When people around here mentioned there are no more insects on the wind screens of car a local biologists checked the number of insects - and it was more or less the same (~5% less)
But what he found out was pretty interesting: Nowadays insects avoid streets. Evolution seems to have breed an inherent fear of streets into insects.
I’ll believe you without questioning or researching myself because that would be a very comforting thought indeed
You would believe it if you saw the mosquito swarms in my garden. The quite busy street basically is a biological desert. One meter off road in my garden I have a HUGE swarm of mosquitoes every evening. Not just one or two, more like 100, all in one big flock, within 1-2m³. And as soon as I leave the house they are all over me. Only way to get rid of them: Walk to the street or get back into the house. Dusk-Time is Mosquito Time in my garden. No humans allowed.
Edit, what I call mosquitos are two different insects around here. The very tiny ones of 3-5mm and sting like hell and the huge ones at 50-150mm (Not joking, some are larger than my hand) which are utterly harmless but also disgusting. I guess nobody expected Monster Mosquitos in Bavaria. But then we also have snakes who can spray like skunks. And LOTS of them.
Huge ones I bet are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crane_fly
My dad and I take (usually) yearly road trips west to visit various national parks. We’ve been doing this for nearly 2 decades now. We’ll typically drive through the night with just a short, few-hour stop at a rest area if we are both too tired to drive.
I distinctly remember some of our earlier trips where by the time we got fuel in the morning after driving through the night there were SOOO many bug guts all over the front of the car no amount of car washes would get them clean.
Our last trip to South Dakota/Colorado there was almost none and I was actually thinking about this. It is very unsettling…something is changing and it’s not for the better…
A global apocalypse has already happened (and is continuing, within what wreckage remains) in the insect and amphibian populations. Almost no one outside a small community of scientists that are specifically in that field has even noticed, let alone has a theory for why, or a guess as to whether it is an urgent problem.
But yes it seems like an urgent problem.
Nobody has a theory why insect populations are catastrophically falling? I highly doubt that.
I mean, wouldn’t the prolific use of pesticide be a pretty damn obvious cause? Wherever humans go, we spray for bugs.
Yeah; I should have said no one has a compelling proven explanation. There are a lot of theories obviously. This article goes into a little bit of detail about it, although in my opinion is proffering its “death by a thousand cuts” theory without that being the consensus of the scientists i.e. “yes this is exactly the combination of factors responsible and they are all significant, we are confident.” It’s more just that things are collapsing too completely and quickly to even be able to coherently study for root cause(s).
Probably closer to “death by a thousand chainsaws” but yeah. People try to kill insects, and they succeed. Add that on top of all the other stuff humans do that kills species unintentionally (deforestation, monocropping, climate change, etc.) and there’s no wonder the population is collapsing suddenly and rapidly.
I mean we used to have giant frog spawns every spring where we would have to be careful walking or we would step on several frogs at a time.
We haven’t had one in 5 years.
People have noticed…the majority just don’t give a flying fuck
Most people i know are happy about less insects in the summer.
The older i get, the more i learn about insects and the more i like them. Also, knowing more about their importance, makes me want to have many more insects around me, instead of less.
Favorite insect fact?
Most insects are illiterate, and very few speak Portuguese.
Yeah I first noticed it like 10-15 years back when I visited my aunt in another town. Her place was always full of June bugs who would smash into your face repeatedly like a bunch of assholes, when we were kids. We even named her place after the bugs. But when I went back as an adult 15 years or so ago, there wasn’t a single one. My aunt said they vanished over a couple of years. I always wondered if they just didn’t like her property anymore or something, but it was likely climate change in the area.
Insect biomass declined by ∼47% and abundance declined by ∼61.5% over the last 35 years.
There has been a 69% decrease in wildlife since 1970. Even recreational fishing is considerably harder than it was when I was a kid, despite lots of stocking efforts.
This is how I convinced my grandfather climate change was real.
For the passed 50 years, he’s gone up to his cabin and fished.
Over the passed 10 years, he’s caught less and less fish.
When I was a kid, you could hardly put your rod in the water before you’d get something to bite. We’d through back a dozen fish before keeping one that was bigger. Now you’re lucky to get a single fish in several hours.
I asked him about the bugs, and he admitted there were less bugs in the windscreen then anytime in his life. And what do freshwater fish eat a lot of? Insect larvae and dead insects on the water. No food means no fish.
I think he finally realized just how fucked everything has to be for so many bugs to die off that fish start to die, and all the animals in the area that eat those fish. He kind of had an existential crisis, but unfortunately has ended up with the mindset “it’s gonna suck for you and your kids, but I’ll be dead before it’s really my problem”
But at least now he acknowledges climate change is real.
I remember this pond we went to, they stocked it with bass but you couldn’t catch it because the second your line hit the water a damn suicidal bluegill would snatch up the hook, bait or no. My dad was trying to teach me to fish and I was having the time of my life. He, on the other hand, was pissed as hell because the damn bluegills were getting in the way of him finding us some bass for dinner. Also, apparently I was supposed to learn that fishing involved patience but we picked the wrong spot for that. I did learn catch and release, and maybe I got a pet fish I dunno.
That pond burned down a few years ago. Climate change is fun.
