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Bug Science

Insect Collapse: 'We Are Destroying Our Life Support Systems' (theguardian.com) 401

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished. His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by far is global warming. "It was just astonishing," Lister said. "Before, both the sticky ground plates and canopy plates would be covered with insects. You'd be there for hours picking them off the plates at night. But now the plates would come down after 12 hours in the tropical forest with a couple of lonely insects trapped or none at all."

"We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet," Lister said. "It is just horrifying to watch us decimate the natural world like this." Lister calls these impacts a "bottom-up trophic cascade", in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain. "I don't think most people have a systems view of the natural world," he said. "But it's all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect." To understand the global scale of an insect collapse that has so far only been glimpsed, Lister says, there is an urgent need for much more research in many more habitats. "More data, that is my mantra," he said.

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Insect Collapse: 'We Are Destroying Our Life Support Systems'

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  • AGW (Score:2, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 )

    The most likely culprit by far is global warming.

    Really? The most likely culprit?

    • Re:AGW (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @01:09AM (#57970750)

      Yes, really.

      It couldn't be tons of pesticides or hurricanes. It couldn't be invasive species. It couldn't be human tourism trampling the ground.

      The temperature went up 1 degree and that is the REAL OBVIOUS cause. You must not question the church of global warming. Back to re-education camp for you!!

    • Re:AGW (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @01:25AM (#57970788)

      Really? The most likely culprit?

      Of course not. The most likely culprit is experimental error, and the 2nd most likely is outright fraud.

      So far AGW has warmed the earth by 1.3 C (2 F). That is a serious trend, and a big concern for the future but is unlikely to wipe out 98% of insects today. It is also implausible that nobody has noticed this massive worldwide catastrophe before this lone researcher stumbled onto the evidence of our life support systems "collapsing".

      This sort of shrill hyperbolic alarmism is counterproductive to getting people to take climate change seriously. This is so over-the-top that I suspect this guy is on Exxon-Mobil's payroll as a false flag operation to make scientists look incompetent.

      Anyway, we will soon find out. If he is right, we will all be dead by this time next year.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Little Island are different to big Island, as in small locations with only one climate and large locations with many. Little they die off until eventually evolution allows new mutations to take their place. Big and of course populations, migrate, north or south as the case maybe.

        For most places, the concern is cities, for small places, well, collapse is likely to be total and human populations must relocate, depending upon the nature of environmental collapse. Bugs, simply bring in new species for more nor

        • Re: AGW (Score:4, Informative)

          by Maelwryth ( 982896 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @03:38AM (#57971110) Homepage Journal
          In response to your first sentence,

          "Little Island are different to big Island, as in small locations with only one climate and large locations with many."

          I live on a small Island and there is quite large variation in climate between valleys. For instance, we cannot grow stone fruit yet the next valley can. Also, it got 30mm of rain yesterday while we sat in bright sunshine.

      • Re:AGW (Score:4, Informative)

        by lu-darp ( 469705 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @04:42AM (#57971228)

        > It is also implausible that nobody has noticed this massive worldwide catastrophe before this lone researcher stumbled onto the evidence of our life support systems "collapsing".

        More than merely implausible, you can go and look up the previously found results. :-) Thankfully insect geeks do exist, and guess what...

        http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/germany-s-insects-are-disappearing ... they found similar declines. What makes this new data-point particularly informing is, aside from the scale, its location and how that was not an area previously expected to be hit so badly.

        > So far AGW has warmed the earth by 1.3 C (2 F).

        That's a world average, but that same level of warming can bring local extremes more like +/- 4 C

        As the article states: “The number of hot spells, temperatures above 29C, have increased tremendously,”

      • Re:AGW (Score:5, Interesting)

        by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @08:41AM (#57971718) Journal

        This sort of shrill hyperbolic alarmism is counterproductive to getting people to take climate change seriously.

        I keep saying that.

        If anybody's wondering why folks like me are skeptical, it's because of decades of shrill alarmism.

        If you were trying to make skeptics, you couldn't have done a better job.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          Any shrill alarmism is the result of people going "lalalalala, I can't hear you" when confronted with evidence of warming, because that evidence presents a threat to their current comfy gas-guzzling lifestyle.

          Add to that a great deal of misinformation spread by people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

          In disbelief that people can be dumb enough to ignore the facts that are right in front of them, scientists and policymakers turned to hyperbole in hope of shaking people out of their stupor

        • This sort of shrill hyperbolic alarmism is counterproductive to getting people to take climate change seriously.

          I keep saying that.

          If anybody's wondering why folks like me are skeptical, it's because of decades of shrill alarmism.

          And now insect populations are rapidly collapsing in many locations over the planet.

          Apparently you should have been alarmed after all.

