Insect Apocalypse German Bug Watchers Sound Alarm

I wish that articles like these could end with at least some point of action that I could take to improve the situation. If the public should act, give them something actionable: Calling their local council, joining an organization, not cutting your lawn, whatever.<p>As anyone&#x27;s who&#x27;s been trained in crowd control during emergencies knows, you don&#x27;t just sound alarm without at the same time telling people what to do. Journalists should take at least some kind of the same responsibility. Otherwise, people will either panic or stop listening.

The German parliament had two interesting votes last week:<p>(1) Recoginze the ongoing climate catastrophe - propose measure to counter act [1]<p>(2) Stop using coal power stations [2]<p>You can guess how the ruling parties voted. It makes me furious in the light of recent devastating news (No permafrost in Candian arctic, melting Greenland ice, hottest June in Germany since record keeping, Anchorage seeing unprecedented temperatures...)<p>===<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bundestag.de&#x2F;parlament&#x2F;plenum&#x2F;abstimmung&#x2F;abstimmung?id=613" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bundestag.de&#x2F;parlament&#x2F;plenum&#x2F;abstimmung&#x2F;abstimm...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bundestag.de&#x2F;parlament&#x2F;plenum&#x2F;abstimmung&#x2F;abstimmung?id=612" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bundestag.de&#x2F;parlament&#x2F;plenum&#x2F;abstimmung&#x2F;abstimm...</a>

Anybody can do a little bit to help insects. It ranges from planting a pot of some flowers, to building an insect hotel, to switching to a more natural lawn or talking to your city council to replace parts of the lawns in parks with more insect friendly meadows.<p>However, I don&#x27;t see how I as consumer can choose agricultural products that are friendlier to insects. Organic agriculture also uses pesticides and monocultures. Reducing one&#x27;s meat intake is always a good idea, but other than that how can I judge the impact my food choices have on biodiversity?

I just know : my mom has a garden and in winter she used to feed the birds. Since 2 or 3 years the birds are not stopping eating this food when spring comes - my mom now feeds the birds all year. At the same time insect have become noticeably fewer

It&#x27;s crazy how disconnected from nature we have become to not notice in our everyday life an extinction event happening at this very moment.

This one scares me. No one seems to be doing anything about it, and the results could be massive.

In 1958 Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows to be killed, as part of the famous Four Pests Campaign (Chinese: 除四害), because they ate too much grain. This caused one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Without birds, the population of insects grew massively and ate most of the plants, grains making one of the one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine.

My large, extended family, notes this every year when we go to our family reunions in Northern Ontario: each year, our cars have fewer bugs than the previous year.<p>We&#x27;ve had the family reunion the same July weekend for 45 years now and our cars and trucks used to be just plastered with insects. Now there may be none at all.

The older I get, the more guilty I feel of even squashing an ant in my home -- they are living forms like us and we should be treating them with respect and give them space to thrive as well. And if this means setting up protected reserves for insects and to ban certain types of chemicals then so be it.

Can someone explain to me why this is a bad thing? We used to go out of our way to kill insects in past decades, presumably because we&#x27;d prefer them dead. Now they are dying off and I&#x27;m not sure why I should be unhappy about this.<p>What are the bad consequences of this?

Not to sound overly optimistic, but I can imagine that a trend like this is less difficult to reverse than, say, climate change.<p>The scientific consensus about climate change seems to be that even if we can muster the political courage and will and do our darndest, we may already have passed the tipping point and will boil anyway.<p>As to the insect apocalypse: given a fighting chance, life has a way of veering back. This is of course if viable numbers of populations survive and keystone populations have not been extinguished. (Maybe this is just a complicated way of stating that ecological systems work on other timescales than the climate.)

The intriguing aspect is: This phenomenon is indeed observable everywhere (windshields) yet there is no obvious reason. Pesticide use should have gone down across all of Germany in the last 30 years. So should have general pollution. Warmer weather should actually help insects. Large natural reserves have been created (e.g., former military training grounds, depopulated areas in rural Germany).<p>So either this is caused by an as of now unknown agent, or we see some form of delayed effect.

