Habitat seems to play a large role --- I've always raked leaves and piled up sticks which fall from trees in our yard into a compost pile in a shady area, which I've been careful to disturb as little as possible from from fall through spring, since fireflies lay eggs in such piles, and their larvae mature in such conditions.
My kids would invite their friends over on nice summer evenings to see fireflies, since none of the McMansion neighborhoods had nearly as many.
We keep getting these warnings, for decades now insect biomass has been in sharp decline and so far we have done very little to try and reverse it. At some point ecosystems are going to go into collapse including ones critical for our food chain.
Thanks for another warning.
^Fpesticide
Nothing here in this thread.
We're overusing pesticides. It's a problem. We should stop.
Here in the Texas hill country we don't have much agricultural use of pesticides, but out in East Texas we do. In the hill country I see plenty of insects.
This is an even bigger issue than climate change because the intensity of the change is even harder to notice. I still see glimpses of biodiversity loss all around me, and it scares me.
> The second driver is habitat loss — the inexorable creep of urbanization, deforestation and sterile suburban lawns, which host fewer and less-diverse ranges of insects.
I don't buy this as a cause of a global decline, though. In many areas things have gone in the opposite direction. The Appalachian mountains were clear cut in the 1800s and now are back to forest. If this theory is correct, I would expect there to have been a massive increase in insect populations on the east coast.
I don't buy this as a cause of a global decline, though
The definition of habitat loss here is a bit poor because it doesn't mention the main contributor: farm land which over the past century got changed from something where insects could still survive to something which is more of a barren wasteland to them. And the thrid factor which goes hand in hand with that is pesticide use.
In many areas things have gone in the opposite direction.
Could be, but I'm pretty sure globally there are more areas where it is not going in that direction though. Or at least hasn't been going over the past century.
The Appalachian mountains were clear cut in the 1800s and now are back to forest. If this theory is correct, I would expect there to have been a massive increase in insect populations on the east coast.
Fir starters that's only one, quite localized example. Also the reasoning doesn't hold - ecosystems are complex systems. It's not because one specific area has been properly restored that insects would suddenly go there from surrounding areas, let alone that from the restored areas they then would suddenly have colonized neighboring areas (the entire east coast as you mention). Mainly because the speed at which they can colonize is limited and insects bound to forests don't necessarily all survive in other types of habitats.
I was only talking about the land use argument. Pesticides seem like a much more likely cause to me, especially because pesticide use on developed land can also cause contamination on undeveloped land.
Forest isn't some Boolean you can toggle 0 and 1. It's not the same forest, why would we expect the same inhabitants?
If you want to claim that the forest that is there now is somehow dramatically worse for insects than the forest that grew there before, that's going to need some evidence behind it.
There was a study done. I’m not sure exactly the study, but it’s from a book called Natures Ghosts. It talks about a Roman farm from around 0AD. The farm plot was clear cut, while the forest around it was never touched, including up to this day. The scientists cataloged the plant and animal species from both the farm plot and the untouched forest. Even though the farm plot had massive trees, and hasn’t been disturbed for 2000 years, the difference in species was massive. On the ancient farm plot: many parasitic species/invasive, off the plot: more prominence of delicate or unique species; just a few hundred meters apart. This is what “different forest” is.
Edit: found the study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17601136/
The study describes it like this, which sounds like it's the opposite:
> Plant species richness strongly increases toward the center of the settlements, and the frequency of neutrophilous and nitrogen-demanding species is higher.
When I hear things like "delicate or unique species" I get the feeling it's not a particularly scientific conclusion.
It's a pretty common thing that replanted forests turn into monocultures that don't have a lot of value for biodiversity. This then leads to all sorts of problems that healthy diverse forests don't have. I don't know if that's the case with the Appalachian forests but this is depressingly common. That being said, there are good steps being taken, e.g. the rewilding projects by mossy earth.
It wasn't replanted. It just grew back when the farms were abandoned.
Not all forests are the same. Old growth forests have a lot more diversity than something cut down in the 1800s, so that would fall under "dramatically worse for insects" imho.
Of course not for all insects, but I would guess that GP didn't mean highly succesful species like ants, which seem to thrive pretty much everywhere. I recommend visiting an old growth forest if you can find one in your area, they're a completely different beast compared to the ones you might be used to. It's really worth it!
Forests were clear cut in the 1800s, yeah. But plant life remained. The latter half of the 1900s moved us in a direction where nature was clear cut and paved over with a mix of rocks and petroleum, which is not very conducive to life. Then we kept moving in that direction by building massive parking lots that are empty most of the time and putting day/night cycle disrupting lights everywhere to keep those paved barren areas lit all night. Then because those dim yellow lights weren't enough, we switched to bright white lights that simulate daytime that blast all hours of the night just to really drive in the day and night cycle disruption. Also, we replaced all native plants with ugly grass. And because that grass struggles to survive, we spray the grass with poison to kill any life that may consume it and any local plants that may attempt to thrive amongst the grass. Also, we constantly mow that grass to keep it just 1 inch long and kill anything that may survived there even despite the poison and lack of biodiversity. And whenever leaves from local plants fall, which serve to replenish soil during decomposition, and act as food and shelter for insects, we get a loud ass leaf blower to put it all into a pile, put that into a garbage bag, and ship it all off to a garbage dump to ferment inside a bag for the next few hundred years so we can make a lot of methane to accelerate global warming for generations to come.