      • You don't get it. A 1.3C warning is the global average, but you need to look at the duration of extreme temperatures that affect insect or other animal life cycles. It's quite possible, and expected, that there is a limit to how far temperatures can go for how long before a species has trouble at some stage. For example, a few hours at, say, 100F might not b a problem, but eight hours might be.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Zorpheus ( 857617 )
      I think the culprit are the insecticides used in agriculture. And this blame on others comes from their lobby.
      • Re: AGW (Score:3, Insightful)

        Yup. Toxic insecticides and other crazy chemicals stayed with abandon onto crops are by far the most likely culprit. Why? Because a) they've done this before, many times. And b) killing insects is what those crazy chemicals were _designed_ to do.

        But hey, let's blame it on the sky falling. That way people can spend a lot of time shaking their first and shouting at the sky. Rather than, you know, controlling and restricting the usage of dangerous environmental toxins.

      • Yeah I also think this is a lot more likely as an explanation.

    • The most likely factor is rapid human population growth in asia and africa.
    • Re:AGW (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Can'tNot ( 5553824 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @03:00AM (#57971032)
      The article makes a decent case for global warming as the culprit, you have made no case whatsoever. Not even shitty anecdote, you have offered nothing at all and yet here you are disputing this guy's research. You need to do better.
      • The cause of global warming is directly related to rapid human population growth in asia and africa.
        • Re:AGW (Score:4, Informative)

          by Can'tNot ( 5553824 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @04:39AM (#57971216)
          No need to limit yourself: The cause of global warming is directly related to rapid human population growth. Since the bulk of additional CO2 in the air has come from industrialized countries, it's misleading to omit them.
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by phantomfive ( 622387 )

        The article makes a decent case for global warming as the culprit

        It really doesn't. What insect that thrives at 27 degrees practically disappears at 29 degrees? Or maybe the recent hurricane had more to do with it? [sciencemag.org]

        and yet here you are disputing this guy's research

        I'm not disputing his research, I'm disputing his conclusion. Although now that you mention it, his research does raise eyebrows. 98% of the insects are gone? This is a study I would double-check before using it for anything important.

        • You should probably ask anyone who farms or hunts. In my neck of the woods, everyone can tell you the difference a "cold winter" or "hot summer" will make in insect populations. Particularly the ones that like to eat you or your crops. Many insect eggs are very delicate, either laid in shallow pools that dry up, or at very specific locations where small temperature/humidity variations will make them non-viable. Usually the species are healthy because they lay a LOT of eggs, but eventually, tipping point

    • Yeah. I thought the scaremongers had told us that when global warming really took off only the cockroaches would be left. Turns out they are dying. So they did not even get that right.

      Perhaps people should study the ecosystems more in depth instead of blaming everything on anthropomorphic global warming. Seriously.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by lu-darp ( 469705 )

      The article never said Anthropogenic or human-caused. Sorry, but YOU (and many commenters) inserted that. If you really care about such topics, this should alert you to your own biases in interpreting information.

      For folk who just headline-skimmed then jumped to the comments: the article offers into good reasons why heat-thresholds are crossed regularly now but not before make the changing climate a likely candidate, and how pesticides and other "usual suspects" are unlikely to be factors in this scenario.

    • You mean small cold blooded animals, who had adapted for millions of years for a particular climate have trouble to a rapidly changing climate?

      The problem with global Climate change, isn't that the Climate is changing, but the speed of the change. While many of these animals can deal with fluctuations of weathers and seasons. The change in climate means the number of bad seasons for them outweighs the number of good ones, so it just leads to long term pressure on their survival.
      While there are other issues

  • Total agreement (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @12:43AM (#57970672)

    5 step plan to fixing this, fast.

    1. Remove 2 billion people from the planet.

    2. HVDC lines built to all major deserts.

    3. All major deserts covered in as much solar power as we can build.

    4. LFTR reactor research funded to pre-Jimmy-Carter levels.

    5. Ban coal power outright.

    Keep in mind that if we want to reverse the damage, we need to build excess power capacity (a lot of it) to pull CO2 out of the air as a feedstock for hydrocarbons or some other sequestration.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 )

      6. Escalating taxes on fossil fools for transportation use. The aim should be to phase them out for ground transport within 20 years, worldwide.

      7. Ban all unnecessary use of pesticides and herbicides. Agriculture is a valid use if used in moderation; so is disease control. Having a perfect, green lawn in your boring shithole of a suburb is NOT a valid use.

      • All good points, except that there is no need to kill off the 2 billion people. If we implement the other steps, we can leave genocide to the Greens.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Remove 2 billion people? And put them where exactly?

      Are you going to line up first to be removed?

      Or is that only for other people from some other place you dont know anyone?

      Thought so. I stopped reading there. Nothing else you could possibly have said would have made sense or even been funny.

      • Remove 2 billion people? And put them where exactly?

        In the nether, or maybe a river. At least, that's where I unload my excess cobblestone.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Remove 2 billion people from the planet.

