There are sampling methodology issues with this type of studies.
The main conclusion is that insecticide chemicals used for agriculture are pretty effective at killing insects (especially Neonicotinoid but probably also other classes).
A more rigorous sampling methodology would produce a different picture, with huge differences depending on the distance from highly cultivated areas.
This is not apocalypse, this is actionable, invertebrates species populations can rebound at a surprising speed in less poisonous ecosystem.
Politics should act to ban some classes of insecticides.
Iowa has been replaced by South Carolina. But New Hampshire law has introduced a race condition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire_presidential_pri...
"New Hampshire state law[6] stipulates that the presidential primary shall be on the second Tuesday in March (the date when town meetings and non-partisan municipal elections are traditionally held), but that the Secretary of State must, if necessary, change the date to ensure that the New Hampshire primary will take place at least seven days before any "similar election" in any other state. The Iowa caucuses are not considered to be a similar election. In recent election cycles, the New Hampshire primary has taken place the week after the Iowa caucus."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrats-vote-to-chan...
"PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The Democratic Party on Saturday approved the reordering of its 2024 presidential primary, replacing Iowa with South Carolina in the leadoff spot as part of a major shake-up meant to empower Black and other minority voters critical to its base of support."
A third of that corn is used for animal agriculture as feed, a third for production of ethanol (environmentally worse than gas anyway), and just one third is for human consumption [0].
We could easily eliminate 2/3 of that crop (by switching to electric and plant based) and 2/3 of associated pesticides/herbicides as well.
I'm not arguing status quo is wise, but it's folly to pretend that upending the economic mainstay of that whole region would be done "easily".
Similarly, replacing corn with a crop that is profitable (without subsidies), suited to the region, and also doesn't require pesticides that affect insects would not be easy.
> upending the economic mainstay of that whole region would be done "easily"
Change the incentives (remove animal subsidies), and the problem will solve itself.
There is a big demand for plant based protein now ... we know how to grow peas, beans, lentils ... however it's not profitable to do so now because we continue to subsidize animal agriculture (one of the most harmful things we can do to the environment) with obscene amount of money. That's the main reason plant-based cheeses cost 3x more than cow-milk-based, although it should be other way around.
> crop that is profitable (without subsidies), suited to the region, and also doesn't require pesticides that affect insects would not be easy
Easy is not the important part. Easy led us to the hell (or purgatory), where we currently are.
Those problems you're writing about can be solved with biodiversity. Let's imagine smaller fields, with different crops, interplanted with trees and shrubs to enable a lot of life [0], and you won't have problems with mice or bugs, because diversity will take care of any infestations.
If you're interested how to farm economically without pesticides/herbicides, may I suggest movie The Biggest Little Farm (2018), where the role of biodiversity is nicely illustrated.
>Change the incentives (remove animal subsidies), and the problem will solve itself.
That's still not easy. That is like saying ending entitlements is an easy way to save a lot of money in the federal budget. That's the entirety of my point - its a bit facile to call a change easy just because you can put it in one sentence.
And no offense but I have to chuckle at your example - (and note that organic veggie gardening is my chief hobby and I've studied advances in market gardening for years out of personal interest, and the model absolutely fills a niche). But around the time of the documentary, Apricot Lane Farm was USDA 'small scale' meaning income of sub-$250k a year at a time they had 60 employees... Basically you are suggesting we can replace government subsidies with venture capitalists.
There are wicked problems in agriculture and getting even a slight net improvement across environmental/social/economic sustainability metrics is going to be the result of incremental policy, technological and cultural changes, it isn't going to happen by handwaving industrial corn fields currently forming the backbone of rural communities into angel-investor backed biodynamic farms that don't actually need to make money on outputs.
>Change the incentives (remove animal subsidies), and the problem will solve itself.
That's still not easy. That is like saying ending entitlements is an easy way to save a lot of money in the federal budget. That's the entirety of my point.
And no offense but I have to chuckle at your example - (and note that organic veggie gardening is my chief hobby and I've studied advances in market gardening for years out of personal interest, and the model absolutely fills a niche). But around the time of the documentary, Apricot Lane Farm was USDA 'small scale' meaning income of sub-$250k a year at a time they had 60 employees... Basically you are suggesting we can replace government subsidies with venture capitalists.
