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.
Favorite insect fact?
Most insects are illiterate, and very few speak Portuguese.
lol
THEY TASTE LIKE SHIT YO
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).
Probably closer to “death by a thousand chainsaws” but yeah. People try to kill insects, and they succeed. Add that on top of all the other stuff humans do that kills species unintentionally (deforestation, monocropping, climate change, etc.) and there’s no wonder the population is collapsing suddenly and rapidly.
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.
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Yeah I first noticed it like 10-15 years back when I visited my aunt in another town. Her place was always full of June bugs who would smash into your face repeatedly like a bunch of assholes, when we were kids. We even named her place after the bugs. But when I went back as an adult 15 years or so ago, there wasn’t a single one. My aunt said they vanished over a couple of years. I always wondered if they just didn’t like her property anymore or something, but it was likely climate change in the area.
Part of it is destruction of their habitat.
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.
Insect biomass declined by ∼47% and abundance declined by ∼61.5% over the last 35 years.
There has been a 69% decrease in wildlife since 1970. Even recreational fishing is considerably harder than it was when I was a kid, despite lots of stocking efforts.
This is how I convinced my grandfather climate change was real.
For the passed 50 years, he’s gone up to his cabin and fished.
Over the passed 10 years, he’s caught less and less fish.
When I was a kid, you could hardly put your rod in the water before you’d get something to bite. We’d through back a dozen fish before keeping one that was bigger. Now you’re lucky to get a single fish in several hours.
I asked him about the bugs, and he admitted there were less bugs in the windscreen then anytime in his life. And what do freshwater fish eat a lot of? Insect larvae and dead insects on the water. No food means no fish.
I think he finally realized just how fucked everything has to be for so many bugs to die off that fish start to die, and all the animals in the area that eat those fish. He kind of had an existential crisis, but unfortunately has ended up with the mindset “it’s gonna suck for you and your kids, but I’ll be dead before it’s really my problem”
But at least now he acknowledges climate change is real.
I remember this pond we went to, they stocked it with bass but you couldn’t catch it because the second your line hit the water a damn suicidal bluegill would snatch up the hook, bait or no. My dad was trying to teach me to fish and I was having the time of my life. He, on the other hand, was pissed as hell because the damn bluegills were getting in the way of him finding us some bass for dinner. Also, apparently I was supposed to learn that fishing involved patience but we picked the wrong spot for that. I did learn catch and release, and maybe I got a pet fish I dunno.
That pond burned down a few years ago. Climate change is fun.
It’s those little things that scare me the most. Insects make up a large amount of the bottom tier of the food chain and are a necessary part of the reproductive cycle of a lot of plants. This is a much clearer indicator of how deep in the shit we are with climate change.
For me it’s the oceans.
That’s the kind of cascading changes that are going to rapidly fuck shit up.
Just a bit too acidic or warm and we can kiss our asses goodbye. And it’s pretty much at that point already.
Enjoy things while they last. We probably have less time than we think.
Birds decreased a bunch it seems, but the one that stood out to me was squirrels. I seem to remember there being a lot more when I grew up. They were chasing each other playing in trees running on rooftops everywhere. Now I see them playing once in a while. Either the squirrels all got Netflix, depressed, and repressed like us humans and not want to play anymore, or they are dying off.
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.
Oh no we are. We were told in the 80’s that we had 20 years. It’s been 40 years.
They also told us that when we start seeing the signs, it’s too late.
Realistically at this point all we can do is mitigate the damage as much as possible. There’s going to be widespread migrations, famine, resource wars. Humanity will survive but the environment will be drastically altered damn near permanently.
Humans will survive but will pay the greatest cost.
I would argue that the greatest cost is paid by all the species that vanish forever.
I am beginning to wonder how long it is going to be before we do something stupid like intentionally detonate a few nukes in a remote area to intentionally cause a mild nuclear winter to stave off the effects of climate change.
Futurama was wrong, nukes will just make climate change worse. That’s why the Doomsday Clock combines both.
you can listen to nature recordings around certain locations and what was once many birds is now not very many birds
any good decades old nature recordings you could recommend me?
Yeah that sucks though. It dawned on me when I realised fly fishing sucks nowadays. There’s simply so little flying insects here that fishes aren’t feeding on them anymore and lost the reflex to go after them.
Now here I am trying to add flowers for insects in my garden to offset a bit my part in this :-/
I think about this every time I get a nasty letter from my HOA because they noticed some weeds…
Fuck that I’m even harbouring a sea of dandelion this year. No mowing for the moment. I’m seeing butterflies for the first time in years…
That’s awesome. My back yard has some areas that I’m leaving alone, but I don’t want to be fined for my front yard… HOAs suck.
Get elected to the HOA board and go mad with power by tossing out all their stupid rules
or better yet just start showing up to the meetings and harassing them over the same thing continually. It’s not like they can ban you, you literally exist under their system.
You’re missing the third panel of that comic.
Labeled 2050 it shows the car without bugs, but also without the human.
Because the car is self driving, or because there’s no more humans?
Little bitta both I’d imagine
Because there are no more humans.
