See! We shouldn’t be covering them in chocolate and eating them! We should be eating cows! Because…uh…I’m able to hold this snowball before you! 
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Some days I get really bummed out. Other days I try to think like Otto Mann.
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I wonder how much of this can be attributed to developments in production of artificial pesticide compounds and their gradual diffusion into the greater environment. Certain novel molecular configurations (even below thresholds of detectability with current methods), might make us victims of our own successes in the long run…
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it’s anecdotal, but there’s also the bug splatter decline.
Where a trip in high summer would once have necessitated taking a squeegee to the front window, now the glass is largely clear, drivers are reporting.
i feel like when i was a kid bugs were everywhere in the summer. now? not so much.
sounds like no one ever really thought to measure it well before. so tracking the decline is hard.
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Actually. The last 5 years or so there has been a notable decrease in the nr of mosquitos over here. I live close to water and good mosquito nets have always been essential.
Except for last year, when we didn’t bother to put them up after the winter because the year before we had put them up for nothing.
Even stranger because the last few winters were warm. And in the previous 40ish years or so of my experience a warm winter meant loooots of mosquitos.
Scary stuff.
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This is on my mind as well. PLUS all the medicines we take go down the sewer and end up in the water supply, PLUS decades of leaded gas mean every major highway is flanked by soil contaminated with lead AND the runoff from motor oil and gasoline leaks.
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So instead of a Silent Spring due to the lack of birds, it’ll be silent due to the lack of bees and other vital organisms.
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I noticed the decline around… the early 1990s at least back home in Wichita KS. Specifically, I noticed two kinds of insects in decline: bees and mosquitoes. The latter I didn’t mind being gone but it was very strange that bees were gone as well. Then fireflies in summer, moths, and much more followed. You’d be hard pressed to find any of the kind in the periphery of Wichita where my family most of the time lived. And note that Wichita is a factory town during that time (still is just less jobs now). So I have to wonder what really changed?
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Every year, I see insect traps fastened to trees in the city. Prisms of sticky paper, they are printed with grids to let researchers quickly estimate the number of critters caught. Ive been expecting someone to chart a change in the kinds on insects caught, as climate change favors some species over others. And an overall decline in numbers would certainly show up in these studies. Oh well, I guess if they arent posting alarming trends, everything must be hunky dory!
The logical candidate is neonicotinoids. They are made to kill insects after all. And they became available/fashionable in this time period.
The ironic thing is that neonicotionoids were developed as a more environmentally friendly pesticide.
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The logical candidate is neonicotinoids. They are made to kill insects after all. And they became available/fashionable in this time period.
The ironic thing is that neonicotionoids were developed as a more environmentally friendly pesticide.
Also, the destruction of and fragmentation of habitats, due to industrial agriculture.
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You mean like god ol’ Terry did in 1982, yes?
/s
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Probably yes. Though I’m not sure that has changed much in the last 30 or so years. At least over here where I live it actually got a bit better in that regard, with farmers leaving parts of their fields ‘wild’ for the insects.
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