It’s those little things that scare me the most. Insects make up a large amount of the bottom tier of the food chain and are a necessary part of the reproductive cycle of a lot of plants. This is a much clearer indicator of how deep in the shit we are with climate change.
I see this meme a lot but is there any actual truth to it? I just drove to see the eclipse (April, not the warmest month) and my car was covered in bug splats.
It kinda is. I used to constantly get bug splats all over my car, but as of the last year or two I don’t have nearly as many. I’ve noticed that I spend less time when washing compared to then. What makes it even more worrying is I drive a lot more now.
Yeah, it’s getting worse. I specifically have been trying to grow plants to bring in pollinators; the only bugs I’ve seen on them are flies and aphids. I live in an area of California that’s a seasonal wetland; it’s now possible to drive an hour in any direction and hit no bugs. The bugs and ecological collapse might get us before the fossil fuel companies manage to murder us all for their investors.
Yeah we’re probably totally cooked. I wasn’t even alive in the 90’s, so I wouldn’t know firsthand, but you can listen to nature recordings around certain locations and what was once many birds is now not very many birds.
I dunno. I think everyone looks at climate change and the destruction of ecosystems and habitats as a kind of, instantly apocalyptic issue, like that’s just a turning point and then suddenly everyone dies. I don’t think it’s so simple. I don’t really know if corn or many of the crops we rely on can weather 2 degrees celsius global warming or whatever, but I think it’s probably pretty likely that humanity, or more likely, some well-meaning asshole, ends up terraforming a bunch of shit before that really happens, which will probably kill a bunch of other animals and decrease overall biodiversity to an even greater extent. I think probably humanity at large would rather kill almost every other lifeform on the planet for survival before we allow ourselves to be threatened. Or, before we allow our structures to threaten dissolution, so probably “other lifeforms” also includes like, people in third world countries who rely on more local ecology and depend on local ecosystems for their foodstuffs. More interdependent.
So I dunno, we’re probably totally cooked.
Damn millennials with their ecological collapse; killing the windshield wiper fluid industry!
Good, fuck bugs! Especially mosquitos! And those grubs that crawl up your urethra!
What’s bizarre is the smile of the guy at the wheel. I mean I get it but it’s still surreal.
What’s bizarre is that your focus snapped to the body language and emotions of this sketched character instead of the main idea of the comic. I don’t mean to be judgmental at all, it’s just an observation and an interest of mine. Can you tell me a bit more about your flow of consciousness when you first looked at the image?
First thing I see is face and then unhappy and happy states?, feel it kinda though not exactly. I look at the smile and I somewhat feel it too.
When I look at a picture of a smile I get a brief glimpse of my happy moments in life. I can feel the green grass and trees and family for a split second. Then this happy conflicts with the realisation of the message of the image which gives it surreal quality of being happy and horrible at the same time.
Which is accentuated further by the happy being not just some usual happy human but an idealised character from cartoon in a way that I associate with positivity and pureness.
Then I try to frame this guy in a bad light semi subconsciously. He voted for Trump
Neat. It’s like your mind sees a lot of emotional subtext when that meaning is not necessarily there, at least in a comic. I’m sure you look at things in life in the same way, except your point of view is much more useful and practical there, given that subtext is king in reality.
There should be some type of new art form or art genre that seeks to replicate this juxtaposition of happiness and environment, which creates feelings of the surreal.
I sometimes wonder how pure and positive cartoon characters would react to our world. What would be their daily routine?
I see what you mean about framing given the context. Mental health is too important to waste it worrying about things mostly out of our control. Maybe comic guy is just trying to take a day off from frowning? Haha
Little side excerpt here: I’ve been meeting a lot more people like you lately. People that connect highly emotionally with media content (you), and also react highly emotionally with other people (in the case of the people I know). This is in stark contrast to myself and other people I know who are jaded to this type of experience and only seem to “feel” stuff in an indirect way, or a culturally coded way in order to protect their mind from potential trauma. I believe that’s called an avoidant personality or something. Reading your original comment just helps me to open my mind to new ways of being and experiencing when all I’m used to is what I’ve already encoded in my behavior from others. Anyway, thanks for the insight!
Edit: went too deep than is socially acceptable.
It’s weird but I swear I was more like you a month ago. Not sure what changed but something unlocked from psychedelics maybe.
I had this really long period of trying to tell what’s wrong with me and then very lately I feel comfort and no questions, calm. It’s me.
I also quit Reddit hm, and use Lemmy with no scores to curb addiction
Hmm, psychedelics are truly mysterious. I find that they can lead to some permanent “more abstract thinking” than usual. I read this article once that attempted to answer the question of why early psychedelic proponents and researchers were so “weird” as the article put it. Have you read it? I’m glad you feel different. I feel like I’m in a transition phase (hopefully).
damn you awoke a deep memory. roads used to be blanketed in bugs come summer back then. now it’s rare to even get a single bug stuck on the screen in a cross state drive.
I wonder if cats being more aerodynamic could have something to do with this too.
Edit: I said what I said.
Just spent 12 hours in the car driving to see the eclipse. The windshield does not need cleaning. Far cry from when we used to drive all over the states as a kid, you’d have to scrub the windshield probably every third gas stop.
Well obviously all those people driving in the 80’s killed all the insects with their windshields and now there’s none left. It’s their fault.
