
Alarming study shows massive insect loss - dschuetz
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming-study-shows-massive-insect-loss/
======
jfk13
Duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18222888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18222888)

~~~
dschuetz
You're right :O I wonder why the submission wasn't merged... EDIT: Different
URLs, oh well.

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macawfish
This is devastating. Surely our dumbass (monoculture) agricultural and
(monoculture) development methods bear blame for this. Surely our obsession
with hierarchical power structures is a driver.

There is also a mass microbial extinction occurring right now:
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2094423-microbial-
mass-...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2094423-microbial-mass-
extinctions-were-kicked-off-by-human-evolution/)

I'm exhausted of this consumer society that quashes all appreciation for the
dynamic, the non-linear, the relationships of the micro to the macro, of the
individual to the mass, of ecologies.

Words can't express my irritation for the blindness of techno-utopians who
think we should aim to be happier on Mars. Get a clue! This is our chance to
terraform earth back to health! If we can't do that now, there really isn't a
chance in hell we could do it with Mars. We need to fall in love with earth
again, with all of its creatures, including humans, and even mosquitoes. By
perpetuating that live-in-space fantasy, you're sealing the fate of peoples'
hearts, crushing the precious seeds of hope and trust in earth's fragile life
system, and in humans' potential to bond with earth sustainably.

 _(Sometimes I do wish ignorant power mongerers and unrepentant rapists would
go take a long time-out in the void of space. Maybe that would catalyze the
spiritual realization we desperately need them to have. The risk, of course,
is alienation.)_

Okay... So everything you and I do and say right now matters tremendously. We
are at a critical point. It's all that ever has mattered but it especially
matters now.

I saw someone below talking about rewilding some spent grazing land. That's
real stuff, thank you.

~~~
busyant
> I'm exhausted of this consumer society that quashes all appreciation for the
> dynamic, the non-linear, the relationships of the micro to the macro, of the
> individual to the mass, of ecologies.

I used to work as a microbiologist / geneticist. One of the standard exercises
that beginning microbiology students perform is to

* take a small number of bacteria

* inoculate the bacteria into a sterile container of liquid "food"

* measure bacterial growth in the container versus time

Once the bacteria get going, there's an exponential explosion in their growth.
"Exponential" growth continues until they begin to exhaust their resources
(food). I used to think about that a lot ("How dumb the bacteria are. They
can't plan for the future. They're unaware of how they fit into the larger
picture and they just 'race' w/ each other until they deplete their own
resources.").

Collectively, I'm not sure we are much different.

~~~
rleigh
I did the same experiment, and often have the same thought. We might be
intelligent, but collectively we do seem to act in the same manner.

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gmjoe
Key paragraphs:

> _The food web appears to have been obliterated from the bottom. It’s
> credible that the authors link the cascade to arthropod loss, Schowalter
> said, because “you have all these different taxa showing the same trends —
> the insectivorous birds, frogs and lizards — but you don’t see those among
> seed-feeding birds.”_

> _Lister and Garcia attribute this crash to climate. In the same 40-year
> period as the arthropod crash, the average high temperature in the rain
> forest increased by 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures in the tropics
> stick to a narrow band. The invertebrates that live there, likewise, are
> adapted to these temperatures and fare poorly outside them; bugs cannot
> regulate their internal heat._

