Insects Could Vanish Within a Century At Current Rate of Decline, Says Global Review (theguardian.com) 241
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems," according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century. The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are "essential" for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.
Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: "The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet. The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanization and climate change are also significant factors. "One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects," the study says, noting a recent study in Puerto Rico where there was a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years. Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit.
Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: "The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet. The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanization and climate change are also significant factors. "One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects," the study says, noting a recent study in Puerto Rico where there was a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years. Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit.
Fortunately (Score:4, Insightful)
By the time this whips back around to fuck humanity, the denialist will be spouting off how mass extinctions happened in the past without human influence. Perfectly normal part of the lifecycle in Earth.
Draw a line (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Draw a line (Score:5, Funny)
I slept in a half hour today. At this rate I'll be sleeping for nearly 200 hours per day this time next year.
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Just as true as the original headline: "Insect researchers could vanish within a century!"
The italicized word is doing a lot of work in both sentences....
Re:Draw a line (Score:4, Insightful)
Just as true as the original headline: "Insect researchers could vanish within a century!"
The italicized word is doing a lot of work in both sentences....
And of course the solution is to sit on your ass and do nothing except make snarky comments and maybe increase the use of pesticides because the 70-90% declines in insect populations we are seeing already is clearly a non-issue.
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> intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides.
This ! Agriculture is destructive on the environment, leading to loss of top soil, destruction of local plants and animals. Check what happened to Limberlost Swamp [wikipedia.org].
Re:Draw a line (Score:5, Funny)
At this rate I'll be sleeping for nearly 200 hours per day this time next year.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
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And in 100 years you'll be sleeping 18,000 hours a day.
Which is pretty much the truth.
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I extrapolate that by 2035, all intelligent discourse will consist of threads of XKCD links.
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I extrapolate that by 2035, all intelligent discourse will consist of threads of XKCD links.
We should be so lucky. I can imagine worse.
Re:Draw a line (Score:5, Interesting)
No it will not, XKCD links are actually a source of the problem.
I like XKCD and all, but let get real for a minute, problems can hardly be summed up as such and are tantamount to nothing other than mudslinging. Unless someone is 100% in lock step with your beliefs on something then XKCD articles are mostly used to imply that dissenters are just ignorant morons. The problem is far more complex and what is even worse... XKCD's articles are better though of as a problem that all sides in every debate shares.
Everyone has confirmation bias, and all sides have people that will overlook the sins of their fellow compatriots because the ends really do justify the means. Take an politically polarized subject and you will find someone calling for criminal charges, fines, imprisonment, and even the death of those disagreeing with them. There is no faster proof of an unscientific moron than when someone trots out one of these following fallacies...
Consensus = Truth/Fact/Proof.
Correlation = Causation.
Gatekeeping qualifications... Only a certified, licensed, or recognized group/institution/team are allowed to have an opinion... except skeptics because their opinions are invalidated by the professionals that I happen to agree with.
Gaslighting people for not believing in something.
Asking for skeptics to prove a negative, or asking that they provide scientific evidence for their position when the evidence being unable to convince them is the evidence.
Acceptance of controvertible evidence, scare or abundant, as good enough to be proof as though it were incontrovertible evidence.
I don't consider name calling or generic aspersions as proof someone does not know what they are talking about. Even Einstein said... Only two things are infinite... the universe and human stupidity and I am not sure about the former.
People are stupid... epicly stupid, and human stupidity is constantly being underrated. Especially proven by all the pseudo scientists guilty of the fallacies I mentioned above.
Hopefully XKCD will keep being nothing more than a funny and witty little site where groups of pseudo intellectuals can mentally masturbate with each other.
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Huh? Why do you consider me being a downer for refuting the guys claim that all future intelligent discourse would be XKCD links?
I said I like XKCD and I said they are witty, I am just saying that if all discourse being distilled down into XKCD links then it is just a sign of the problem.
Nothing of what I said was pseudo-intellectual, many well respected scientists including Nobel Laureates have espoused the exact same views I have on the subject. Heck even many therapists have commented negatively on our
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Pot, meet kettle.
Re:Draw a line (Score:5, Informative)
Why, so you can bury your head in the sand and sing la la la la la whilst we exterminate the planet? Sure there will be some slow down eventually but so far in Europe at least half the insects are dead already and we are heading for a disaster the likes of which we've never seen before if we don't change our rape and pollute the planet ways.
