
'Alarming' loss of insects and spiders recorded - ciconia
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50226367
======
SyneRyder
Australia's "Foreign Correspondent" ABC TV program did a 30 minute documentary
recently on this, interviewing the scientists involved, showing the
methodology and features some beautiful German scenery:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKpknKwbKsI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKpknKwbKsI)

The farmers had an interesting response - since farming without chemicals
results in much lower yield & less income, they were letting people "sponsor"
chemical-free areas of their farm (think Patreon for farming). The more
sponsorship they received, the more areas of farmland they converted. At a
certain threshold, people could even pay to have the farmland replaced
entirely with flowerbeds for bees.

~~~
chongli
Essentially what you’re saying is that farmers have convinced wealthy people
to pay them to stop growing food. If this catches on in a major way then I can
think of at least one reason this will turn out badly.

~~~
jvanderbot
They're giving an opportunity for wealthier patrons to subsidize the
pesticide-free production of food.

Yes, they can ask for all of it to be bee playground, but markets still exist
and food prices still will fluctuate

~~~
chongli
My point is that if it becomes popular among wealthy people to sponsor the
conversion of productive farmland into what is essentially wildlife preserve
then food prices could go way up, threatening food security.

~~~
stjohnswarts
Highly unlikely, rich people give a significant amount of money to charities
but in general it's a drop in the ocean compared to the overall economy and
government spending. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

------
walkingolof
Something I've come to think about when reading about the loss of insect
biomass, and this is purely anecdotal, but it would be interesting to see if
anyone else seen this. When I was young in the 70s/80s and the family was on a
car vacation, it seemed like we often would stop to clear our windshield from
bugs, the radiator would be full of them also, what is scary is that I do not
see that now when my family is out on a car trip...

~~~
mvdwoord
I remember this particular data point being refuted by cars becoming more and
more streamlined. The bugs don't die anymore, they whoosh over ;) Anecdotal:
after driving at normal speeds, very few bugs indeed, also compared to 30
years ago. After prolonged driving on the autobahn at high speeds (200kph+)
there are more bugs on the front of my car than ever.

I am quite sure there is a significant decline in insects, and we should be
worried and act upon that, but the bugs on car thing is not the best way to
measure.

~~~
Rotareti
> I remember this particular data point being refuted by cars becoming more
> and more streamlined.

I've been driving the same car for 20 years. I remember cleaning the bugs from
the roof rack after each longer trip. There were so many bugs, the front of
the rack was entirely covered with a dark coat. These days the roof rack stays
completely free of bugs. I simply don't have to clean the rack any more.

------
webwielder2
I would vote for any candidate who made this a pillar of their campaign. I
wish we cared about important things :-(

~~~
11235813213455
I would too, and I believe the solution is to drastically change people's
over-consumerists life-styles. I live a 'minimalist' life-style and feel
finally happy, my environmental footprint is probably lower than 5% of the
average, the planet could easily host 10 billions people like this, but can't
sustain 2 billions over-consumerists

~~~
jaynetics
I like your approach, but have two small caveats: if you're living in a
regular house or apartment in the Western world, with electricity, plumbing,
heating etc., perhaps using public transportation several times a week, you
might produce much less carbon than your fellow citizens, but probably not
less than the average human. With current sources of energy, this is
unsustainable for 4, let alone 10 billion people.

The other thing is: consumerism must go, but it's no easy feat. So many people
in 1st world countries work in jobs that make zero sense in a post-consumerist
society. Advertising is a huge industry. Even many tech giants like the FAANGs
would become largely superfluous. There will have to be a gentle transition,
not a "drastic" one, or 2019 politics will end up looking like a fairytale in
hindsight.

~~~
11235813213455
It's not easy to fight consumerism, all governments goals are even to keep it
high, sadly. But there must be new rules, with climate/environment in first
role

I live in France, electricity isn't too dirty to produce (nuclear), and I
can't say I abuse it, I don't heat a lot, I like to sleep in the cold, maybe 3
months a year, and I have no air-conditioning of course, this is a nonsense.

I use a bike for everything, so my main CO2 footprint might be from the
vegetables/fruits I buy, they are still quite locally produced
(France/Spain/Italy/Morocco for clementines sometimes) (I mean I wouldn't buy
a pineapple/mango from another continent, this too is an absolute nonsense)

------
vermontdevil
I know it’s anecdotal but driving long trips in the summer usually ends with a
splattered windshield of bugs. Nowadays not so much.

~~~
leggomylibro
People keep saying this, and I have to wonder where they're driving. In cities
and along highways I agree, but when I get into the weeds and drive by farms /
orchards / prairies, my windshield gets to the point where I can barely see
out of it. I might not have to clean my windshield once in several months of
city/hiking drives, but when I explore it's a different story.