I&#x27;m doing everything I can in my own yard: growing vegetables without pesticides&#x2F;herbicides, growing wildflowers&#x2F;natural fauna in the majority of our gardens, etc.<p>And I&#x27;m growing sympathy for insects in my children! My daughter is obsessed with ants and we&#x27;re getting into my childhood hobby of farming ants.<p>Etymology is almost as cool as mycology. I love insects, arachnids, and all of our crawly little friends!

I thought it was ironic that an advertisement for exterminators came up in the middle of the article. Another triumph for add algos ;)

This is also easily observed by anyone old enough who drives in the suburbs or rural areas, and it really jumped out at me a decade or more ago.<p>When&#x27;s the last time you had to clean your windshield of a bunch of dead bugs (or a few large ones)? I remember when every gas fill up also meant using both the mesh sponge side and the squeegee side of a windshield washer, and you knew which gas stations kept those buckets filled and had good squeegees. How long since you used one of those to clean off a filthy windshield, or since you noticed if a gas station has good ones?<p>On a somewhat related note, how long since you had to do the same for bird droppings? And when you&#x27;re parking at night or walking back to your car, do you have any issues with walking through the huge clouds of bugs around the lights or are there no longer any such clouds?<p>Edit: expanded and mobile corrections

Is there no pattern at all to the locations where the greatest decrease happened? If it’s pesticides then the traps nearest an active field of crops will show the greatest decrease. It doesn’t sound like they’re finding that. If it was road deaths then it would be near the roads. If it’s temperature then you would expect to see decreases in hot years, increases in cold years. If crawling insects are affected differently than flying ones, that tells you something. If it’s everywhere at once with no pattern whatsoever, well thats just <i>baffling</i>. It would have to do with the composition of the air or maybe the solar cycle or something else that affects everywhere at once.

I&#x27;m surprised to read no one seems to know what to do about this. There&#x27;s a simple thing you can do and that is buying organic produce. Sure, it still uses some pesticides but not all and a lot less (at least in Europe, not sure about the US).

Off topic, but capitalizing words in titles in English really bothers me. Every word in the title are nouns, but some are here ment to be verbs. In German for example, only the nouns would have been capitalized, making the title much easier to read.

&gt; &quot;Since 1982, the traps we manufacture ourselves have been standardised and controlled, all of the same size and the same material, and they are collected at the same rate in 63 locations that are still identical,&quot; explains Sorg.<p>Do I believe that something, likely humans, is doing damage to nature? Yes.<p>However, give the above, I have to ask: couldn&#x27;t the argument be made that collecting less samples is natural selection at work? That is, the insects that aren&#x27;t trapped - for whatever reason - will pass those traits on and so on. The survivors breed more survivers. Those that are trapped and die, well so does their DNA.

&quot;Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.&quot;<p>This is almost certainly false. The paper released earlier this year only looked at other studies which reported insect populations in decline, a methodology certain to find a problem.

in my country right next to germany, within &#x27;protected&#x27; natural areas, insect life declined by as much as 85%. If you have a garden which is friendly to insects you get swarmed as there are literally no other places to go.<p>people need to be aware of this and stop just paving their gardens. create a nice home for some bugs :-) it will be good for your children and their children. So no excuse not to put some flowers outside and keep at least a few insects fed and happy.

This worries me <i>way</i> more than warming itself.