1800s folks stupidly cut down trees because they didn't know any better, but they weren't actively destroying everything and intentionally making it absolutely uninhabitable like our generation does. And now we even have bizarre concepts like HOAs, which mandate absolute and completely intentional environmental destruction for the sake of uniformity.
You are vastly overestimating the amount of land that is taken up by urban and suburban areas. Drive across the country and you will see that very little of the time you spend is in those areas. And then even that is an overestimate because those roads aren't random. They were specifically built to go through all the biggest cities on the way.
I'm confused by your comment about the Appalachians. Were talking about the last handful of decades, not two centuries. The country is less wild today than ever before. More subdivisions, more strip malls, more farms.
This is actually not true, the amount of forest land has been stable for about 100 years. Most of the decline is in the 19th century as population expanded west.
Land dedicated to farming has also declined for the last ~75 years. Peak was 1954 with about 1.16 billion acres. It is down to about 875 million acres.
https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...
No it isn't less wild than ever. It was literally clear cut for farming in the 1800s. I know that this goes against some popular narratives, but if you look it up you will find that it is very true. Also the amount of forest land in the US has been increasing in the last few decades too.
The windshield test is somewhat deceptive as improved aerodynamics plays a role, but the difference is still quite noticeable when driving around in a classic car.
The other thing is that the cleared right of way on highways is larger. Both because highways are larger and because it reduces things like animal strikes.
You're telling me the trend of those big, flat noses (chins?) aren't bug collectors?
But a lot of people drive old as shit cars.
"Old as shit" is still a moving target. An old as shit car from 30 years ago is not the same model year as an old as shit car today.
To memory, cars started getting a lot more aerodynamic through the 90s. You have to go back to the 80s to find boxy designs throughout mainstream cars, at which point you’re looking at vehicles somewhere in the ballpark of 40 years old.
Anecdotally, I’ve not seen many of those on the road. It’s not too unusual to see a late 90s something puttering around town, but 80s and older is unusual, even in rural areas.
I drive a car that was released 25 years ago (a 7th-gen Celica) and it has a coefficient of drag of 0.32, which beats many vehicles currently in production, including multiple electric vehicles.
Now compare that to a car which would have been 25 years old, 30 years ago.
Someone driving the same car for a long time will have seen the change in numbers of insects getting stuck to it.
I wonder what the influence of wind is on survival of flying insects. Over here - W. Eu. - we’ve seen storms on a monthly base now. I don’t think the energy balance of foraging adds up if there’s too much wind.
Plus I heard somewhere song birds are declining due to this apocalypse.
But mosquitoes are not declining, the one insect I wish would decline real fast :)
They are spreading further north now, places that have mostly been free of them are starting to see mosquitoes now due to the increased temperature.
and higher altitudes. its nuts. ticks also are doing this.
Actually I feel like they are. I would get mosquito bites all the time as a kid when I went outside in the evening. Now I almost never do.
One day, humankind will force a full mosquito extinction. That day can't come soon enough.
Why get rid of all mosquitoes when only about one in every fifteen mosquito species bites us?
Archive Link:
There's one reason not mentioned - habitat loss, be it caused by urbanization [1] or by land consolidation ("Flurbereinigung") [2][3].
It used to be the case that rural areas were splintered into many small farms, with bushes being used to mark borders, and these bushes in turn provided harbor and food for insects and cover for small rodents and other mammals.
"Thanks" to mechanisation however, which prefers large uniform land because thats easier for ever larger machines to process, a lot of these splinters were consolidated together and so there is nothing left to support any wildlife, be it insects or small animals, which in turn also causes bird populations to drop - when there are no mice because they don't have any place to build their nests, the birds don't have food as well.
[1] https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/...
[2] https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/flugbegleiter-umfrage-...
[3] https://naturschutz-initiative.de/aktuell/neuigkeiten/landwi...
The thing that gets on my nerves is that this is really an unsolvable political problem.
When governments do try to push and make it law to have X amount of bushes and unfarmed land in a way that makes sense for wildlife to thrive you instantly get angry farmers on your roads, lose their votes and get publicly accused to starve the nation.
And farmers, due to the difficulty of their job (in time, investments and returns) and their role in a society's lifecycle get instant empathy.
There's areas in Italy where farms have absolutely polluted water to insane level, and this further compounds with heavy pollution of drinkable water wells (which should always be at least 120 meters from the closest farm from what I know).
Regular citizens, which end up getting heavily sick from all these farms (often in mortal ways) never get any kind of support as they lack the political and financial weight, and as soon as the argument scales, you're back at populist "you want to starve our people and kill our economy" arguments.