This article also says that the declines they observed were primarily driven
by intensive agriculture. I wonder if it would behoove us to zone more wild
spaces. Why not set up some new national forests, parks, and wildlife
reserves? It's not like people don't also enjoy those things.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
_Why not set up some new national forests, parks, and wildlife reserves?_

[https://thehill.com/regulation/lobbying/461860-trump-has-
nam...](https://thehill.com/regulation/lobbying/461860-trump-has-named-more-
ex-lobbyists-to-cabinet-in-3-years-than-obama-bush)

Specifically look at

EPA:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_R._Wheeler#Lobbying,_20...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_R._Wheeler#Lobbying,_2009–2018)

and Interior:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bernhardt#Legal_work_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bernhardt#Legal_work_and_lobbying)

~~~
bufferoverflow
We can do that, but pesticides are in the air, in the rain.

~~~
leggomylibro
Yes, but aren't a lot of those pollutants localized? I was just at a national
park which called out how air pollution was affecting lichens and other
sensitive life in the area, but...the part of the park with informational
hikes bordered a highway where huge trucks passed by every few minutes.

We forbid offroad vehicles from driving through wetlands for this sort of
reason; those environments are very sensitive to the pollution, noise,
erosion, etc. But we put freeways damned near everywhere.

I dunno. I agree, it doesn't seem like enough, but what can we do? Tear up all
our roads and rebuild them on a carefully-planned "pollution grid"? And even
then, the BLM allows grazing and hunting on most of their lands which is
another deeply-ingrained tragedy of the commons. Good luck getting rid of
those methane-rich cow farts in the area when everyone feeds their herds off
of the 'free' land. And good luck keeping 4x4s away when hunting is allowed.

------
Tharkun
Another anecdata-point: I am seeing waaaay more mosquitos than 20 years ago,
but a lot fewer of every other kind of insect.

~~~
GVIrish
That may be because mosquito predators have been hit very hard by pesticides
whereas the mosquitos have developed resistance.

A dragonfly eating mosquitos ends up with a higher concentration of a
pesticide because it eats a lot of other insects that may have been exposed to
a pesticide. The other problem for the dragonfly is that it has a longer
lifecycle and produces less offspring per generation than a mosquito. So it
has far less ability to achieve pesticide resistance than the mosquito does.

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/05/how-p...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/05/how-
pesticides-actually-increase-mosquito-numbers/)

------
StanislavPetrov
Unless and until most people are willing to accept that the earth's resources
are finite and our massive overpopulation is not sustainable this problem will
simply accelerate until we die off from starvation (or killing each other from
the wars over resources that will inevitably occur). You can only squeeze so
many people onto a spaceship with finite resources. At some point, no matter
how efficiently or responsibly you try to allocate those finite resources
there will not be enough resources to sustainably support an ever-increasing
population. Earth is the spaceship. Unfortunately everyone would rather keep
their head in the sand and pretend that technology will solve all of our
problems while the ecosystem we literally depend on to survive is being
depleted and destroyed in front of our very eyes.

------
rhegart
We need to tackle environmental issues at the local level too. Small cities
are homogeneous and easier to deal with

~~~
natmaka
This. Centralization causes many problems. Everything is nowadays decided "far
away". Facing whatever problem, most now think that "the government has to do
something" or one of the usual variants (the most common one being "with
SOMEBODY as president, this would already be fixed!").

The government/president won't fix anything, as usual.

Gov/prez are too far away, too absorbed by being re-elected and cronyism,
reigning on a too big and therefore heterogeneous and complicated territory...

Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. Leopold Kohr described it
clearly (~60 years ago)!

~~~
lotsofpulp
The single biggest problem in America is excess consumption due to single
family homes with garages and zoning separating residential and business
areas. That’s definitely not getting solved on a local level.

~~~
natmaka
"zoning separating residential and business areas" is absolutely not "local".

Back to local, then most problems will be fixed.

~~~
lotsofpulp
When I've had to appeal zoning laws, I've had to do it on a city or county
level. No state I've worked in has involved higher level governments, at least
not for homes/small businesses, unless there were environmental concerns.

~~~
natmaka
Are those cities or counties populated by more than a few hundred souls? They
are too big. This is not 'local' in my book, whatever the denomination (city,
county...).

Moreover some/many underlying principles of many "local" laws are induced by
higher level governments, either by direct or indirect pressure (no funds
granted without such and such law), or by "culture" (local public servants
being, or willing to be/resemble, like the big guns).

------
tropdrop
> However, some insect species, such as houseflies and cockroaches, appear to
> be on the up.