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Why, so you can bury your head in the sand and sing la la la la la whilst we exterminate the planet? Sure there will be some slow down eventually but so far in Europe at least half the insects are dead already and we are heading for a disaster the likes of which we've never seen before if we don't change our rape and pollute the planet ways.
Does this mean that Europe will now import masses of insects from third world countries and call anyone who disagrees racist?
Re: Draw a line (Score:2)
>whilst we exterminate the planet?
You are a blithering alarmist imbecile. Go kill youself.
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You are very ignorant, go educate yourself.
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I understand statistics very well, thanks.
Good job, I'm proud of you.
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There's nothing theoretical about the huge decline in insect numbers, Germany has a 75% decline, France now has a 50% decline in birds likely due to the decline in insects.
If you're not scared it's because you don't know enough about the level of destruction going on.
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If you're not scared it's because you don't know enough about the level of destruction going on.
If I'm not scared it's because I'm an adult and somewhere along the way learned to face reality. Time to grow up, Mr Logic.
Re:Draw a line (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny you should mention xkcd... https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
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Nobody in your knitting circle, maybe, but climate scientists can explain that graph pretty well these days.
Loss of insect species is very alarming (Score:5, Insightful)
Insects are a keystone species in many food webs. Without insects, many plant waste products (wood logs, dead grasses, fallen leaves, etc) would not break down fast enough for the carbon and nutrients to be recycled into the food chain, or otherwise returned to the ecosystem.
Add to that, that insects are essential pollinators for many plant species, including (and especially) those that are valuable human agricultural crops, (or are otherwise essential to other macrofauna), and you end up with bad juju very quickly.
The loss of insect species at this rate is alarming. Very alarming. Making quips about mother fucking donald trump, or wasting everyone's goddamn time with pointing fingers at one political group or the other to preserve their complacent lifestyles and personal peace of mind--- rather than being mindful and alert about this problem, and going for the needed fixes to prevent the looming catastrophe this represents--- It is fucking damning as hell about why this catastrophe has happened in the first place; It's part of the problem, not any solution.
Re:Loss of insect species is very alarming (Score:5, Interesting)
The insect loss rate is a grossly inaccurate, and covers tiny little chunk of land.
"The 98% ground insect loss" between 1976 and 2012 was taken from a research plot of land in the Luquillo Mountains.
This plot of land was DESTROYED in 1990 by Hurricane Hugo, as was the insect and animal populations. https://pr.water.usgs.gov/public/webb/hurricane_hugo.html
The paper attempts to blame this on an increase in temperature and max/min temperatures without any conclusive evidence, without any good data points, and I imagine that its an attempt tot secure funding by the massive amounts of 'Climate Change' money there is. FYI, the only data points that are year on year contiguous that they have (2012 and 2013) actually show a small growth in the population.
Climate Change is real and terrible, but the science behind this crap is utterly disgraceful.
Re:Loss of insect species is very alarming (Score:5, Informative)
The insect loss rate is a grossly inaccurate, and covers tiny little chunk of land.
What do you mean by "grossly inaccurate"?
As in plus or minus how much?
The authors seem to have data for 19 years (1993 to 2011, inclusive) for the walking sticks, and each of those was taken with 5 days of sampling over 10 traps for 50 samples to get each of the 19 points.
So there's some evidence of statistical rigour. How small is the "tiny little chink" of land?
As in what area?
Do you have any reason to suspect that this area isn't representative?
The 98% ground insect loss" between 1976 and 2012 was taken from a research plot of land in the Luquillo Mountains.
This plot of land was DESTROYED in 1990 by Hurricane Hugo, as was the insect and animal populations.
As you can see from figure 5 C [pnas.org], the walking stick population was declining overall since 1991. The decline is correlated with temperature (figure 5 D, same link as 5 C, above). It does not show a flat or recovering population as if the 1990 even had destroyed the population.
The paper attempts to blame this on an increase in temperature and max/min temperatures without any conclusive evidence, without any good data points
No they don't. They show that that is the likely cause using multiple regression, and discuss the alternative hypothesis of the effect of clear-cutting, showing to be not the case in the study area.