There are wicked problems in agriculture and getting even a slight net improvement across environmental/social/economic sustainability metrics is going to be the result of incremental policy, technological and cultural changes, it isn't going to happen by handwaving industrial corn fields currently forming the backbone of rural communities into angel-investor backed biodynamic farms that don't actually need to make money on outputs.
"Weaker candidates are identified early and fall out of the race"
Not really true. They are only the weaker candidates in those states. You have plenty of attractive candidates in other states drop out before those primaries.
You can approach this as a statistical sampling problem. Out of a field N candidates, one will become the representative of the party in the national election. Your optimization challenge is to identify the winner with high confidence while conducting the fewest number of tests. Each test exacts a financial and political cost on the eventual candidate. To have the most viable candidate in the general election, you want to do the fewest number of tests that give you the final result with high confidence.
"The staggered system of primaries does just that."
It actually causes the devaluation of the votes of later primaries. Due to the difference in concerns of different geographic areas, you would have a shitty sample based on the current line-up.
"Your optimization challenge is to identify the winner with high confidence while conducting the fewest number of tests."
If that were the case, you wouldn't even do primaries and you'd just rely on the surveys, which arguably have better sampling (primaries are biases toward the vocal minority due to the low turn outs and not necessarily the overall voter pool).
> It actually causes the devaluation of the votes of later primaries.
Does it really though? California votes blue. Doesn't matter which Dem candidate - they will win California. Because California votes blue regardless of candidate, California has self-selected itself out of the primary system.
> If that were the case, you wouldn't even do primaries and you'd just rely on the surveys
You certainly could do that. But voting is necessary to receive the consent of the populace.
Fucking thank you. I can’t believe the DNC lets their absurd primary rules stand year after year. Superdelegates are still a thing too, even after the Hillary/Bernie debacle. Tuck that one away in your memory because it’ll become relevant again 25 years down the road, even though everyone thought they were abolished after 2016.
Yes, I agree Hillary would have won no matter what. That doesn’t mean the DNC primary system wasn’t rigged. It still is. Staggered primaries mean earlier elections influence later elections and superdelegates allow individuals to steal the votes of voters for themselves.
This isn’t like the 2020 election conspiracies. DNC primary rules are demonstrably unfair with no benefit other than to allow party elites to override voter choices.
You mean the party is allowed to influence the selection of the candidate that will represent them? And put their thumb on the scales against populist candidates from the fringe with rabidly delusional adherents?
One could argue that the GOP primary process would be better off with superdelegates in order to avoid the tendency to nominate fringe weirdos with absurd populist policies.
Perhaps, but we'll never know for sure considering that the DNC leadership manipulated the process to tilt the scales in favor of their preferred candidate.
The argument I’ve heard for Iowa being the first state is it somewhat levels the playing field for candidates. Iowa is a small enough state you can drive around it and meet people, without having the budget for a bunch of flights. The media market is also smaller and thus cheaper.
"Presidential elections in the US start and end for many candidates in one state."
Eh, this isn't the biggest issue. If it was, we would have had bills for this that were vetoed. There has to also be support for banning this in the legislature, which depends on many other states.
Politics should act to ban some classes of insecticides.
And people need to be educated so they don’t hire pesticide companies to bomb their entire yard every year with insecticide because they want fewer mosquitos and other bugs outside.
If that were the only difference between a house and a flat then there would be reason to be confused. Few chose a flat vs a house mainly based on how much they love nature itself.
Yea but like, there's topical applications instead of bombing the backyard. Or plant lots of citrus in the yard. Rip a small branch off and scrunch up the leaves and keep it near. The citrus fumes from the leaves can keep them at bay.
My house and neighbor don't spray. I chave a corn field behind me, which I think is BT because I don't see them spray. We have plenty of bumble bees, beetles, and other insects. Although I will say there are fewer butterflies than I remeber as a kid.
My in-laws live in a development where they and almost everyone else sprays. There are very few insects. Still plenty of annoying yellow jackets though.
Dunno. I'm one of the people who don't want mosquitos, though I don't care about bugs which don't suck my blood. I have a fan-powered mosquito trap which seems to work well enough. No chemistry.
We put up mosquito traps. They emit a bit of CO2 or something like that to attract the little pests. Seems to work pretty well for us, and we still have a really healthy insect population in our yard more generally. It helps that we leave our leafs around the trees and we always cordon of a section of the lawn to leave unmowed all spring and summer.
What's the alternative? The public is much more afraid about GMO crops than dying insects and the farmers clearly don't want to be the losers in this situation.