~~~
smackay
Seed-eating birds spend a lot of time gathering insects to feed their young. I
presume also seed plants are dependent on pollinators. Certainly this is just
an armchair comment but I would have expected the effect to show up across the
board.

~~~
ocschwar
The reason it isn't is that this study is based in Puerto Rico, where the bugs
don't have the option of migrating north. In the US mainland, yes, this is
happening, and it's harming insects, but the main result is migration, not
extinction.

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jenks
This is absolutely horrifying. Insects are mother nature's sex organs!

In 1945 after world war 2, the US had an abundance of ammunition supply and
decided do make use of it in other means than warfare. They used that
ammunition supply to make Chemical NPK fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides,
fungicides and rodenticides. This was the onset of commercial farming and -
not so ironically - exactly when the world insect popluation started
decreasing! Now we are just seeing it in its most drastic potential.

Pesticides not only destroy the detoxifying organs in our body upon
consumption, they also destroy the basis of every ecosystem on Earth!

They don't stop at just killing insects though. Ever hear of the phrase of war
"Salt the earth", where countries would pour salt over airable land to knock
out the enemies food supplies? Pesticides are salts! They destroy the Humus of
the soil which contains all of the microfungi and microorganisms which have a
symbiotic relationship with the roots of the plant to send filaments of
nutrients through the roots and receive sap from the roots in return.

When you realize that the food you're getting is so much less nutrient dense
than food that was farmed organically which actually obeys the laws of nature,
you begin to realize that this commercially farmed food literally takes more
energy and nutrients out of your body in the processes of digestion,
metabolization, assimilation, and elimination than you get from the food!

~~~
majos
>Pesticides not only destroy the detoxifying organs in our body upon
consumption

What? Do you mean by _direct_ consumption or residually on food?

> you begin to realize that this commercially farmed food literally takes more
> energy and nutrients out of your body in the processes of digestion,
> metabolization, assimilation, and elimination than you get from the food!

Confused by this too. By this logic those of us who rely on commercially
farmed food (most of us) should be continually wasting away and soon dying,
which is not the case

~~~
jenks
As i mentioned, commercial farming leads to less nutrient dense food.

The processes of digestion, metabolization, assimilation, and elimination each
take energy and nutrients to work. Foods grown in low-vitamin dense soil
inherently have less nutrients to provide the organism which consumes them.

Be cautious in your assumption that everything is great with commercially
farmed food. Widespread disease, reliance on stimulants like coffee, energy
drinks, and even as extreme as ADHD medicine being given to children - even
though the effects are almost identical to those of people being on cocaine -
are becoming more widespread the more prevalent commercial farming becomes.

The rate of cancer in 1900 was 1 in 30, 1980 it was 1 in 5, 1990 1 in 4, 1995
1 in 3, 2000 1 in 2.

Correlation? causation? It's impossible to tell, but the idea that engineering
mother nature to make her work more efficiently than the way she has
engineered life over millions of years has yet to ever work in our favor each
time we have tried throughout history.

~~~
majos
> Foods grown in low-vitamin dense soil inherently have less nutrients to
> provide the organism which consumes them.

Even taking this as a given, "less nutrient dense" is far from "so nutrient
poor that digestion literally takes more energy than the food contains", which
is what your original comment claimed.

> The rate of cancer in 1900 was 1 in 30, 1980 it was 1 in 5, 1990 1 in 4,
> 1995 1 in 3, 2000 1 in 2.

Ok. The cancer _diagnosis_ rate has skyrocketed. That's a different point. In
many ways this is good -- it means more people are living long enough with
medical care to get a diagnosis.

> the idea that engineering mother nature to make her work more efficiently
> than the way she has engineered life over millions of years has yet to ever
> work in our favor each time we have tried throughout history

What? GMOs have worked out on a massive scale, improving billions of lives
through new drought/pestilence/act-of-God-resistant strains.

I'm with you that agribusiness has many problems and bad actors, but the
claims you're making go really far.

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CalRobert
I am currently trying to buy a few acres of land. It's currently grazing land,
but I'd like to rewild most of it. By any chance, can someone suggest a good
source for learning how to do so in a way that encourages insect, bee, and
bird populations? It's near a bog so I'm hoping it can have a bigger impact
than it would in isolation.

~~~
dejv
You can go as deep as you want, but the basic checklist could be (for case
when you don't want to have productive farm land):

\- make sure there is some type of water on your property, shallow pond would
be ok

\- build different biotopes: leave some pasture area, plant patches of
different bushes.

\- plant some fruit trees and few solitair trees (depending on your geography
it might be oak, linden or whatever. Ask at your garden center)

\- build/buy and place different insect hotels in various parts of property

\- when mowing the grass always leave some part (say 1/3) intact

\- I am not familiar with situation in US, but in Europe you can find mixes of
wild species seedings for given geography. You can use those to speed up
biodiversity growth in the area.