Yeah the insect apocalypse is the most terrifying thing to happen so far in my lifetime, though if I never see another mating swarm of palmetto bugs it will be too soon.
They do have short little lifetimes mostly, could bounce back but people just can’t stop using insecticide. It’s not even like fish, where we are consuming too many, we are literally just killing them, in ways that poison the food chain. Short term thinking will doom us all.
Been screaming about this for a couple of years now. I remember dad teaching me to always clean the windshield when we stopped for gas.
I’ve seen the decline in my swampland in Florida in just the past 4 years.
Also a Florida native and I think the county mosquito fogging is part of the problem, there is no way that poison isn’t harming other invertebrates. I know they do it to control disease and keep malaria from becoming endemic, it’s not literally for no reason but is the cure worse than the disease? We need insects.
The first mass extinction caused by an earth life form.
After we finish killing ourselves off… I wonder in the deep future if some smart creature will find it in the geological record and make jokes about how unbelievably stupid we were
We are not the first. The firat oxygen producers fucken nuked damned near every other lifeform.
Yeah, totally. But I suspect they didn’t know they were doing it, AND they didn’t also kill themselves in the process… on purpose.
They did kill themselves in the process, repeatedly until they finally evolved resistance.
So whenever someone assumes that accelerationism will cause a single collapse and then we’ll get Star Trek… Nope, we’ll just keep rebuilding capitalism and collapsing until we actually evolve something better. Collapse won’t teach us how to work together any faster than poison taught microbes how to breathe oxygen.
Maybe. Although it seems just as likely that when humans die off intelligence may not even be a genetic advantage for whatever comes next.
The thing about humans is that as individuals we can be rather intelligent, but as a collective we arent even sapient. A human hivemind would become effectively brain dead in an instant. But jokes aside, what others see as doom I see as an opportunity to overcome. We may come out the otherside utterly fucken reduced, but so long as we do come out of the otherside mankind will always progress.
Hopefully our descendants will look apon our actions as we look apon our chalcolithic ancestors who were the first metal smiths poisoning themselves with arsenic. A neccessary ill for progress. If we do not progress then it will all be for not.
the best part is, you don’t have to consume fish.
Saw this on Facebook and the comments were teaming with boomers and morons insisting it was because cars are now more aerodynamic.
That will have a non-zero effect, but it’s far from the whole story.
Because cars in the 90’s weren’t aerodynamic? There’s been improvements, sure, but most cars then still had pretty good coefficients of drag.
But sure, blame anything except climate change.
This but unironically coupled with about half the total insects we had back then.
Yeah, I’ve also got the nicest of old cars there ever was, a Suzuki SJ - that is not it.
I’ve done a lot of campaigning with different groups about climate change and lots of the older folks have cited the disappearance of bugs as a wake up call for them. Ecosystems (including weather systems) are dying and our food is going with it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68792017
The UK government thinks giving some farmers some money will solve this and keep handing out new licenses for drilling for oil and gas, which the oil industry and the rest of the world has known for over 50 years will end up roasting the humans off the planet. The government are incredibly short sighted, profit hungry and lacking in humanity (see also selling bombs to kill kids with and sending people who block those sales to prison)
Thank capitalism
It’s not just insect apocalypse, although that’s most of it. Cars also do a better job of moving air over the vehicle now, so smaller insects don’t end up on your windshield. It’s still a problem with motorcycle helmets, although it’s far, far less of a problem than it would have been 20 or 30 years ago.
The study was saying that less aerodynamic, older boxer cars killed less insects, conversely to what I would think…
Man it’s always a strange feeling when you suddenly realize something quite ubiquitous disappeared like 20yr ago and you never noticed.
The worst is that celebrity that just died, or that movie I meant to get to from recently, or finally listening to “new Weezer” and they all happen 20 years ago
Just spent 12 hours in the car driving to see the eclipse. The windshield does not need cleaning. Far cry from when we used to drive all over the states as a kid, you’d have to scrub the windshield probably every third gas stop.
Well obviously all those people driving in the 80’s killed all the insects with their windshields and now there’s none left. It’s their fault.
The democratization of corruption.
I’d like like a graph of the bug population decline overlayed onto Roundup adoption. Just a theory.
Roundup is an herbicide, fyi. But there are plenty insecticides being widely used, even moreso than Roundup in urban and suburban settings. Whenever mosquitoes start to come out, someone near me gets a mosquito yard treatment, and you can instantly see the insect biodiversity in my garden drop.
I work with a biologist who is studying this question because of the decline in pollinators and their results from studying this seem to show that it’s very likely that glyphosate is contributing to the problem by limiting food sources and making pollinators more avoidant of spray areas. There’s also some evidence that it may have an impact on insect immune systems.
I had a pest control company come out to plant some rat traps in the backyard and I specifically told them not to spray for spiders. They did anyways and fucking killed my bees! I was furious, and heartbroken, and there was nothing I could do to undo the damage.
I am no plantologist, but even an herbicide can affect insects, no?