      There is really no need for that. We have basically got population growth under control, with the fertility rate being around static (2.2) in most places. Yes, even third world countries.

      The population is still growing because people are living longer. But it's levelling off, and at a level which is sustainable with modern farming methods and renewable energy.

      In the longer term, past 2100, the population will probably fall as the fertility rate continues to decline

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by flink ( 18449 )

        Remove 2 billion people from the planet.

        There is really no need for that. We have basically got population growth under control, with the fertility rate being around static (2.2) in most places. Yes, even third world countries.

        The population is still growing because people are living longer. But it's levelling off, and at a level which is sustainable with modern farming methods and renewable energy.

        In the longer term, past 2100, the population will probably fall as the fertility rate continues to decline

        Modern farming techniques aren't sustainable. Modern farming relies on tapping fossil water (aquifers), mining phosphorus, and petro chemicals. All of these are exhaustible resources. And beyond that fertilizer runoff in waterways, excessive antibiotics used to raise livestock, and pesticides are all ecological disasters in their own right.

        I'm not saying that we should just stop all those things now and let a bunch of people starve, but we need to realize we are drawing down resources in decades that were

        • Re:Total agreement (Score:4, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @10:09AM (#57972112) Homepage Journal

          Modern farming is unsustainable only when profit is the main motive. If sustainability is the main motive it's fine. We can fix the economic system simply by legislating that sustainability must be the priority and imposing penalties for not doing it.

          • by flink ( 18449 )

            Modern farming is unsustainable only when profit is the main motive. If sustainability is the main motive it's fine. We can fix the economic system simply by legislating that sustainability must be the priority and imposing penalties for not doing it.

            The bread basket of the US is only that because of tapping aquifers and putting nutrients back into the soil that we are pulling out and shipping all over the country/world. If we moved to sustainable techniques like rotating in non-food crops, leaving fields fallow for long enough for the aquifer to recover from a year's worth of growing, and recovering nutrients from sewage all over the country to ship back to fields as fertilizer, then food prices would skyrocket as supply plummets. Even if there was en

    • Remove 2 billion people from the planet.

      It's not the human population, it's the human resource consumption. As the average American uses 30 times the amount of resources [nytimes.com] as people in developing countries, removing the USA would be equivalent to "removing" the poor from around the world many times over.

      Ban coal power outright.

      Sure.

      LFTR reactor research funded to pre-Jimmy-Carter levels.

      Cost and time make nuclear power unjustifiable. Taking 20 years and $20 billion to build a new nuclear power plant is alre

  • Deja Vu (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @12:44AM (#57970676)

    We had this dance already :
    https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]

    As I said last time :
    "Water diverted from the forest ranges from 7 to 17 percent of average flow throughout the year, with up to 54 percent of flow diverted from individual watersheds (table 5). A much higher percentage of average flow is diverted when intakes outside of the forest are considered (table 6)."

    https://www.fs.fed.us/global/i... [fs.fed.us]

    That forest isn't as pristine as the researchers pretend it to be.

  • Global warming? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @12:47AM (#57970682)
    What about pesticides and other toxins as well? We're dumping this shit into our environment and some of it is persistent. Agriculture is one thing, but whenever I see a house with a perfect, green lawn, I want to smack the owners in the face.
    • by dryeo ( 100693 )

      It's not that hard to have a nice green lush lawn without chemicals. Good soil with the right mixture of sand and compost, don't mow the grass short so it shades out the weed seeds and live somewhere with lots of rainfall.

    • I have my doubts as as well. A slightly higher temperature killed the insects? Sure, there's more to it than that, stuff migrates when the climate changes for example, which can disrupt an ecosystem. But the earth has been as warm before as it is now, and warmer.

      Wouldn't be the first time that a scientist blames global warming for some unexplained phenomenon. And no, we don't need more data, we need more study into this.
    • Re:Global warming? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @08:19AM (#57971630)

      What about pesticides and other toxins as well? We're dumping this shit into our environment and some of it is persistent. Agriculture is one thing, but whenever I see a house with a perfect, green lawn, I want to smack the owners in the face.

      The EU issued a blanket ban all neonicotinoids last year. This is the stuff that is largely responsible a 75%-85% collapse of the insect population in the EU zone. I don't know how much those are used in Puerto Rico but neonicotinoids are certainly capable of causing a 70% plus reduction in insect populations so I won't be crying any rivers if this stuff gets banned elsewhere too. It's just one of many toxic substances that I don't want in my food.

    • The best and easiest way to get a green lawn is to not plant grass there are any number of weeds that look like grass that also help with erosion and are more persistent than average grasses people usually plant. Let the lawn grow to about 6 - 7 inches before your first mow of the year, keep the lawn mowed to 3.5 - 4 inches if you mow to low in the hotter months it will turn brown. No pesticides required that being said I use pesticide on the back tree line in particular to kill flea and ticks and it helps

  • got a great deal on some spray that allowed for more exports and more profits every year.
    Every year they spray and use more.
    More people are trying to use the same land every year.
    So human population need to expand into forests more every generation.