Oh, you're one of those conspiracy theory crackpots that think that climate scientists simply do 25 years of education, then get pathetically lowly paid positions as post docs rather than getting a highly paid job in the private sector, so that they can compete for grants that barely fund their research, and they do not get to pocket any of, because that's a sensible route to personal enrichment by deception?
Not a wonder you had so many misconceptions about the paper. Which science-denial website did you pick up your opinions from, if you don't mind be asking?
FYI, the only data points that are year on year contiguous that they have (2012 and 2013) actually show a small growth in the population.
Nope. As you can see from the figure I link, they have data for every year from 1993 to 2011 for walking sticks as well. Decreases occurred on 10 of those sequential years.
Climate Change is real and terrible, but the science behind this crap is utterly disgraceful.
Irony (adj): a bit like an iron.
Re:Loss of insect species is very alarming (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not just one research plot in the Luquillo Mountains. There are cases of decline across the world. [scientificamerican.com]
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Mod this guy up, the idiot whiners who keep referencing Trump need a hiding.
Republicans are /generally/ worse with the environment, but this problem hardly, hardly rests entirely on their shoulders, in the slightest. Our entire culture, our entire behaviour as a species has led to this, almost every element of our worthless, stupid, consumerists lives have got us here. This is hardly some idiot time to whinge about god damn @#%ing moron Trump.
The far left are now, as bad or worse than the far right.
Get yo
Re:Loss of insect species is very alarming (Score:4, Interesting)
Whether global warming is true or not ...
Whether gravity is true or not, global warming's been measured.
Yep, warming. [nasa.gov]
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1 degree increase in 140 years?
About 50 years.
In the case of eucalypts, that about 25% of species outside their range. Which means they have to migrate or go extinct. Other plants are probably similar.
The truth is if humanity wanted to solve our claimed warming problem we have the technology right now to do it.
Agreed. The problem appears to be that humanity is manipulable by marketing, and fossil fuel interests are paying for marketing.
We could quite easily build out double our current global power generation capacity with nuclear and use the surplus to remove the carbon from the atmosphere.
We'll need about seven times if we want our current transportation to go electric as well, assuming my arithmetic is about right.
Why don't we do it? Because we aren't being impacted enough from any warming effects to justify the effort and expense..
Oh yes we are. We aren't doing it because of marketing on one hand, and the difficul
Re: Loss of insect species is very alarming (Score:2)
Re: Loss of insect species is very alarming (Score:4, Interesting)
Insects aren't going to disappear.
When they say Four aquatic taxa are imperilled and have already lost a large proportion of species, that means that some of them have already disappeared. They are not saying that they will all disappear. But in Luquillo where there have been large population drops observed, these have been accompanied by parallel decreases in Luquillo’s insectivorous lizards, frogs, and birds [pnas.org].
It's not worth the hyperbole and panic.
The observed collapse of a food web in some areas. It's not hyperbole, and panic is justified, unless you're already in your late 80s or have terminal cancer.
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It's worth looking into whether something can be done, but panic is neither justified nor helpful.
Even if the study's conclusions are correct and we lose some insects and some animals that eat them. So what? How many people will die as a result?
The few insect species that we do rely on are nowhere near extinction, while intensive farming techniques and cheap energy are bringing billions of people out of poverty, of whom a significant percentage would have died due to the lack of food, clean water or healthc
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So what?
Extinction Is a bad thing because it denies humanity access to the living thing and its ecosystem as a scientific resource.
It is also a bad thing because we are a long way from understanding the interconnectedness of the global ecosystem, so we don't know which extinction will be followed by the extinction of a very important pollinator or competitor or predator of a pathogen that will lead to the impacts for us or important domestic or agricultural species.
Extinction aside, drops in biomass of things l
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Extinction Is a bad thing because it denies humanity access to the living thing and its ecosystem as a scientific resource.
So the only negative there is that scientific progress might be slower?
It is also a bad thing because we are a long way from understanding the interconnectedness of the global ecosystem, so we don't know which extinction will be followed by the extinction of a very important pollinator or competitor or predator of a pathogen that will lead to the impacts for us or important domestic or agricultural species.
We can find out which species are pollinators and ensure they are unaffected. Actually those insects would be just fine if we just stop spaying insecticide on them. We already provide them with an abundant food source. And if their competitor or predator goes extinct, that's even better.
