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Earth Science

'Alarming' Loss of Insects and Spiders Recorded (bbc.com) 167

Insects and spiders are declining in forests and grasslands across Germany, according to new research. From a report: Scientists have described the findings as "alarming," saying the losses are driven by intensive agriculture. They are calling for a "paradigm shift" in land-use policy to preserve habitat for the likes of butterflies, bugs and flying insects. Recent studies have reported widespread declines in insect populations around the world. The latest analysis, published in the journal, Nature, confirms that some insect species are being pushed down the path to extinction. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the drivers of insect decline are related to farming practices, said Dr Sebastian Seibold of the Technical University of Munich in Freising, Germany. "Our study confirms that insect decline is real - it might be even more widespread then previously thought considering, for example, that also forests are experiencing declines in insect populations," he told BBC News. "I think it's alarming to see that such a decline happens not only in intensively-managed areas but also in protected areas -- so the sites that we think are safeguarding our biodiversity are not really working anymore."
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'Alarming' Loss of Insects and Spiders Recorded

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  • Woohoo (Score:2, Funny)

    Fuck spiders. They are fucking creepy as fuck.
  • by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @11:33AM (#59387036)

    I've had an alarming loss of bee's over the years. I don't see them on my fruit trees as often. I don't see them in my garden as often. My fruit production has gone down over the years significantly.

    I'm told that its not a problem, that I should buy myself a beehive. I don't ever remember a time having a bee hive was required as there used to be plenty of bees.

    If we don't balance ourselves out quickly, mother nature is going to do it all by herself.

    --
    If you can't be in awe of Mother Nature, there's something wrong with you. - Alex Trebek

    • by LatencyKills ( 1213908 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @11:42AM (#59387064)
      A friend of mine raises and sells bees and honey as a hobby, and he tells me that any honey bee you see in North America is no longer a wild honey bee, but a honey bee from a farmed colony. He says that without people raising honey bees, there wouldn't be any left at all.
      • While I realize that the honey bee is introduced/feral in North America, that's quite alarming!
        • There are also entire populations of wild bees, which have been wiped out either due to habitat loss (think widespread roundup use on 'weeds') or killed by overzealous use of pesticides

    • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      I've had an alarming loss of bee's over the years. I don't see them on my fruit trees as often. I don't see them in my garden as often. My fruit production has gone down over the years significantly.

      I'm told that its not a problem, that I should buy myself a beehive. I don't ever remember a time having a bee hive was required as there used to be plenty of bees.

      If we don't balance ourselves out quickly, mother nature is going to do it all by herself.

      --
      If you can't be in awe of Mother Nature, there's something wrong with you. - Alex Trebek

      I've noticed during the summer the last few years that lightning bugs are much less common than they were growing up, and that was only about 2 decades ago. It just doesn't feel quite like a summer night without fireflies going off all over the place.

      • That's interesting, because here in NH I recall seeing fields full of fireflies when I was a kid (1970's), but then throughout the 2000's saw nary a one. However, in the last four or five years, I seem to be seeing them again - not in the same numbers, but definitely more than just a few years earlier.
    • Pesticides killed them. It turns out that spreading chemicals around in order to kill insects, kills insects. I mean, who woulda thought it? I would have thought the chemical would have said "hey, wait, this is a bee, I won't kill it". Turns out chemicals aren't like computers.

    • Part of the problem here is also that wildflower populations are down because everyone thinks that all fields, sides of roads and everything needs to be mowed. Cut field mowing and stop mowing road embankments and soon you would have wildflowers sprouting up and higher bee populations, plus you would generate less CO2 from useless mowing.

      Many cities even force people to mow and will not allow people to have wildflowers in their yards. Less mowing, more bees.

      Another factor on top of this is this idea that ev

      • The latter is definitely not a problem in Germany. No such thing as home owner associations here - the closest equivalent is the apartment owner association of a single building. This makes houses and gardens usually quite varied.