Feeding or interacting with a freshly sprayed plant and becoming tainted, or perhaps even by the reduction/elimination of the plant sprayed?
It absolutely harms insects in some ways that increase their mortality, but pesticides straight up murder them and are used just as often if not more
No argument about pesticides, but herbicides are what I am concerned with currently as there seems to be some confusion with their effect on insects. In my ten-minute internet education on the topic, it seems there is a decided effect with herbicides and insects.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6502833/
- Insects directly exposed to herbicides experienced high mortality; while those fed leaf material that had been exposed to herbicides did not.
So, both direct and indirect impacts (melanin and their immune systems) as well as greatly reducing the plant sources they may be accustomed to frequenting is a triple-whammy. I do hate mosquitoes, but I feel bad for all the other bugs and what this will do to the world.
People aren’t spraying herbicides for mosquitoes though, they’re spraying pesticides that also kill bees, grasshoppers, and beetles. I’m not defending herbicide use, but as far as insect populations are concerned, pesticides are a serious direct threat
I was not implying that people were spraying herbicides for mosquitoes, but merely mentioned them as a sympathetic exception.
There’s nothing credible to suggest glyphosate affects anything except plants. There are some pretty bad herbicides out there, but Roundup ain’t one of them.
Downvote away.
I am here to learn (and possibly be entertained), not downvote everything I might not agree with.
I do find it a heady statement to say glyphosates affect nothing but plants, so as my curiosity was piqued in plantology I searched and did find this webpage near the top of my results (using Startpage):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8115815/
- Glyphosate, the most commonly used herbicide in the world, inhibits the production of melanin. Melanin is an important pigment and a key component of the insect immune system; this study shows that glyphosate weakens insects’ melanin-based immune system and makes them more vulnerable to infections, including with the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.
I would not call this a non-credible source so it would seem there are indeed some deleterious affects with insects.
So I can’t see in that study where they correlate actual field concentrations to what they’re applying to the test insects. From what I can tell, they’re using very high concentrations and observing reduced melanization. Interestingly, in lower concentrations, there’s a tendency for the mosquitos to develop a better response to the infection, presumably because the survivors are less susceptible.
Further, while the 10 mM-treated mosquitoes had the worst survival outcome, the mosquitoes that survived the drugging showed low susceptibility to P. falciparum infection. These observations suggest a potentially interesting effect whereby very high concentrations of glyphosate reduce mosquito survival, but bolster the immune system or general physiology of survivors, which then allows them to resist P. falciparum infection with greater success. Alternatively, very high glyphosate treatment could be selecting for mosquitoes within the population more resistant to P. falciparum infection.
What you normally see in these studies is that they have to directly apply concentrations much, much higher than found in the field to develop a response. The runoff levels are tested to be in the nM range, but they’re applying 10-50 mM to each insect directly injected. Even if they’re in the field and encountering mM concentrations as applied, contact with an insect probably isn’t going to transfer much to the bloodstream as there’s no direct transfer pathway for animals.
The runoff levels are tested to be in the nM range, but they’re applying 10-50 mM to each insect directly injected. Even if they’re in the field and encountering mM concentrations as applied, contact with an insect probably isn’t going to transfer much to the bloodstream as there’s no direct transfer pathway for animals.
wouldn’t the primary technicality here be exposure time? Rather than exposure levels. Ultimately depends on the lifespan of the insect itself. But this is a pretty significant factor to why things like leaded gas got banned.
Presumably. Also would be determining a pathway that gets those low concentrations through to the organism in levels high enough to induce the effects that they’ve determined with artificial exposures. But that’s not even hinted at in the study, and that’s usually where these studies fail.
I can introduce high levels of NaCl to a cell and kill it, but without finding a way that dunking someone in seawater kills them via mere exposure, saying the ocean is hazardous is a bit of a stretch.
When Monsanto and Bayer are paying out billions in compensation to people with glyphosate-related cancers, but still refusing to admit liability so they can keep it on the market, you’ve got to at least be a little suspicious about their safety claims. It’s still cheaper for them to pay people off than stop selling it, I guess?
A jury trial for damages is about as far away from a scientific determination as one could get. People have gotten settlements for cancers “caused” by LTE power meters.
I have no clue why people trot out this sort of thing as some sort of evidence.
IDK probably because if you were a multi billion dollar company that has already proved the science behind it’s safety, apparently. It would seem rather trivial to prove it’s effectiveness in court. No?
Settling doesn’t mean you’re guilty, but it doesn’t mean you’re innocent either. At best it’s a PR move.
If you do a cursory search you’ll find lots of studies describing the negative impacts of glyphosate to insect health, such as to gut biota and immune function, and straight up increased mortality
mmmmm glyphosate, sounds yummy. Cant wait to eat it.
Don’t worry, you already are :)
i meant drinking it, straight up, i’m already filled with micro plastics, i’m sure my tissue is part PFAS as well.
That is a dominant theory, yes. Well, and other similar environmental poisoning + climate change + ecosystem destruction + transformation of biomes into anthromes (human made)
Yes it’s terrifying. I hope its not the start of the food chain collapsing.