Birds are the only insect control I use in my garden. I am not growing miles of corn or another monoculture. It is a hard sell to some farmers to diversify their fields and plant trees for the birds to roost.
It feels like this is also where natural selection and evolution kick in. Surely insects will evolve resistance to insecticides given their ubiquity, rapid life cycle, and prodigious ability to reproduce?
I think in this tit for tat insects have the long term advantage. The insecticides have to be relatively harmless to mammals, otherwise other methods of production for food become economically viable. I wager on the roaches.
Fellow German here. I go out for mountain biking and gravel rides a lot. Every time I pass agriculture fields in summer, there is no "noise" anymore, it's totally quiet. No birds, no insects, nothing, it almost seems dead. As soon as I come to places where nature can be itself, there is an abundance of sounds, nature is thriving. Unfortunately the former prevails the latter several times.
I guess I don't need any studies of WHAT is killing these insects...
That's exactly what I do. 1/2 of my garden is wild with wild flowers, habitats for insects and birds and on the other half no pesticides are used, I just weed by hand. Great diversion if you're stuck with a programming problem...
They're related in that both are downstream of industrialization, but changing climates aren't lessening insect biodiversity as much as overuse of various chemicals are.
Bees live less than a year, so the number of dead bees can surely only be used as an indicator of changes on around that time-scale or shorter. Eventually fewer bees means fewer dead bees.
Remember getting so many mosquito bites, but then after growing up you almost never see mosquitos any more in the same location. Was many years since I last saw one now.
+1 to that. Car windshields are clean today after a long ride on the autobahn.
I have apple trees in my garden and if you dont physically shield the apples, wasps and other insects will just eat them up in no time. Nearby there are enormous apple tree fields. Nothing touches their apples. I wonder why.
The way many cities, farms, processing plants, resorts, houses, etc... spray regularly, I think some people are targeting 100% decline in flying insect biomass. I hope they don't get their wish.
At some point in the future the consequences of our actions are going to start emerging, and shit is going to get real for society.
Where in the world would be a good place to be living when this happens? Probably a relatively small, relatively undeveloped island in the pacific right? (if it isn't underwater by that point)
Some point in the future? We are in the midst of a massive species extinction event already. The problem with all that: The dependencies in the biosphere are complex graphs and we humans are eradicating part of that, unraveling everything connected to that. Guess who is part of that big graph? Humans. For beings which declare themselves as being "intelligent" this can only be described as exceptionally stupid.
my escapist fantasy exists deep in the sticks of northern vermont / maine. not too many people, necessary cold seasons, relatively decent hardiness zones.
I can remember a decade ago having to clean my car’s windshield each time I filled up at the gas station. Now-a-days in both the US and Germany I find it a rarity - my wipers can generally get the one or two splats. You’ll notice a bit more on the country roads vs interstate/autobahn but such an alarming difference overall.
It’s fertilizers but it’s also declining biodiversity. We’re razing down natural habitats and covering it up with other things. When you dig up the prairies and build McMansions with decorative grass at best, turf or concrete at worst, all the native insects go to die, and so does the rest of the food chain.
annecdata: my very nice cleaning lady saw a bumble bee on her allotment yesterday, and told me about it. 10 years ago it would not be worth mentioning - they all come out in early spring.
Can someone here point me towards the most current literature/sources on this topic? I’ve seen Beneckes EU-parliament talk and found the numbers presented there (probably the same ones you can see in the paper) very concerning.
What does figure 4 look like in 2023? Where can I subscribe to stay up to date? What can companies in the ML/analytics space do to help?
We don’t have the data to make much more than directional claims re: macro trends in insect biodiversity. Ecological monitoring is tedious and labor-intensive; insects are simply too minute, too diverse, and too numerous to be surveilled at scale. Scale is necessary to make multi-decadal claims across millions of taxa; this is probably why some of the most rigorous studies^1 have produced findings that complicate the idea of an insect armageddon.
I’m working on a tool to make insect (focused esp. on pollinators) monitoring 10,000x cheaper. We do not currently understand the scale of insect declines, much less are we able to design targeted interventions. In the past decades, mammalian and avian declines were largely reversed, mostly thanks to ambitious multiyear monitoring efforts that enabled limited conservation resources to be allocated efficiently.
We should replicate this model with insects. I plan to make this possible by radically reducing the cost of data.