If this trend continues, I wonder if we will see some species previously
reliant on spiders for food (birds?) switch to more cockroaches and
houseflies. More likely, we will see a radical restructuring of what we
consider to be "common" species.

For instance, hedgehogs and sparrows - incredibly common in my own childhood -
are apparently quietly disappearing from places where they were previously
abundant. What will replace them?

~~~
Areading314
Nothing will replace them, there will just be less life. It's the result of
spraying toxic chemicals everywhere.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
I am still old enough to remember “Silent Spring” and the fear that all the
birds were disappearing. This lead to the banning of DDT. Unfortunately at the
time there was not as good a substitute for mosquito control that matched the
low human toxicity and persistence of DDT. As a result, millions of people,
mostly children died from malaria and other mosquito borne illnesses.

~~~
bwb
Wow got a link? Millions and where was this?

~~~
nngrey
Africa has been the hardest hit. Progress has been made in reducing deaths in
recent years, but millions is not an exaggeration and children have often been
the victims. While most of us have a negative attitude towards DDT because of
its impact on the wildlife, it did play an important role in controlling
mosquitoes and reducing malaria infections in the past.

[https://www.who.int/news-room/facts-in-
pictures/detail/malar...](https://www.who.int/news-room/facts-in-
pictures/detail/malaria)

[http://www.healthdata.org/research-article/global-malaria-
mo...](http://www.healthdata.org/research-article/global-malaria-mortality-
between-1980-and-2010-systematic-analysis)

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ddt-use-to-
combat...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ddt-use-to-combat-
malaria/)

~~~
bwb
Thanks all, reading!

------
mindfulhack
I sit on both coin sides of loving technology and loving the natural
environment.

We have to decide what we want, and what is important to us. We're only just
at the beginning of our civilisation's development. We, the AI, and/or the AI
we'll be connected to will be able to recreate and terraform, to bio-engineer
species, environments and food however we want.

I suppose until such time that we can do that, we do need to take the natural
environment very seriously. I am increasingly concerned about climate change,
but also human health. I also care about animals. We're only one of many, and
I don't care how more 'evolved' I am than another species.

~~~
SwellJoe
"We're only just at the beginning of our civilisation's development. We, the
AI, and/or the AI we'll be connected to will be able to recreate and
terraform, to bio-engineer species, environments and food however we want."

That seems wildly optimistic given current trends. What makes you think we'll
make it that far, given that we(1), so far, have only managed to continually
make things worse over time?

1-And by "we" I actually just mean the oligarchs who profit from environmental
destruction...individuals have only marginal agency in this story. But, we
keep letting them do it, for some reason.

~~~
chr1
Oligarchs don't go around cutting forests for fun, they profit from
"environmental destruction" because other people need it to live and are ready
to give their money in exchange for its results and receive money for
performing it.

Communist countries do as much damage as capitalist ones, and even hunter-
gatherers did a huge amount of damage, so you are looking for solution at a
wrong place.

Which of current trends do you think justify your pessimistic outlook? We are
not in a particularly bad state compared to hundred years ago, and recently we
didn't cause more extinctions than we caused as hunter-gatherers. With genetic
editing we are working to create much more efficient crops, in some places we
learned how to use technology to drastically reduce use of pesticides, area,
and water in agriculture (see Netherlands and Israel), gene drives that would
eliminate main pest species are going to allow us to further reduce usage of
pesticides, and we are learning to grow fish and algae in the ocean instead of
simply exploiting wild populations. We are even working on restoring long dead
species like mammoths, so i'd say there is every reason to be optimistic about
the future.

------
pers0n
Stop mowing your lawn for 6 months or more. And you'll see more insects than
you have for decades

------
huffmsa
Are we sure that it's not just a case of being able to measure more
accurately?

~~~
Symbiote
Yes.

The academics behind the study are not idiots, and understanding measurement
and the relevant measuring instruments is a foundation of pretty much every
field of science.

~~~
huffmsa
Sure, which is why 60-70% of research findings are difficult to impossible to
reproduce.

Which is why "economists" are all filthy rich from their highly accurate,
highly precise predictions about economic trends.

Which is why stories about a software bug potentially skewing the results of
thousands of studies was at the top of this site all of last week.

~~~
Symbiote
Throwing unfounded doubt onto the work of some experts is about as useful as
shouting "fake news!".

------
bufferoverflow
But let's use more insecticides. What can possibly go wrong?

------
christophilus
From what I can tell, all of the spiders have moved to my garage.

~~~
koheripbal
This site is turning into Reddit. Do the people with more informative comments
now frequent another site? Back to slashdot?

~~~
zozbot234
Lobsters.

~~~
mooreds
I'll second this. The only issue is that you don't get the wide variety of
posts, but maybe that's GP's point. Lobste.rs is great for super technical
posts.