Extinction aside, drops in biomass of things like 98% are indicative of a collapse of productivity of the land. Humans already use about 30% more resources per year than the world produces.
What does that even mean? We can only consume 100% of what we produce. Who's making the extra 30%? Can you provide a citation?
while intensive farming techniques and cheap energy are bringing billions of people out of poverty
Great for them, but not relevant to the impact on humanity of the loss of some of the world's ecosystems.
One leads to the other. You
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So the only negative there is that scientific progress might be slower?
There are many negatives to speices loss.
One is the the biotechnology and medical science that we will never have access to.
Another is the capacity of the world to carry life, including ours
Another is the risk of losing a species or group that collapses an important system for human survival.
We can find out which species are pollinators ....
Well, we'd have to put a lot of money into species identification if we're going to identify all the pollinators. And a lot of time.
But being a pollinator isn't the only mechanism by which a species is important to
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Name a specific threat caused by climate change and I can find a point in time where stone-age humans survived that. If anything, it's rapid climate change that created humans in the first place.
Besides, we're not exactly a normal apex predator given how we can eat everything and the majority of our calories come from plants.
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Source?
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Don't worry, Elon Musk will 3D print new crops that pollinate via IoT meshworks. With blockchains.
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No Kendall, it's actually done by insects also. Bacteria, fungii, protozoa, single-celled organisms all play a role. Learn more about science, Republican children. Nicotinoid "weed killers" are chemical warfare on our food chain. We're killing it.
All of it.
Re:Loss of insect species is very alarming (Score:5, Informative)
I see you did not pay attention in grade school AC. this is not surprising.
https://www.ck12.org/biology/i... [ck12.org]
While the article is very short, I understand that your attention span is ALSO very short, as evidenced by your lack of creativity in your word choice in your ad-hominem. So, here is the pertinent portion of the article, with added bold emphasis.
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soil mites ...
termites
ants
wasps
Re:Why do you believe this new fantasy? (Score:5, Funny)
First we were told cockroaches were the only things that were survive a nuclear war. Now we are to believe that insects are super fragile? I don't think so, they have a super short lifespan and prodigious replication rates so as to be able to out-evolve any threat and take over any exposed ecological niche.
1. Cockroaches can survive nuclear war.
2. Cockroaches are insects.
3. Therefore, stop worrying about the ecological fragility of insects.
That's logically compelling. Not.
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First we were told cockroaches were the only things that were survive a nuclear war. Now we are to believe that insects are super fragile?
Gosh you're right! Cockroaches are insects. Thererfore all inscts are cockroaches. Let's expand it. Cockraoches are animals therefore all animals are cockraoches. Including you.
This does make a lot more sense now.
Re:Why do you believe this new fantasy? (Score:5, Informative)
The one time humans could have maybe made dent, with DDT and mosquitos, they checked out thanks to more fake science [reason.com] that claimed DDT harmed birds eggs.
No, that's not fake science.
DDT and Birds
Birds played a major role in creating awareness of pollution problems. Indeed, many people consider the modern environmental movement to have started with the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's classic Silent Spring, which described the results of the misuse of DDT and other pesticides. In the fable that began that volume, she wrote: "It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh." Silent Spring was heavily attacked by the pesticide industry and by narrowly trained entomologists, but its scientific foundation has stood the test of time. Misuse of pesticides is now widely recognized to threaten not only bird communities but human communities as well.
The potentially lethal impact of DDT on birds was first noted in the late 1950s when spraying to control the beetles that carry Dutch elm disease led to a slaughter of robins in Michigan and elsewhere. Researchers discovered that earthworms were accumulating the persistent pesticide and that the robins eating them were being poisoned. Other birds fell victim, too. Gradually, thanks in no small part to Carson's book, gigantic "broadcast spray" programs were brought under control.
