There’s Something Scientists Want You to Know About That Alarming Insect Armageddon

It’s an unthinkable ecological nightmare: the scientific prediction that up to 40 percent of the world’s insect species face extinction in the next few decades.

This grim tomorrow, forecast in a widely publicised study published last month, threatens to destroy the food web as we know it. But only if the insect apocalypse is as dire as claimed.

more…

Tau.Neutrino said:

There’s Something Scientists Want You to Know About That Alarming Insect Armageddon

It’s an unthinkable ecological nightmare: the scientific prediction that up to 40 percent of the world’s insect species face extinction in the next few decades.

This grim tomorrow, forecast in a widely publicised study published last month, threatens to destroy the food web as we know it. But only if the insect apocalypse is as dire as claimed.

more…

Nobody pointed out to me the paper on insect apocalypse.

I think there already has been one, as a result of two causes:

1) Civilian catastrophes (eg. Bhopal, Chernobyl) are always negligible compared to military catastrophes (eg. WW 1, Hiroshima/Nagasaki). To really destroy something you need a war on it.

The widespread spraying of wide-spectrum insecticides and the bulldozing of what was then called “swamps” and now called “wetlands” during the war on malaria from 1905 to 1960. In the early days of this, one person was able to claim that there was not one mosquito left alive in the whole country of Panama. Nearly every country in the world, with the exception mostly of sub-saharan Africa, had a policy of destroying every insect they could. Herbicide spraying Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from 1961 to 1971 should be added to this. And the war in the Pacific 1942 to 1945 devastated insect populations on Pacific islands.

2) Light pollution. Street and house lighting. For street lighting, particularly 1930 to 1970, but ongoing. For house lighting getting more and more of a problem with time.

So many creatures rely on the moon for navigation and timing of reproduction. Moths for starters. But also lacewings, beetles etc. among the insects. And turtles, amphibians, bats, corals, jellyfish, etc. I ascribe the loss of the bogong moth to this cause. The failure of navigation routes leads to starvation. The failure of reproduction synchronisation, well, I don’t need to draw a picture.

I once tried a romantic candle-lit dinner on a new housing estate on Bribie island. The number of moths that suicided on the candle flame that night. The odour of singed moth is not romantic, nor is seeing the poor dying creatures on the dinner table.

Now, as to the original article https://www.sciencealert.com/study-warns-nature-is-under-threat-of-collapse-due-to-plummeting-insect-numbers and its rebuttal, both have problems. I’ll skip over that to observe that both the original paper and its rebuttal claim that “insects are dying out”.

We have to limit outdoors lighting in the country, all around the world, as a matter of urgency.

mollwollfumble said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

There’s Something Scientists Want You to Know About That Alarming Insect Armageddon

It’s an unthinkable ecological nightmare: the scientific prediction that up to 40 percent of the world’s insect species face extinction in the next few decades.

This grim tomorrow, forecast in a widely publicised study published last month, threatens to destroy the food web as we know it. But only if the insect apocalypse is as dire as claimed.

more…

Nobody pointed out to me the paper on insect apocalypse.

I think there already has been one, as a result of two causes:

1) Civilian catastrophes (eg. Bhopal, Chernobyl) are always negligible compared to military catastrophes (eg. WW 1, Hiroshima/Nagasaki). To really destroy something you need a war on it.

The widespread spraying of wide-spectrum insecticides and the bulldozing of what was then called “swamps” and now called “wetlands” during the war on malaria from 1905 to 1960. In the early days of this, one person was able to claim that there was not one mosquito left alive in the whole country of Panama. Nearly every country in the world, with the exception mostly of sub-saharan Africa, had a policy of destroying every insect they could. Herbicide spraying Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from 1961 to 1971 should be added to this. And the war in the Pacific 1942 to 1945 devastated insect populations on Pacific islands.

2) Light pollution. Street and house lighting. For street lighting, particularly 1930 to 1970, but ongoing. For house lighting getting more and more of a problem with time.

So many creatures rely on the moon for navigation and timing of reproduction. Moths for starters. But also lacewings, beetles etc. among the insects. And turtles, amphibians, bats, corals, jellyfish, etc. I ascribe the loss of the bogong moth to this cause. The failure of navigation routes leads to starvation. The failure of reproduction synchronisation, well, I don’t need to draw a picture.

I once tried a romantic candle-lit dinner on a new housing estate on Bribie island. The number of moths that suicided on the candle flame that night. The odour of singed moth is not romantic, nor is seeing the poor dying creatures on the dinner table.

Now, as to the original article https://www.sciencealert.com/study-warns-nature-is-under-threat-of-collapse-due-to-plummeting-insect-numbers and its rebuttal, both have problems. I’ll skip over that to observe that both the original paper and its rebuttal claim that “insects are dying out”.

We have to limit outdoors lighting in the country, all around the world, as a matter of urgency.

>>This is a good, essential debate the world’s scientific community needs to be having about the ecological collapses we see around us, and the ways we measure those collapses.

If the insect apocalypse is even close to the devastating scale suggested by Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys, we’re going to need the very best science we can muster to help us, and scientific counterarguments are a crucial part of the process.

“We are concerned that such development is eroding the importance of the biodiversity crisis,” the researchers say, “making the work of conservationists harder, and undermining the credibility of conservation science.”<<

I hadn’t thought about the following aspect.

Remember Jarad Diamond’s “Guns germs and steel”.

If i apply that to the extinction of insects, guns becomes insecticide, steel becomes bulldozers.

But what about germs? How has the global spread of germs decimated insect populations?

mollwollfumble said:

I hadn’t thought about the following aspect.

Remember Jared Diamond’s “Guns germs and steel”.

If i apply that to the extinction of insects, guns becomes insecticide, steel becomes bulldozers.

But what about germs? How has the global spread of germs decimated insect populations?

I mean, what’s the insect equivalent of chytrid fungus in frogs? The mite Varroa destructor perhaps? It’s known to infect not just honeybees but also bumblebees, some wasp species and some beetle species. I don’t think anyone has a clear idea of how much devastation of native insects there is going to be.

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

I hadn’t thought about the following aspect.

Remember Jared Diamond’s “Guns germs and steel”.

If i apply that to the extinction of insects, guns becomes insecticide, steel becomes bulldozers.

But what about germs? How has the global spread of germs decimated insect populations?

I mean, what’s the insect equivalent of chytrid fungus in frogs? The mite Varroa destructor perhaps? It’s known to infect not just honeybees but also bumblebees, some wasp species and some beetle species. I don’t think anyone has a clear idea of how much devastation of native insects there is going to be.

There are plenty of parasites preying on insects, but these have evolved alongside each other and can exist together without the parasitic predator sending the prey species extinct. However the chytrid fungus and the Varroa mite are introduced with native species having no defense against them and so can be driven to extinction. Animals that have evolved together and members of a similar ecosystem can usually exist together, it is the exotic species that cause the problems and this applies to vertebrates and other life-forms too.