I’ve been toying with this idea for a few years, but I finally made the leap to building my startup^2 full-time a few months back (coming from entomology/ecology). Hoping for an alpha release & demo study this summer.
I'm happy to chat with anyone interested. Especially interested to meet those working and funding in this space.
> What can companies in the ML/analytics space do to help?
plaster the internet with chatbots doing fake engagement in order to swing political bias the other direction. the other side of the argument is already doing it.
We don't even yet have the data to describe temporal trends in insect diversity and abundance rigorously and at scale, let alone attribute drivers. There is definitely scope for ML to assist in producing/validating/collating data.
Civic engagement is going to be more effective with science behind it, otherwise it is up against campaign donors and lobbyists who can accurately point out there isn't enough data to demonstrate insecticides have caused a crash in insect populations, and to act as if they have would be threatening rural economies and food security without cause.
Well, one could hack Monsanto and find all the secret emails which talk about how bad glyphosate is for the actual environment-eco-system that used to be in balance with insects.
Anecdote time, i drove home last summer to my parents they live in the middle of nowhere with farmland all around and i remember distinctly when i was a kid how many bugs that would be squashed, coming around now there is very little compared..
I dont know much about pesticides but that seems like a slippery slope.
This is interesting to me ; I am a regular cyclist and I commented recently on the fact that when I was a kid, there were always 'clouds' of gnats in the evenings that typically swarmed around and you would bike through them...
I havent encountered a swarm of little gnat in a very long time.
However, I blame this on glyphosate which decimated the insect environments.
The other thing, in the early 1980s in Lake Tahoe, there was a grove of trees near my elementary school where the Monarch Butterflies would congregate and an entire pine tree would be completely blanketed in them - havent seen that in decades.
Milkweed is their only food and egg-laying spot (on the underside of the leaves) - but milkweed has been eradicated with glyphosate and thus no more Monarchs.
Alternative universe title: After several decades German Insects learned not to keep falling on Malaise traps, or local birds learned how to ravage the traps and take profit of it
Another alternative universe title title: After taxonomists vanished insect biomass is flying under the radar and being severely underestimated
Aside: I fairly recently got into photographing bugs with a macro lens and flash. It opens up a whole new world that you can't normally see with the naked eye. Also you can do it in your garden or local park, no need to fly to the Serengeti. Insects (and arachnids) are amazing.
from past discussions here, it appears to be a) real, and b) due mainly to 24 hours lighting and destruction of common ground where reproduction happens
I predict huge numbers, but of far fewer species in a hundred years..
Climate change, plastics, antibiotic resistance, huge budget deficits, etc. We create all sorts of problems in society. We can’t seem to connect the dots…
Right, As I often say, tragedy of commons will turn out to be our great filter. Not just at individual level but every level up including city, state & nations. It works great for when the problems faced are aligned with individual short term best interests not so well when collective action is needed.
It’s not just tragedy of the commons, it’s also a lack of collective will to not keep borrowing from the future and kicking the can. Debt, the biome, economic systems depending on never ending growth and an ever growing population pyramid. There is no incentive to think long term and preserve for tomorrow.
This will catch up to us eventually, and ignorance will be plead.
regulated and science-based Forestry seems to have destroyed thousands of years of forest growth in less than a hundred years of English command, here in California. Nothing about it was 'commons' .. Secondly, the largest polluter of the Pacific Ocean has been the US Navy, on shore and off.. also fully 'not commons'
Let's ignore the politics and look with a science lense at what is really going on?
but Politics IS what is going on here. we can fix climate change with some effort. we can also fix biodiversity loss & most social issues with some restructuring. the problem is that those who stand to lose are the ones politicizing this to ensure that a consensus does not arise. Read 'Dark Money' by Jane Mayer if you have doubts. In light of so much manipulation I think its rather Naive to say that 'I dont wanna get political', No lets get political because the science is settled.
Am I allowed to say that the number of bugs I see in 2023 is roughly the same as I saw when I was young, or will I get downvoted for disagreeing with the bug hive?
The main conclusion is that insecticide chemicals used for agriculture are pretty effective at killing insects (especially Neonicotinoid but probably also other classes).
A more rigorous sampling methodology would produce a different picture, with huge differences depending on the distance from highly cultivated areas.
This is not apocalypse, this is actionable, invertebrates species populations can rebound at a surprising speed in less poisonous ecosystem.
Politics should act to ban some classes of insecticides.