    How to fix this:
    Consider what and who is using so much strange spray on their crops.
    Set the forests aside like the US does as a huge new national park. No more human activity is allowed.
    See if the insects and critter populations recover when the import a
    • Also, crops are one thing, but I'm fine with banning frivolous uses of pesticides and herbicides. Nope, you don't get to have a perfect, green, dandelion-free lawn to impress Mr. and Mrs. Stepford next door. Mother Gaia is more important than the fuckin' Stepfords.
      • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Once the animals and insects get weakened with the pesticides and herbicides all kinds of fungus and parasite infections take over.
        Every generation of animals and insects then has to face huge changes to its own health and what the illegal and powerful pesticides and herbicides do.
  • by js290 ( 697670 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @12:52AM (#57970694)
    "Name one ecosystem that is better off for having agriculture moved into it?" Toby Hemenway http://bit.ly/1pnapoW [bit.ly]
  • by ihaveamo ( 989662 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @01:25AM (#57970790)
    We are in the midst of a huge mass extinction event. It's up to us, our generation, to save what little we can for future generations. If humanity gets through this.. it will be our time RIGHT NOW that will be judged harshly. Grow plants, create pools for insects in your yard. Do whatever you can. At least, lucky for us, we have strong leaders who want to do something about it.
    • I think the bigger problem is that we are ruining this planet for technological civilization until plate tectonics recycle the access to minerals. Nature can adapt faster than that.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Gilgaron ( 575091 )
        There's not enough time to recycle for another species to take over. When the huge coal seams and oil were buried in the carboniferous period, there were not microbes that could digest lignin. So, no successor of ours will ever get as much fossil fuel to jump start their development. If the insect population truly and irreversibly collapses, there won't be any vertebrates left anyway.
  • Six legs good, eight legs bad.

  • by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @02:52AM (#57971016)

    After not being bothered to check on the insect count for 35 years, is it a coincidence this count occurred a little more than a year after Hurricane Maria?

    I'm guessing a category 4 hurricane doesn't do insect populations any favors.

    • I'm too lazy to look up the reference, but there has been similar decline noted in Germany. The reason the PR study was interesting was that it wouldn't be linked to agriculture. Still... ag in Germany and a hurricane in PR could play a role, but on the same note of all things I'd expect insects to be largely unaffected by a hurricane relative to larger organisms.
  • by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @03:50AM (#57971142)
    In the UK nsect abundance has fallen by 75% over the last 27 years [theguardian.com]. I notice in woods where I used to constantly hear bird noise it is now mostly silent
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yes. I "hear" that silence here in France too. That silence is frightening me. Nobody under 20 would understand and the others mostly don't care or don't notice

      Another german study on insect collapse https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-04774-7

    • by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @04:40AM (#57971220) Homepage Journal
      Whoopsie. And I think we were planning on eating all the insects once we ran out of higher mammals. Guess we'll just have to move directly to the soylent green phase.
  • by Tom ( 822 )

    Here's the thing:

    What is destroying the planet are a) humans, lots and lots of humans and b) progress, industrialisation, travel

    Or, in other words: Our life, and the things that make it cute.

    I don't see volunteers for giving up either of that. Oh, plenty of people who want others to give it up. But almost all the "back to nature" freaks are doing so from a position of 1st world luxury and comfort, not from a position of hard field work and subsistance farming and starvation winters.

    The solution is at the sa

    • Industrialized nations have been dropping to sub-replacement levels, but you do see this generally mentioned in more panicked rather than relieved tones in the media. From some of the models, we need to proactively remediate some of the damage that's been done rather than merely stop doing further damage. That seems to be a more intractable problem to get the public behind to me, but maybe if we can convince the plebs that The Other is trying to steal their CO2 we can get the money to do so.
      • by Tom ( 822 )

        Industrialized nations have been dropping to sub-replacement levels

        Yes, but barely. And yes, the mostly see this as a problem, not because of any real reasons, but because too many systems (pension systems, healthcare systems and economic systems dependent on growth) are built with the assumption of growing population.

        The problem is that existing levels of human population are already at around 200% of what the planet can sustain without serious consequences.

    • Fertility reduction virus that only affects humans and doesn't affect health in other ways. There now, I said it.
  • Wasn't expecting it... but this really bugs me.

  • Maybe the bugs evolved to avoid sticky plates?
  • All those scientists and their sticky plates wiped out the insects.

  • Seriously, we are destroying our planet due to massive CO2. We need to stop burning all fossil fuel. The only way is adding Nukes to AE.

According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.

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