------
ElDji
Why the BBC chose to quote the alarming word ? In my opinion, quote usage have
the effects to minimize something (= strong decline in insect population) that
is quite well established by facts.

------
LegitShady
The main question is where have the spiders gone, and how far away from there
is it physically possible to be?

~~~
corey_moncure
Try this.

Go outside at night, and take your smartphone with you. Turn the flashlight
on, and shine it away from your face while holding the LED right above and
between your eyes. Look at the lawn.

If your lawn is like mine, you will see 4-5 shiny reflections from the grass
in every square meter of your land. They're not dew drops. They're ground
spiders.

~~~
taneq
Your last line carries the horrifying implication of air spiders. :S

~~~
shantly
I think that's mostly as opposed to, say, tree-dwelling spiders... but then
again, you know about ballooning, right?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballooning_(spider)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballooning_\(spider\))

Key quote: "Even atmospheric samples collected from balloons at five
kilometres altitude and ships mid-ocean have reported spider landings."

~~~
choeger
Holy shit. Someone needs to _do_ something! These little critters sneaked into
that position with no one noticing. They are definitely up to something! Think
about the children!!!

------
hyperpallium
So alarmist! Like after the Great Oxygenation Event, which wiped out the
organisms who caused it, new organisms evolve. Life goes on, folks! Just,
without us and our ecosystems.

~~~
pfdietz
So if there were (for sake of argument) a Great Cyanidation Event, we
shouldn't be worried about it? :)

------
peterwwillis
So they're taking one thing they can measure and then kind of hand-wavey
suggesting agriculture is the problem, and that's it.

In the past, we have been overly eager to right the wrongs in nature, arrogant
enough to believe we knew how, and as a result caused massive ecological
destruction. Every time we intervene, we screw up, because we really don't
have a handle on the complexity theory of nature. But none of that makes it
into a story that's mainly there to fill the space that an advertisement
doesn't take.

I'm sure that the loss of insect populations is a major problem. But I'm also
sure we have no clue how to fix it, and that the attempts will be very messy,
possibly even worse. To me that's more scary than the immediate problem.

~~~
zeofig
We know exactly how to fix it: stop destroying their habitats and messing with
the climate. Any other "fix" is going to be feelgood techno-fetishism.

~~~
peterwwillis
We don't actually know how to do those things. If we try to, we cause
unintended side effects. Complex problems do not have simple solutions.

------
Erlich_Bachman
But biodiversity loss has happened many times in the past, and the system is
still here. More importantly, we are still here. The species loss has occured
many times even in the recent history while Homo Sapiens were already out
there, and a lot more times if we include very close relatives of most
advanced primates. It's not just that "system continues", primates even
continue.

Other species thrive, new ones come up and evolve, new niches form etc. Why
would this time be any different? How do we know that this is somehow worse
than the previous times? How do we know that this is not the natural process
of evolution? Why do we assume that the graph of number of species has to go
straight up all the time? How do we know there aren't supposed to be plateaus
and dips?

So yeah, if you can you consider answering seriously before downvoting, that
would be great. I can't understand what in the history of science of species
should make me believe that this event is bery bad on the long-term scale?
Will there be many adjustments and problems? Yes? Will we adapt? Most
certainly? Or why not?

~~~
pfdietz
> But biodiversity loss has happened many times in the past, and the system is
> still here

This could just be an observer selection effect, since if the system weren't
still here, neither would we be here.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Arguably if there were other advanced species that just went extinct at some
point, we would have found artifacts which are much older than what we have
found made by previous homo sapiens-ish civilizations. And more advanced ones
than just pyramids.

------
HenryKissinger
I'm sorry to go against the grain, but forgive me for not shedding a tear at
the impending disappearance of insects and _shudders_ spiders.

1: I am aware of the importance of insects in the food chain. I know that many
animal species, like small birds, feed on insects. I fully accept the
consequences. The extinction, or near extinction, of insects is worth the
disappearance of some animals.

2: I'm carving an exception for bees. We need bees for pollination (for now).

~~~
not_kurt_godel
I for one find insects and spiders to be a profoundly beautiful part of our
world, and would severely regret their extinction even if it wouldn't be
catastrophically consequential for humans (which to be clear, it absolutely
would be). Some of my favorite insects/spiders are: dragonflies, butterflies,
praying mantises, ants, cicadas, crickets and orb spiders. Appreciating their
delicate beauty is an essential part of the human experience.

~~~
xvilka
Not only beautiful, they are worth to study: the knowledge of spider's silk
gave us better materials, spiders can fly with the electrostatic fields,
Portia spider has a unique 3D-dimensional thinking of usually more complex
creatures. And more secrets to discover in the future, I think.