But DDT, its breakdown products, and the other chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides (and nonpesticide chlorinated hydrocarbons such as PCBs) posed a more insidious threat to birds. Because these poisons are persistent they tend to concentrate as they move through the feeding sequences in communities that ecologists call "food chains." For example, in most marine communities, the living weight (biomass) of fish-eating birds is less than that of the fishes they eat. However, because chlorinated hydrocarbons accumulate in fatty tissues, when a ton of contaminated fishes is turned into 200 pounds of seabirds, most of the DDT from the numerous fishes ends up in a relatively few birds. As a result, the birds have a higher level of contamination per pound than the fishes. If Peregrine Falcons feed on the seabirds, the concentration becomes higher still. With several concentrating steps in the food chain below the level of fishes (for instance, tiny aquatic plants crustacea small fishes), very slight environmental contamination can be turned into a heavy pesticide load in birds at the top of the food chain. In one Long Island estuary, concentrations of less than a tenth of a part per million (PPM) of DDT in aquatic plants and plankton resulted in concentrations of 3-25 PPM in gulls, terns, cormorants, mergansers, herons, and ospreys.
"Bioconcentration" of pesticides in birds high on food chains occurs not only because there is usually reduced biomass at each step in those chains, but also because predatory birds tend to live a long time. They may take in only a little DDT per day, but they keep most of what they get, and they live many days.
The insidious aspect of this phenomenon is that large concentrations of chlorinated hydrocarbons do not usually kill the bird outright. Rather, DDT and its relatives alter the bird's calcium metabolism in a way that results in thin eggshells. Instead of eggs, heavily DDT-infested Brown Pelicans and Bald Eagles tend to find omelets in their nests, since the eggshells are unable to support the weight of the incubating bird.
Shell-thinning resulted in the decimation of the Brown Pelican populations in much of North America and the extermination the Peregrine Falcon in the eastern United States and southeastern Canada. Shell-thinning caused lesser declines in populations of Golden and Bald Eagles and White Pelicans, among others. Similar declines took place in the Br
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What I can tell you is there here in Northern Ontario, Canada, when I used to go fishing as a boy (~35 years ago) our truck would be covered with insect guts before we even got to our destination 50 miles away. You would be eaten alive by flies and mosquitoes at the destination until you got out onto the water.
Nowadays, we can go and do the same trip and it's not apparent we've hit even a single bug on the way. And bugs at the shoreline are hardly a nuisance anymore, relatively speaking.
And it's not just
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First we were told cockroaches were the only things that were survive a nuclear war. Now we are to believe that insects are super fragile? I don't think so, they have a super short lifespan and prodigious replication rates so as to be able to out-evolve any threat and take over any exposed ecological niche.
SuperKendall, you are making incorrect logical steps. I'll spell out for you where.
The popular press article said "More than 40% of insect species are declining". That relates to a sentence from the original academic paper, "Our work reveals dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world's insect species over the next few decades." https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
Obviously that means that 60% of insect species AREN'T declining.
Your faulty logic was (1) from the figure that 40
Re: Why do you believe this new fantasy? (Score:5, Informative)
I propose you see if there is actually a problem before acting or panicking. Wow, what a radical concept, to insist on replication of results.
Why not check to see if there are other comparable results before using rhetoric which depends on their non-existence?
https://journals.plos.org/plos... [plos.org]
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Debugging (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, someone is just running Earth in debug mode.
Breaking News (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire planet Earth could spontaneously explode in 15 minutes.
It won't, but it could. It COULD.
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No. Actually, it could not. At least there is no indicator that would even remotely point in the general direction of that possibility.
Share in Eden or reign in Hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens when the food supply declines, because nutrients don't cycle with fauna, because pollinators are gone, because all the interrelated parts of nature unravel? That is the basis for a planet habitable to humans.
Do we use more pesticides to fight harder for what's left, considering that pesticides cause the implosion of the very ecosystem benefits we depend on to raise food to begin with? Then we're finished.
What happens to poor people when sustenance and shelter and resources that once came freely become scarce? I'm sure the rich will have their hydroponic gardens - atop places where oaks once rivaled wheat fields for output and salmon arrived to spawn in such numbers that it appeared possible to walk across rivers on their back. If manufactured solutions are a replacement for ecosystems for the many, though, why aren't we all snapping up real estate in places like the Sahara or Antarctica?
We are turning an Eden into a much more barren world, because we so insist on dominating and concentrating its wealth. We don't live where ecosystems aren't established. Humans have got to learn to share the world with others - or else.
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The most cost effective ones are probably the already existing ones. They're free, and in the form of honey bees they also produce additional revenue while performing the desired primary operation.
Anecdotally, I've noticed the same, approx 5 years (Score:3, Interesting)
For around the past 5 years, I've generally noticed simply less insects around in places I would traditionally expect them.
