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[-] 0110010001100010@lemmy.world 174 points 7 months ago

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...

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 134 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[-] Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 60 points 7 months ago

People have noticed...the majority just don't give a flying fuck

[-] kamenlady@lemmy.world 31 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

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[-] pennomi@lemmy.world 48 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 43 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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).

[-] pennomi@lemmy.world 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[-] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 22 points 7 months ago

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.

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[-] Son_of_dad@lemmy.world 29 points 7 months ago

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.

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[-] sturlabragason@lemmy.world 97 points 7 months ago
[-] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 89 points 7 months ago

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.

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[-] kromem@lemmy.world 81 points 7 months ago

Insect biomass declined by ∼47% and abundance declined by ∼61.5% over the last 35 years.

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.world 38 points 7 months ago

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.

https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/69-average-decline-in-wildlife-populations-since-1970-says-new-wwf-report

[-] Zron@lemmy.world 19 points 7 months ago

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.

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[-] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 32 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] kromem@lemmy.world 28 points 7 months ago

For me it's the oceans.

That's the kind of cascading changes that are going to rapidly fuck shit up.

Just a bit too acidic or warm and we can kiss our asses goodbye. And it's pretty much at that point already.

Enjoy things while they last. We probably have less time than we think.

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[-] daltotron@lemmy.world 53 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world 38 points 7 months ago

Oh no we are. We were told in the 80's that we had 20 years. It's been 40 years.

They also told us that when we start seeing the signs, it's too late.

Realistically at this point all we can do is mitigate the damage as much as possible. There's going to be widespread migrations, famine, resource wars. Humanity will survive but the environment will be drastically altered damn near permanently.

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[-] a4ng3l@lemmy.world 46 points 7 months ago

Yeah that sucks though. It dawned on me when I realised fly fishing sucks nowadays. There’s simply so little flying insects here that fishes aren’t feeding on them anymore and lost the reflex to go after them.

Now here I am trying to add flowers for insects in my garden to offset a bit my part in this :-/

[-] The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 35 points 7 months ago

I think about this every time I get a nasty letter from my HOA because they noticed some weeds...

[-] a4ng3l@lemmy.world 19 points 7 months ago

Fuck that I’m even harbouring a sea of dandelion this year. No mowing for the moment. I’m seeing butterflies for the first time in years…

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[-] Turun@feddit.de 44 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

You're missing the third panel of that comic.

Labeled 2050 it shows the car without bugs, but also without the human.

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[-] RBWells@lemmy.world 40 points 7 months ago

Yeah the insect apocalypse is the most terrifying thing to happen so far in my lifetime, though if I never see another mating swarm of palmetto bugs it will be too soon.

They do have short little lifetimes mostly, could bounce back but people just can't stop using insecticide. It's not even like fish, where we are consuming too many, we are literally just killing them, in ways that poison the food chain. Short term thinking will doom us all.

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[-] Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca 38 points 7 months ago

Saw this on Facebook and the comments were teaming with boomers and morons insisting it was because cars are now more aerodynamic.

[-] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 26 points 7 months ago

That will have a non-zero effect, but it's far from the whole story.

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[-] als@lemmy.blahaj.zone 35 points 7 months ago

I've done a lot of campaigning with different groups about climate change and lots of the older folks have cited the disappearance of bugs as a wake up call for them. Ecosystems (including weather systems) are dying and our food is going with it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68792017

The UK government thinks giving some farmers some money will solve this and keep handing out new licenses for drilling for oil and gas, which the oil industry and the rest of the world has known for over 50 years will end up roasting the humans off the planet. The government are incredibly short sighted, profit hungry and lacking in humanity (see also selling bombs to kill kids with and sending people who block those sales to prison)

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[-] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 34 points 7 months ago

It's not just insect apocalypse, although that's most of it. Cars also do a better job of moving air over the vehicle now, so smaller insects don't end up on your windshield. It's still a problem with motorcycle helmets, although it's far, far less of a problem than it would have been 20 or 30 years ago.

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[-] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 34 points 7 months ago

Man it's always a strange feeling when you suddenly realize something quite ubiquitous disappeared like 20yr ago and you never noticed.

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[-] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 31 points 7 months ago

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.

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 29 points 7 months ago

I live in dairy country and have to travel on a lot of rural roads; I do not share this experience. There are still plenty of bugs. Even with the county trucks spraying mosquito poison every few months around the canals and rivers.

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[-] Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world 29 points 7 months ago

I'd like like a graph of the bug population decline overlayed onto Roundup adoption. Just a theory.

[-] protist@mander.xyz 21 points 7 months ago

Roundup is an herbicide, fyi. But there are plenty insecticides being widely used, even moreso than Roundup in urban and suburban settings. Whenever mosquitoes start to come out, someone near me gets a mosquito yard treatment, and you can instantly see the insect biodiversity in my garden drop.

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[-] lung@lemmy.world 17 points 7 months ago

That is a dominant theory, yes. Well, and other similar environmental poisoning + climate change + ecosystem destruction + transformation of biomes into anthromes (human made)

[-] kratoz29@lemm.ee 24 points 7 months ago

Come to Mexico, I swear my windshield was crystal clear throughout all my road trip from McAllen to Austin, but once when I headed home, Mexico, I started to see the bugs all over the windshield, and even a dude in a gas station appeared from somewhere to clean it without even asking for (this is some of those douchebags who get mad because you don't want to give them coins for the service you did not ask for lol) and when I continued driving the windshield was almost in the same dirty status pretty quickly.

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[-] masquenox@lemmy.world 24 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I'm old enough to remember. The most unsettling thing about it is that all the other people old enough to remember it as well seems perfectly settled about it.

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[-] Gigan@lemmy.world 24 points 7 months ago

Yes it's terrifying. I hope its not the start of the food chain collapsing.

[-] feedum_sneedson@lemmy.world 22 points 7 months ago

Is this maybe to do with aerodynamics? My friend has a flat-fronted van and has to clean the insects off pretty frequently.

[-] ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world 39 points 7 months ago

No. There is considerably less insects.

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[-] Hikermick@lemmy.world 20 points 7 months ago

I fly fish and therefore pay attention to aquatic insects. The rivers in my area definitely have more bugs largely due to efforts to cut pollution

[-] BallsandBayonets@lemmy.world 20 points 7 months ago

Damn millennials with their ecological collapse; killing the windshield wiper fluid industry!

[-] TheHowTM 15 points 7 months ago

I have a 2004 Honda element, the windshield attracts bugs like craz. In the summer I can go through a gallon of fluid in a few weeks. I also have a 2008 Outback, which is the one I usually take across state lines to see family. It's better at keeping them off the glass, but the washer line is busted and the tank is cracked, so I still end up having to use gas station squeegee a couple times per trip.

I can't win.

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