But mosquitoes are not declining, the one insect I wish would decline real fast :)
Anecdotally, I’ve not seen many of those on the road. It’s not too unusual to see a late 90s something puttering around town, but 80s and older is unusual, even in rural areas.
My kids would invite their friends over on nice summer evenings to see fireflies, since none of the McMansion neighborhoods had nearly as many.
I don't buy this as a cause of a global decline, though. In many areas things have gone in the opposite direction. The Appalachian mountains were clear cut in the 1800s and now are back to forest. If this theory is correct, I would expect there to have been a massive increase in insect populations on the east coast.
Edit: found the study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17601136/
> Plant species richness strongly increases toward the center of the settlements, and the frequency of neutrophilous and nitrogen-demanding species is higher.
When I hear things like "delicate or unique species" I get the feeling it's not a particularly scientific conclusion.
Of course not for all insects, but I would guess that GP didn't mean highly succesful species like ants, which seem to thrive pretty much everywhere. I recommend visiting an old growth forest if you can find one in your area, they're a completely different beast compared to the ones you might be used to. It's really worth it!
Land dedicated to farming has also declined for the last ~75 years. Peak was 1954 with about 1.16 billion acres. It is down to about 875 million acres.
https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...
The definition of habitat loss here is a bit poor because it doesn't mention the main contributor: farm land which over the past century got changed from something where insects could still survive to something which is more of a barren wasteland to them. And the thrid factor which goes hand in hand with that is pesticide use.
In many areas things have gone in the opposite direction.
Could be, but I'm pretty sure globally there are more areas where it is not going in that direction though. Or at least hasn't been going over the past century.
The Appalachian mountains were clear cut in the 1800s and now are back to forest. If this theory is correct, I would expect there to have been a massive increase in insect populations on the east coast.
Fir starters that's only one, quite localized example. Also the reasoning doesn't hold - ecosystems are complex systems. It's not because one specific area has been properly restored that insects would suddenly go there from surrounding areas, let alone that from the restored areas they then would suddenly have colonized neighboring areas (the entire east coast as you mention). Mainly because the speed at which they can colonize is limited and insects bound to forests don't necessarily all survive in other types of habitats.
1800s folks stupidly cut down trees because they didn't know any better, but they weren't actively destroying everything and intentionally making it absolutely uninhabitable like our generation does. And now we even have bizarre concepts like HOAs, which mandate absolute and completely intentional environmental destruction for the sake of uniformity.
And even then, insects don't only live in forests. They live in fields, marshes, all sorts of terrain. And it's overwhelmingly tamed and sterilized.
Nothing here in this thread.
We're overusing pesticides. It's a problem. We should stop.
Here in the Texas hill country we don't have much agricultural use of pesticides, but out in East Texas we do. In the hill country I see plenty of insects.
What I suspect is driving it is actually pavement and development ready property. The footprint for pavement for a building is usually three times the footprint for the building itself. This includes parking lots, connecting roads, sidewalks, and even the concrete slabs needed to place things like air conditioning units or tall signage. That pavement denies undergrowth and pioneer species that small insects thrive on seasonally.
It also denies water runoff. Without the water being able to saturate the ground it gets redirected to elsewhere. There's several issues with that, including unnatural subsidence and runoff pollution. The ground has some ability to naturally filter out small amounts of pollution as water seeps down through the soil and to the water table. But if there's pavement all of that water torrents to a single area which gets oversaturated. The soil can't hold any more, and so the water is rejected and pools above the surface. This is why you see so many puddles at the edges of parking lots or road intersections. This allows the pollutants to concentrate, and when the ground finally does absorb the excess water it pulls in those pollutants all the way down to the water table as they're in too high a concentration for the soil to capture.
And development ready property is an actual serious problem. Companies buy real estate and then deforest and regrade it in anticipation of someone eventually buying it. They don't have a buyer lined up, they're just expecting someone to eventually want to settle there, be it a business or a home. In the meantime they keep the land stripped, with no trees or shrubbery, no native plants, and sometimes without even grass. There are places I've seen that were turned into development ready property that have sat hollow and scarred for twenty years.
Even in places where there's native plants, undergrowth, and pioneer species that overcome this, the continual removal of trees makes it almost impossible for animals to stay there for long. Part of this is that with the heat island effect of nearby pavement you get constant blowing lateral winds. Winds which birds can't use as updrafts, winds which blow away rodent ground nests, and winds which scatter colonies of insects. But even if they survive all of that, the constant grooming of the land to keep it "presentable" means zero turn mowers rolling over all of that and destroying it, irrigation being dug that drains naturally forming ponds that house insects and amphibians, and the turfing that chokes out everything with fast growing non-native grasses.
