, meaning something else, like climate change, is causing the issues.
Re: The windshield test (Score:2)
Pesticides spreads outside the designated area, insects roam over large areas, wetlands have been drained and converted to farmlands, ditches have become covered to make farming more efficient, farms are monocultural and only grow a single or few crops - and don't have animals. Many insects depends on natural manure. Many insects depends on different types of weed like nettles. The list goes on.
Fake news! (Score:2, Insightful)
Right? Right?
In other news, the human race continues to self-desctruct out of greed, arrogance and sheer incapability to do better.
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I think the beetles have moved to my garden. I had to spray (which I hate to do) for potato beetles in my garden last week end.
There is also no shortage of some small beetle with an orange band across its thorax.
Re:Adaptation (Score:5, Insightful)
There you have it folks, this guy on Slashdot tells us we have nothing to worry about so ignore those scientists that track this stuff for a living. Their advanced degrees are clearly meaningless compared to the common sense of this common man.
And you believe the alleged administration on what those Chinese were carrying? Have you listened to these yahoos lately? Joe Biden was killed and replaced with a robot clone (wot izzat?). Haitian dog and cats are eating Ohioans.....well, it was something Haitian eating something American. Russia didn't start the Ukraine war. Vaccines won't protect you from the diseases for which they were developed. Measles can be brought to bay using Vitamin A.
Now, let's have less of la Presidenta's effluent and more science.....oh, he's cutting that too. I guess that will show those naughty entomologists.
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FTFY: opportunists that "track" this stuff for $$$
Yeah fuck those scientists driving around in their fancy Ferraris. What have they ever done for us /s.
FWIW: If you became a scientist for money you're probably too dumb to be a scientist in the first place.
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The article seems to agree with the guy on slashdot.
> “I’m an optimist, in the sense that I think we will build a sustainable future,” Wagner says. “But it’s going to take 30 or 40 years, and by then, it’s going to be too late for a lot of the creatures that I love.
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Life will update for sure, but it may take a while, nothing big, maybe a few human lifetimes. And many many species will disappear. It's fine though, it's not like we depend on nature to survive, food, oxygen, I'm sure we can do without this.
Oh, I know, let's ask Trump for guidance, I remember way back when he was telling us how we should be able to use the bad-for-ozone sprays in his beautiful apartments because they were "concealed", so you know gases don't get out. Such a master of science, I'm sure he c
Re:Adaptation (Score:5, Insightful)
Life will adapt to higher temperatures or wider temperature swings.
yeah, the problem with that is that the consequences of these changes are very hard to predict, and they're happening very, very fast (in evolutionary terms), many species simply have no time to adapt. a barren desert is also a "natural habitat", and has also "life", but you're not going to want to live there ...
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a barren desert is also a "natural habitat", and has also "life", but you're not going to want to live there ...
I thought that was called California and "good weather".
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There is a complete lack of understanding happening here, but it's not what you think.
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Dying is the opposite of adapting.
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Insect populations will adapt and recover. To think that these changes are permanent is ludicrous and reveals a complete lack of understanding of nature. Life will adapt and fill openings/niches that are available over time. Cool it with the chicken-little stuff. Life will adapt to higher temperatures or wider temperature swings.
That's not how evolution works.
Yes, life can adapt to higher temperatures, but as the article shows it's not instantaneous as the populations are crashing.
But the problem is the whole point of climate change is the climate won't stop changing. Even if they adapt to the current increase it will take time to do that, and for the populations to recover. But before that happens we'll be looking at another degree and the populations will crash again.
The longer the temperatures keep increasing the more the popula
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But the adaptations may also make them better at adapting to increasing temperatures as well. Even the adaptations should not be seen in a static way.
It doesn't because the temperatures don't increase much over the scope of a single generation.
Remember how evolution works. The offspring who are best adapted to the current conditions have more offspring themselves.
So if the typical range the species operates at is 18-22C (made up numbers), but the current range is 19-23, then only the ones with mutations that let them operate at the higher temp will survive. The rest of the population will crash and the new population will be less robust because they've l
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Funny the first thing they blame is climate change, and not insecticides, which are a million times more effective today than they were a century ago. With climate change, you'd figure bugs have no problem migrating slowly as the cooler zones move geographically.
Insecticides tend to not be used in natural preserves. Unless you have a different definition of what a preserve is that I'm not aware of.
Re:Climate change? What about bug spray? (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny the first thing they blame is climate change, and not insecticides, which are a million times more effective today than they were a century ago. With climate change, you'd figure bugs have no problem migrating slowly as the cooler zones move geographically.
Insecticides tend to not be used in natural preserves. Unless you have a different definition of what a preserve is that I'm not aware of.
Insects tend not to stay exclusively in natural preserves, unless you have a different definition of what a preserve is that I'm not aware of.
Insects migrate. They move around to feed on food sources outside the immediate area. Some, like the monarch butterfly or the dragonfly, migrate thousands of miles, even across entire oceans. The notion that a preserve would protect insects from pesticides is based on an assumption of localized effect that doesn't always line up with the real world.
When a large percentage of insects that leave the preserve don't come back because they fed on crops sprayed with pesticides, that diminishes the population of the preserve, both directly by their loss and indirectly by the loss of offspring that would have come back in a future generation.
And if we reach a point when the only place where the insects are surviving is in the preserve, the loss of insects that leave the preserve would also reduce the genetic diversity of the preserve and accelerate the collapse of the species.
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Good god, just read the article...
“But what we see here in the preserved areas – that as far as we can tell, are free of even these destructive insecticides and pesticides – even here, the insect numbers are going down horrifyingly dramatically”
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Funny the first thing they blame is climate change, and not insecticides, which are a million times more effective today than they were a century ago.
Science doesn't "blame" anything. It tests hypothesises. I don't expect someone who speaks like you to understand that part of what scientists do is control for variables. Actually I don't expect someone who speaks like you do to read the fucking article, otherwise you would have seen your point was already addressed.
Klamboe (Score:2)
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I still had them visit me too often last year (in the middle of the polder in Zeeland) and spotted one on occasion even this "winter", but so far the nights have been quiet. Even when I left my window open by accident.
Haven't seen a bee in two or three years around here though, and it was rare before that despite or because of all the farmland around here.
But hey.. (Score:2)
....there's plenty of humans and livestock at least!
https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass [ourworldindata.org]
I Noticed this in San Diego (Score:2)
But not Mosquitos (Score:2)
Interestingly, mosquito populations have been steady or increasing over time.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.... [wiley.com]
Ticks seem to be a bigger issue as well (maybe more awareness), compared to when I was a child.
climate change (Score:2)
Climate change is the process whereby you explain some observation that you don't actually understand.