Obviously they are still around but there just /seems/ to be less.
I am firmly, firmly in the camp of the post, I definitely believe we've begun the 6'th mass extinction. It's gonna be a doozy.
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It's been the last couple of years of significant decline only. I'm a pilot, and as an unavoidable side effect of flying I kill lots of insects, which afterwards need to be cleaned from the plane. Cleaning has become noticeably easier over the last few years. However, I'm quite sure that this is a local artificial process, i.e. more advanced (less natural) agriculture in this area.
Climate change is going to make an impact in future, especially if we're going to see the typical +5C up within a few decades as
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Insects provide $57 billion in services to the US (Score:3)
Insects provide $57 billion in ecological services to the USA alone, and that's just dealing with quantifiable things.
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
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This is a better link, btw:
http://www.xerces.org/wp-conte... [xerces.org]
and I smell bullshit. Second digit? Really? Interpret this bullshit figure as 0-100B estimate.
Not exactly correct reporting. (Score:4, Informative)
The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanization and climate change are also significant factors.
No, habitat loss from intensive agriculture and urbanization are both the main driver.
The heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers are second.
Invasive species and diseases from microorganisms are third (not mentioned).
Climate change is fourth.
From the abstract:
The main drivers of species declines appear to be in order of importance:
i) habitat loss and conversion to intensive agriculture and urbanisation;
ii) pollution, mainly that by synthetic pesticides and fertilisers;
iii) biological factors, including pathogens and introduced species; and
iv) climate change.
Spiders (Score:2)
Panic! Or not? (Score:2)
We're all gonna die!!! Eleventy!!! This may be a genuine problem. Or it may not. There is no way for the average person to know. Breathless headlines touting climatic disaster have become so ubiquitous that my first reaction - and that of many people - is a yawn. Ecologists and climate alarmists have done their causes active harm.
Are insects declining? Sure, along with all other animal species that share our habitat. Intuitively, mass agriculture is the most likely culprit, since it creates huge zones of mo
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Amusingly, the vegetarians may be doing active harm - I'll bet that good, natural grazing land has more biodiversity than a soy field.
Too bad most people eat animals raised on corn.
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Too bad most people eat animals raised on corn.
No they don't.
Beef cattle are grass fed for two thirds of their life, and only grain fed for the last third. The USDA tracks [usda.gov] these things.
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Article says that 2/3 of FARMS are pasture, not 2/3 of cows.
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"This may be a genuine problem. Or it may not. There is no way for the average person to know."
Who gives a shit what the average person thinks? I only want to know what experts think. I don't call a burger flipper to fix plumbing.
"Are insects declining? Sure, along with all other animal species that share our habitat."
Oh, everything is suffering? That's all right then. I mean, it's actually wholly false, the coyotes, trash pandas, rats, cockroaches, and several other species have actually flourished while i
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We're all gonna die!!! Eleventy!!! This may be a genuine problem. Or it may not. There is no way for the average person to know. Breathless headlines touting climatic disaster have become so ubiquitous that my first reaction - and that of many people - is a yawn. Ecologists and climate alarmists have done their causes active harm.
Is it your position that if ecologists and "climate alarmists" didn't exist, that the average person would spend a few hours a week doing their research to understand how the world is progressing in the many ways that will indirectly harm them? If so, have you ever met another person in real life?
The problem isn't that there are two sides, both doing research and trying to figure it out, and one side is "politically correct" and drowns out the other side. The problem is that some people are doing science,
"century" (Score:2)
Piss off
The solution (Score:4, Interesting)
is obvious, if somewhat cynical. Stop using new pesticides. Get used to reduced yields and higher prices of food. There will be famines in the 3rd world. It is inevitable. The human population on our Earth is already well past the line where it can be fed safely. The first few decades will be the hardest. But a century in the future, our descendants will thank us for having evaded the looming catastrophe.
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You guys are pretty stupid to not recognize this is sarcasm.
I suppose it is a bit refreshing to see this stupidity from the left, for a long time the right had almost a monopoly on stupid posts here...
Re: The solution (Score:2)
https://youtu.be/Sm5xF-UYgdg [youtu.be]
Please stop advocating for genocide and stop living in the past!
