Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumThis is very alarming!: Flying insects vanish from nature preserves.
Not long ago, a lengthy drive on a hot day wouldn't be complete without scraping bug guts off a windshield. But splattered insects have gone the way of the Chevy Nova you just don't see them on the road like you used to.
Biologists call this the windshield phenomenon. It's a symptom, they say, of a vanishing population.
For those of us who look, I think all of us are disturbed and all of us are seeing fewer insects, said Scott Black, executive director of the Portland, Ore.-based Xerces Society, a nonprofit environmental group that promotes insect conservation. On warm summer nights you used to see them around streetlights.
The windshield phenomenon is not just a trick of Trans Am nostalgia. A small but growing number of scientific studies suggest that insects are on the wane.
The windscreen phenomenon is probably one of the best illustrative ways to realize we are dealing with a decline in flying insects, said Caspar Hallmann, an ecologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Hallmann is part of a research team that recently waded through 27 years' worth of insects collected in German nature preserves.
Read the article at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/18/this-is-very-alarming-flying-insects-vanish-from-nature-preserves/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-national%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.103952ba599c
TheDebbieDee
(11,119 posts)I mean, bees aren't the only insects that pollinate, are they?
ETA: I just Googled - many of the flying insects aid pollination, including butterflies and flies and the like. Also ants, beetles, etc.
Those science fiction films of DOOM were they can no longer grow enough food or any food at all, they prolly all started like this...
lapfog_1
(29,205 posts)chemicals and pesticides and GMO crops
overhunting and overfishing
rapid (geologically speaking) climate change
overgrazing and deforestation
we are so f'd
pscot
(21,024 posts)in the food web. Birds, reptiles and amphibians live off them. Another strand of the web fraying.
NNadir
(33,523 posts)...last twenty years before becoming greasy landfill while doing nothing at all to address climate change should help sweep all those annoying flying things from the air.
Soon the air will be safe only for drones, jets, and of course rockets.
Response to NNadir (Reply #5)
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