Brain dump:<p>Reading V. Smil&#x27;s &quot;Energy and Civilization a History&quot; has made me realize that the Applied Ecology (Permaculture) epoch would be a fundamentally new form of civilization.<p>Cf. Hemenway&#x27;s lecture: &quot;Permaculture can save Humanity and the Earth but not Civilization&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo</a> It&#x27;s about an hour. Here are some notes I took:<p>He reframes &quot;sustainable&quot; as the midpoint of a spectrum with &quot;degenerative&quot; on one side and &quot;regenerative&quot; on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.<p>He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing &quot;culture&quot; (group activites, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it&#x27;s roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.<p><pre><code> Five culture types based on food getting technology: Foraging Hunter-gatherer Agricultural (cities) Pastoral (Animal herding) Industrial </code></pre> Then follows a great deal of the &quot;dirt&quot; on agriculture. Old hat to those who know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don&#x27;t. Hemenway sums it up, &quot;Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people.&quot;<p>(Oil =&gt; Food =&gt; People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be trouble...<p>Holmgrin&#x27;s scenarios:<p>- Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn&#x27;t solve the problem, only postpones it.)<p>- Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.<p>- Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) &quot;Earth Stewardship&quot; &quot;Permaculture&quot; I don&#x27;t know where the people are supposed to have gone.<p>- &quot;Atlantis&quot; - i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but I&#x27;m okay with being proven wrong on that.<p>&quot;Peak Wood&quot; - no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a close. Wow.<p>Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.<p>The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these subjects. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fertilefuture.blogspot.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;05&#x2F;toby-hemenway-video.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fertilefuture.blogspot.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;05&#x2F;toby-hemenway-vid...</a><p>- - - -<p>OMG: Obvious ways that we are out of whack with Nature:<p>Glass windows kill millions of birds.<p>Windshields kill billions of insects.<p>Rain brings out earthworms that then die on the sidewalk.<p>Asphalt covers n% of the Earth and vulcanized rubber particles are continously emitted into the ecosystem.<p>Plastic collecting in the Oceanic Gyres and beaches of the world, as well and in the bellies of animals, and coating and fusing with rock.<p>Gas-burning, noise- and air-polluting leaf blowers that are inherently wasteful (each item is typically blown about 2~5 times before arriving at resting point. Compare to vacuum cleaner.)<p>In fact, all the pollution.<p>Lawns are everywhere. Intrinsically wasteful, deliberately stunted and impoverished ecosystems, massive applications of chemicals.<p>Agriculture. Literally counter-productive: untouched ecosystems are orders of magnitude more productive. Doing nothing is more productive than farming.<p>We wear shoes that insulate us from contact with the Earth (lit. grounding). We do this because we have poured concrete all over everything.<p>Where the meat comes from...<p>And so on.<p>- - - -<p>Part Yay: Humans are Nature&#x27;s turbo-chargers!<p>We can increase the productivity of natural system by an order of magnitude again over baseline untouched ecosystems. (Example: WPA built miles of massive swales across the western states, and years later (with no maintainence) there are plants and animals there where before there was desert. TODO: look this up.)<p>(Cf. Yeoman&#x27;s Keyline techniques. Draw water out onto ridges to gte more use out of rainfall. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.keyline.com.au&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.keyline.com.au&#x2F;</a> )<p>Broadly speaking we can corrugate terrain and systems to get more surface area and interaction and create more niches and therefore more life. Recall that life exists in the thermodynamic flow from the Sun (and yes, the oceanic heat vents) to ultimately the rest of the sky, and that we are nowhere near the physical limiting factors. It&#x27;s relatively easy to add niches to an existing garden. Especially if you&#x27;re able to make modifications! I have a whole DVD about Permaculture water harvesting where they bring in a backhoe to dig out a new little lake and some canals! A one-time expenditure of fossil fuel to make a vast change in the water&#x2F;energy flows of a local system to ultimately increase the ecological robustness and yield makes sense. And in theory, locally grow alcohol fuel could be used to power land-shaping machines.<p>There is also a possibility to use Bucky Fuller-style Tensgresity (or merely geodesic) structures to create &quot;3D&quot; gardens.<p>With Permaculture techniques you can revitalize salty desert in a few years (&quot;Greening the Desert&quot; Geoff Lawton) and there is plenty of desert. All of the necessary factors are themselves organic and therefore capable of geometric increase. We could green the deserts from Southern CA to Texas and accomodate several hundred million people in an ecologically (climate proof!) way.

&quot;He and an army of volunteers have over the years gathered as many as 80 million insects that are now floating in countless ethanol bottles.&quot;<p>Ah, that&#x27;s where the insects went!

who would have thought that ichthyology could be so sexy?? :3

Dang it you guys, I posted this (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20339865" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20339865</a>) <i>yesterday</i>. Things are getting so bad so rapidly...