Time to study animals that eat insects? (Score:2)
How to fix this (Score:2)
Stop removing the forests for farm land and housing.
The bugs will return when the bad use of pesticides stops.
Christ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Every single time there's a study like this, there's another study that wants us to panic over the exact opposite. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
A few weeks ago--I'm pretty sure it was right here on Slashdot--we were being told we were headed for some calamity because world-wide warming was going to make the disease-carrying insert population explode and there wasn't a damned thing we can do about it. Except cut carbon, as usual the miracle solution.
I'll believe any compelling evidence as much as the next guy, but
agriculture (Score:2)
This ! Agriculture is destructive on the environment, leading to loss of top soil, destruction of local plants and animals. Check what happened to Limberlost Swamp [wikipedia.org].
100 (Score:2)
The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century
But 0.975^100 ~ 8% not 0.
Bug report (Score:2)
It's OK. In 100 years, Windows will still be chock full 'o bugs.
How impossibly sad (Score:2)
Stop farming. (Score:3)
Seriously. Farming introduces monocultures and reduces populations for large swaths of insects, such as locusts. Stop farming. Problem solved. (Or you could just let insects eat the crops, but the effect is the same.)
Oh, btw, you'll have to run a lot more cattle to feed everyone...
[waits for envirowhacks' heads to explode]
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This is a problem humanity is causing that it could fix.
How would it be fixed?
Re: Thanks, greens. (Score:2)
The vast majority of "nasty chemicals" which kill insects are naturally occurring insectides which plants themselves have developed as a defense mechanism. Good luck getting rid of those.
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One of the main reasons we use chemicals is because.....mountains of morons
The primary reason we use chemicals is because everything is chemicals. There's no other option.
Your post is clear and readable though, thanks.
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The paper says that [o]ur work reveals dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world's insect species over the next few decades., not merely declining.
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First off, congrats for being able to smell academic papers. I have to read them with my eyes, and then interpret them with my brain. I wish I could just smell them. That would certainly save a lot of time.
Secondly, who gets what sort of power from this paper that you smelled?
Re:Alarmist propaganda based on anecodtal evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets talk for a minute, objectively, about alarmist fake-news.
Okay.
The above is anecdotal evidence; one person, one observation.
Not it's not. It's a scholarly paper with many observations of insect biomass and local tempertature. [pnas.org].
Am I going to seriously make a change to my lifestyle because the never fallable Brad Lister, scientist extraordinair, made an observation? No. The bar of evidence is a study. I need hard data.
The data are decribed in the paper linked above. Knock yourself out.
Lowest price I can find for me to get copies was around $6k.
So there's two possibilities here; either this is fake news and I have a publication so desperate they need to post clickbait, or this isn't fake news and the rich are keeping vital information from the public because, most likely, we're screwed as a species.
There's a third possilbilty. This research was published in a scientific journal that isn't open access.
Re:Alarmist propaganda based on anecodtal evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
An you found they used 6 data points?
I'll copy the relevant part of the section here:
Arthropod Samples.
Lister (22) sampled arthropods within the Luquillo forest during July 1976 and January 1977. Following the same procedures and using the same study area, arthropod abundances were again estimated during July 2011 and January 2012 using both sticky-traps and sweep netting. Our 10 traps were the same size (34 × 24 cm) as Lister’s (22), and also utilized Tanglefoot as the sticky substance. Traps were laid out on the ground in the same-sized grid (30 × 24 m), and also left uncovered for 12 h between dawn and dusk before all captured insects were removed and stored in alcohol. Hoop sizes of our sweep nets (30-cm diameter) matched those used by Lister (22). Body lengths of all captured arthropods were measured to the nearest 0.5 mm using a dissecting scope and ocular micrometer. Regression equations were used to estimate individual dry weights from body lengths (142, 143).
Anolis Abundance.
To compare Anolis densities with Lister’s (22) estimates from July 1976 and January 1977, we sampled anoles within the same 15 × 15-m quadrat during July 2011 and January 2012. Following Lister (22), we used the Schnabel multiple recapture method (27) to estimate densities. However, instead of marking captured lizards by toe clipping, we used Testor’s enamel paint to create small (2 mm) spots with different color combinations directly above the dorsal base of the tail.
Climate Data.