~~~
CalRobert
Thanks! As it turns out I went sale agreed about 30 minutes after my comment.

It's in the Irish midlands and I'll be living there as well in a 210ish year
old cottage, which will certainly be a shift. For dealing with the grass I had
some idea that sheep might be friendlier than mowing, but sheep also tend to
destroy everything in their path and stop seedlings.

I was thinking I might try to grow food in this model -
[http://www.themarketgardener.com/book/](http://www.themarketgardener.com/book/)
\- but that would be on less than half the space.

Clearly I have lots of research to do.

~~~
Heliosmaster
May I recommend "Practical Self Sufficiency"? A few years ago they even made a
British TV-series "It's not easy (being green)":
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-Self-Sufficiency-
Complete...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-Self-Sufficiency-Complete-
Sustainable/dp/1405344415/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539705229&sr=8-1&keywords=dick+strawbridge)

~~~
mark-r
The British TV-series that came to mind for me was "The Good Life" ("Good
Neighbors" in the US). Wouldn't be much practical help however.

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JulianMorrison
Ask someone over 50 who drives, do you remember bugs on your windshield?
Having to run the wipers because it was that bad?

Ask them when they last remember that being an issue. I'm guessing some time
in the 1980s.

There are kids who drive these days and never had bugs on their windshield.
They don't realize it's not normal.

~~~
jvreagan
I remember driving 6 hours from home back to college during August in the
midwest and having to stop every couple hours at a gas station just to clean
the windshield. Now its rare to hit an insect on the road.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
What car were you driving then? What car or cars have you driven recently?

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lisper
> the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold.

This sentence made it hard for me to take the article seriously. What does a
60-fold _decrease_ even _mean_? I understand what a 60-fold _increase_ means:
it means that there is now 60 times more than before. But it's not possible
for there to be 60 times less than before for a quantity that cannot be
negative. So we are left to wonder. Does it mean that there is now 1/60th as
much as before? That is a peculiarly precise number. Is it really 1/60th i.e.
1.67% and not, say, 1/59th (1.69%)? Whatever the truth is, this sentence is
obscuring it.

I don't mean to cast any doubt on the proposition that there is a serious
problem here. This is a criticism of the journalism, not the science.

~~~
hw_penfold
I think the natural interpretation is that the January 1977 numbers showed a
value 60 times greater than the January 2013 value.

    
    
      (the dry weight of all the captured invertebrates)
    

Here's a direct link to the relevant graph:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/10/09/1722477115...](http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/10/09/1722477115/F2.large.jpg)

Full publication:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/10/09/1722477115](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/10/09/1722477115)

~~~
lisper
That would indeed be a not-entirely-unreasonable interpretation except for two
things:

1\. Why not just say that the numbers went down by 98% (i.e. 59/60)?

2\. If you look at the graph, the numbers clearly went down by less than 98%.

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qwerty456127
I wish we could loose mosquitoes and ticks...

~~~
aninteger
And cockroaches.

~~~
qwerty456127
It seems we've already lost cockroaches in Europe, I haven't seen any since
the end of the 20th century. Whatever, I don't really mind them as they don't
bite.

~~~
AnaniasAnanas
There are still a lot of them in southern Europe.

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fallingfrog
So, we have one study in Puerto Rico, and one in Germany. I think we really
need to figure out whether this effect is real, if it is global, and what is
the cause. I guess I'd advocate not panicking until we know more- this isn't
on the level of certainty of climate change yet, where we are absolutely
certain that the Earth is warming.

------
titzer
Paywall-free article from The Independent:

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/insect-
population...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/insect-population-
decrease-hyper-alarming-puerto-rico-rainforest-invertebrate-bugs-
america-a8586126.html)