I had a house in the country, by law there shouldn't be more than one chicken farm in a 4 miles radius, yet they built two in less than 2 miles, one of them 300 meters from my house. It literally smells in disgusting ways 24/7, from ammonia to rot I had to sell it for pennies (5'000 euros, renovated), as nobody but the farmers in the area had the slightest intention to moving to such a beautiful yet disgusting place. And I haven't even mentioned that to avoid having to bring the hundreds of dead animals to a registered incinerator (as the law requires) they just dig mass graves in 5 minutes and cover the entire land.
Wildlife has absolutely disappeared.
It's really a tough, tough political battle.
Everything from agriculture to cattle to fishing is insanely polluting and bad for the environment, but the idea of really tracking and controlling how those industries operate is beyond naive. The labels on your tuna can saying it didn't kill dolphins are worthless, there's no way to check what happens on these boats, so are the labels for your coffee or cocoa not using child labor or your food being organic. It's all absolutely fake and a matter of money.
> When governments do try to push and make it law to have X amount of bushes and unfarmed land in a way that makes sense for wildlife to thrive you instantly get angry farmers on your roads, lose their votes and get publicly accused to starve the nation.
The problem is... farmers are a pretty split bunch. On the one side you have the last few remaining small holdouts trying to make ends meet with a few dozen cows or so, they already get swamped in ever increasing bureaucracy, and on the other side you got the megafarms who not only have the benefits of scale available to them (in anywhere from machines to sheer purchase power for feedstock) but also got dedicated full time employees just taking care about getting government handouts.
Of course the small ones get up in arms whenever anything changes, they don't have the capacity and resiliency left anymore.
Tell it like it is!
Here in the netherlands as soon as you try to do something, the farmers start flyingh upside down flags. I call them the 'head in the sand' flags since they stand for ignoring the problems.
I fear the problem is just that the earth suffers from an infestation of humans and the equilibrium will be restored in the same way all infestations end. It won't be pretty (already isn't in lots of places).
Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century.
Now sure, the causes could be multipliers, insect_pop = base * (cause_0 * cause_1 * …), or even exponential, insect_pop = 1/e^(cause_0 + cause_1 + …), so I'm not saying none of that stuff matters, but also there's definitely something nee.
> Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century.
Sure, but the real push came over the last few decades, (IMHO) closely correlating with the utter decline of employment in the primary sector [1], that was all machines and efficiencies of scale.
[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Wirtschaft/Konjunkturindik...
But that isn't true in all areas. And the particular study in Germany that found a 76% decline was done in forest areas.
A large portion of the habitat loss I suspect isn't actually lawns, which have been decreasing in size as suburbs have been increasing in density. Many suburbs built since the 1990s are so tightly packed that you can't fit a car between the houses to get to the back yard, and the back yard itself is two thirds of the footprint of the house itself.
What I suspect is driving it is actually pavement and development ready property. The footprint for pavement for a building is usually three times the footprint for the building itself. This includes parking lots, connecting roads, sidewalks, and even the concrete slabs needed to place things like air conditioning units or tall signage. That pavement denies undergrowth and pioneer species that small insects thrive on seasonally.
It also denies water runoff. Without the water being able to saturate the ground it gets redirected to elsewhere. There's several issues with that, including unnatural subsidence and runoff pollution. The ground has some ability to naturally filter out small amounts of pollution as water seeps down through the soil and to the water table. But if there's pavement all of that water torrents to a single area which gets oversaturated. The soil can't hold any more, and so the water is rejected and pools above the surface. This is why you see so many puddles at the edges of parking lots or road intersections. This allows the pollutants to concentrate, and when the ground finally does absorb the excess water it pulls in those pollutants all the way down to the water table as they're in too high a concentration for the soil to capture.
And development ready property is an actual serious problem. Companies buy real estate and then deforest and regrade it in anticipation of someone eventually buying it. They don't have a buyer lined up, they're just expecting someone to eventually want to settle there, be it a business or a home. In the meantime they keep the land stripped, with no trees or shrubbery, no native plants, and sometimes without even grass. There are places I've seen that were turned into development ready property that have sat hollow and scarred for twenty years.
Even in places where there's native plants, undergrowth, and pioneer species that overcome this, the continual removal of trees makes it almost impossible for animals to stay there for long. Part of this is that with the heat island effect of nearby pavement you get constant blowing lateral winds. Winds which birds can't use as updrafts, winds which blow away rodent ground nests, and winds which scatter colonies of insects. But even if they survive all of that, the constant grooming of the land to keep it "presentable" means zero turn mowers rolling over all of that and destroying it, irrigation being dug that drains naturally forming ponds that house insects and amphibians, and the turfing that chokes out everything with fast growing non-native grasses.
I moved to the countryside in the last year. it's night and day as compared to the nearby town that I lived in, when it comes to insects and spiders. I constantly find corpses of insects on the window sill and the spiders are chunky, given how well they feed.
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