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...

This is real and very scary

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/25/the-insect-apocalypse-our-world-will-grind-to-a-halt-without-them

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.

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

• https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.4620

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.

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 :-/

You're missing the third panel of that comic.

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.