The real problem is that loads of the wild plant life depends on wild insects, and we do not want to lose that.
Don't get me wrong. Neither I deny climate change, nor do I say we should destroy nature as much as we do.
But we need to start talking the truth instead of invented talking points, or people won't take science serious anymore... even more than they already ignore it.
History has shown industrialized humans to be dangerously ignorant of environmental systems, and almost every action we take with regard to these systems is destructive. Every extinction is irreversible. Things are so wildly out of equilibrium now that it's no longer possible to return to the equilibria from our past.
Ecological collapse isnt some mild inconvenience that makes milk more expensive. Once it has happened, ecological collapse cannot and will not be undone by the seriousness of "business." This type of thinking embodies exactly the kind of arrogant hubris that led us into this situation. The negative feedback loops that have kept earth habitable for us so far aren't laws of nature, and no-one knows how far they can be bent before breaking, or how they even work.
mschuster91•2mo ago
It used to be the case that rural areas were splintered into many small farms, with bushes being used to mark borders, and these bushes in turn provided harbor and food for insects and cover for small rodents and other mammals.
"Thanks" to mechanisation however, which prefers large uniform land because thats easier for ever larger machines to process, a lot of these splinters were consolidated together and so there is nothing left to support any wildlife, be it insects or small animals, which in turn also causes bird populations to drop - when there are no mice because they don't have any place to build their nests, the birds don't have food as well.
[1] https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/...
[2] https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/flugbegleiter-umfrage-...
[3] https://naturschutz-initiative.de/aktuell/neuigkeiten/landwi...
ben_w•2mo ago
Now sure, the causes could be multipliers, insect_pop = base * (cause_0 * cause_1 * …), or even exponential, insect_pop = 1/e^(cause_0 + cause_1 + …), so I'm not saying none of that stuff matters, but also there's definitely something nee.
mschuster91•2mo ago
Sure, but the real push came over the last few decades, (IMHO) closely correlating with the utter decline of employment in the primary sector [1], that was all machines and efficiencies of scale.
[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Wirtschaft/Konjunkturindik...
epolanski•2mo ago
When governments do try to push and make it law to have X amount of bushes and unfarmed land in a way that makes sense for wildlife to thrive you instantly get angry farmers on your roads, lose their votes and get publicly accused to starve the nation.
And farmers, due to the difficulty of their job (in time, investments and returns) and their role in a society's lifecycle get instant empathy.
There's areas in Italy where farms have absolutely polluted water to insane level, and this further compounds with heavy pollution of drinkable water wells (which should always be at least 120 meters from the closest farm from what I know).
Regular citizens, which end up getting heavily sick from all these farms (often in mortal ways) never get any kind of support as they lack the political and financial weight, and as soon as the argument scales, you're back at populist "you want to starve our people and kill our economy" arguments.
I had a house in the country, by law there shouldn't be more than one chicken farm in a 4 miles radius, yet they built two in less than 2 miles, one of them 300 meters from my house. It literally smells in disgusting ways 24/7, from ammonia to rot I had to sell it for pennies (5'000 euros, renovated), as nobody but the farmers in the area had the slightest intention to moving to such a beautiful yet disgusting place. And I haven't even mentioned that to avoid having to bring the hundreds of dead animals to a registered incinerator (as the law requires) they just dig mass graves in 5 minutes and cover the entire land.
Wildlife has absolutely disappeared.
It's really a tough, tough political battle.
Everything from agriculture to cattle to fishing is insanely polluting and bad for the environment, but the idea of really tracking and controlling how those industries operate is beyond naive. The labels on your tuna can saying it didn't kill dolphins are worthless, there's no way to check what happens on these boats, so are the labels for your coffee or cocoa not using child labor or your food being organic. It's all absolutely fake and a matter of money.
maybewhenthesun•2mo ago
Here in the netherlands as soon as you try to do something, the farmers start flyingh upside down flags. I call them the 'head in the sand' flags since they stand for ignoring the problems.
I fear the problem is just that the earth suffers from an infestation of humans and the equilibrium will be restored in the same way all infestations end. It won't be pretty (already isn't in lots of places).
mschuster91•2mo ago
The problem is... farmers are a pretty split bunch. On the one side you have the last few remaining small holdouts trying to make ends meet with a few dozen cows or so, they already get swamped in ever increasing bureaucracy, and on the other side you got the megafarms who not only have the benefits of scale available to them (in anywhere from machines to sheer purchase power for feedstock) but also got dedicated full time employees just taking care about getting government handouts.
Of course the small ones get up in arms whenever anything changes, they don't have the capacity and resiliency left anymore.
terminalshort•2mo ago