We analyzed climate data taken at two locations in the Luquillo forest: the United States Forest Service El Verde Field Station and the Bisley Lower meteorological tower, which is part of the Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory. The El Verde station lies 5 km southwest of our study area (18.3211 N, 65.8200 W), at an elevation of 350 m. The upper Bisley Tower is located 3.2 km southeast of our study area (18.3164 N, 65.7453 W) at 352 m in elevation. Temperature data for the El Verde station span 37 y, from 1978 to 2015 (Fig. 1A), and for the Bisley station 21 y from 1993 to 2014 (Fig. 1B). Given that the highest ambient temperatures for a given area should have the greatest impact on fitness, especially for ectotherms (144), daily maximum temperatures were utilized in our analyses. Climate data for the Estacion de Biologia Chamela were obtained from www.ibiologia.unam.mx/ebchamela/www/clima.html.
Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research Data.
Data sets from the Luquillo long-term ecological research (LTER) online Data Center were downloaded and analyzed for trends in population abundances over time. Detailed methods employed in the various studies can be found at the LTER Data Center website (https://luq.lter.network/luquillo-information-management-system-luq-ims).
Canopy arthropods.
Data were collected by Schowalter (23) near the El Verde field station between February 1991 and June 2009. Several articles have analyzed these samples with respect to invertebrate diversity, functional groups, arthropod composition in gap and intact forest, and recovery from disturbance (145), but none have looked for trends in overall abundance. Here we summed all arthropods sampled each year across taxa, forest type, and tree genera.
Walking sticks.
We analyzed data from a census of walking sticks (Lamponius portoricensis) carried out by Willig et al. (24) between 1991 and 2014 in the 16-ha Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot (LFDP) near the El Verde Field Station. Sampling was conducted during the wet and dry seasons and captured individuals were classified as adults or juveniles. To analyze walking stick abundance through time, we summed all juveniles and adults across seasons and land classes.
E. coqui abundance.
We analyze census data for the Puerto Rican frog E. coqui taken by Woolbright (29, 30) between 1987 and 1997 at study areas n
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So I guess you'll be fine with eating just bread, oatmeal porridge and hazelnuts?
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The only good planet is a dead planet.
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You are more or less correct, no matter what happens life itself will continue by adapting and evolving (you're a bit off on the timescales, the changes will be a lot slower than you seem to think), we humans pose very little threat to the continuation of life in general.
However a secondary or tertiary effect of the changes likely to happen is that humans go extinct. Change is good, change is normal, for the planet as a whole. Not so good for our species in particular.
What's the most depressing is we ar
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You are more or less correct, no matter what happens life itself will continue by adapting and evolving (you're a bit off on the timescales, the changes will be a lot slower than you seem to think), we humans pose very little threat to the continuation of life in general.
However a secondary or tertiary effect of the changes likely to happen is that humans go extinct. Change is good, change is normal, for the planet as a whole. Not so good for our species in particular.
It is very unlikely that humanity will go extinct. We're the first species who can respond effectively to being endangered.
Though I suppose one could quibble about whether it matters if the population goes from 7.5B to 10M or if it goes to 0M. I mean, humanity survives, but everyone you know and all their descendants are dead.
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You obviously don't. But a lot of people do because if not us then any kids we have, are looking likely to experience our own extinction unless there is drastic action (which is very unlikely, as humanity simply doesn't change that quickly). That's going to be no picnic for anyone
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Cockroaches could be the food of the future.
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Too bad that's not how it works. So far the only attempts to build a controlled biosphere which will support humans have failed for a combination of technical and personal reasons. And the cockroaches will likely persist in spite of any efforts to the contrary, because they are so very resilient. Mosquitoes might go eventually, but you will probably go first.
Re: It's not Climate Change, it's Neonicotinoids (Score:2)
Why the hell every post suggesting genocide is upvoted?
Don't you know that we have passed 'peak child' ?
Yes, 40 yrs ago things looked desperate since we did not know that family size shrinks within 2 generations after child mortality drops...but now we see it in every society.
Never heard about Hans Roseling?
Please, stop living in the past!
https://youtu.be/Sm5xF-UYgdg [youtu.be]
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It says nowhere that insects have died out. So yes, you still will find insects everywhere. All the article says is that the amount of insects being around falls 2.5% every year. So if you turn a stone today, you will find only about 97.5% of the insects you would have found a year ago.