      • by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
        Other than grub control, you don't really need pesticides for a nice lawn.
    • by euxneks ( 516538 )
      It is better for your plants to encourage the local bees, they are far more efficient at pollination than honeybees are, afaik. There are things called bee "hotels" for carpenter bees which helps to encourage them. You can also encourage more bees to your place by planting bee-popular plants like lavender, etc.
  • by Chromal ( 56550 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @11:33AM (#59387042)
    Isn't it amazing what a few decades of profoundly psychopathic corporate manipulation of agriculture can accomplish when aided and abetted by regulatory capture, pseudoscientic studies that pointed look away from the innate flaws of dumping industrial toxins into natural systems in shocking unprecedented levels. It's no mystery why it's raining glyphosate. It's no mystery why the birds, bees, bats, and in fact all nature (including humanity) are being degraded, diseased, and destroyed by biocidal acts of destruction. The only mystery is when the executives involved haven't been rounded up and force-fed Round Up for the sake of saving the world.
    • Glyphosate doesn't kill insects.

  • by Volatile_Memory ( 140227 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @11:49AM (#59387096)

    My cats may be responsible for much of the spider loss. At least in my house.

    • Your cat eats spiders? Mine is more like a personal trainer to the spiders she finds in the house. I'm sure it looks scary to the spiders, but nothing bad happens to them other than a quick jog.

  • ... monoculture agriculture dependent on the use of insecticides, we should switch to grazing cattle. There is no need to drive other species off of land used for this.

    • Your food yield would probably drop many orders of magnitude. The reason we do the monoculture is that it yields large amounts of cheap foodstuffs that can be harvested by machine. Banning the problematic chemicals and/or requiring larger preservation areas and accepting the lower crop yields would probably be a small enough change to absorb. The organic food at the store costs more but would probably be less if such methods weren't 'special'.
      • Your food yield would probably drop many orders of magnitude.

        Just to make sure you understand an order of magnitude is a factor of 10. If a couple is 2 and a few is 3-5 many must be at least 5 and could easily mean much more. So you're saying that food yield would be reduced to at most 0.001% (or less if many means >5) of current production. I get that hyperbole is trendy these days but less precision of language isn't helpful so why add to that?

        • I did a quick google search, and you're right, assuming these figures are right it is only one order of magnitude difference between beef and corn per acre, although obviously this simplification would involve many further assumptions I've not validated in this source: http://www.waldeneffect.org/bl... [waldeneffect.org]
      • >The organic food at the store costs more but would probably be less if such methods weren't 'special'.

        Organic food can only exist as a supplement for the affluent next to cheap food for the poor. Organic food uses more land and less effective pesticides meaning food per acre would go down and costs would be going up.

        • Yes this is true, but if the alternative is collapse of the arthropod populations then the cheap food has to go away regardless or we'll crash the ecosystem and have to eat yeast extract or plankton.
    • by Chromal ( 56550 )
      Yeah, except the destruction of forests and biomes usually undertaken in order to create new grazing lands for cattle (See also: the destruction of the Amazon rainforest) will take care of the dirty deed of driving away an entire ecosystem and replacing it with for-profit monocultural unsustainable cows. Extrapolate where those lines go and you see they lead to the collapse of natural systems, the collapse of agriculture, and the rapid extinction of human civilization.
  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @12:21PM (#59387268)
    the agriculture development is mostly for economic reasons. Countries are growing more food for exports. There's also a big push from China to be independent in terms of food production (not surprisingly, their dependence on US grain was a military risk).

    Unless you solve structural problems that lead to slash and burn farming (poverty, regime change wars, etc) and the underlining causes then this is just pissing in the wind.
  • by ruddk ( 5153113 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @12:30PM (#59387308)

    They all seem to have migrated into my house

  • by kackle ( 910159 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @12:43PM (#59387368)
    This isn't about politics or statues or bathrooms, therefore it is unimportant.
  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @01:31PM (#59387558) Journal

    I live in a rural American Foursquare house, built in 1907.

    I'm pretty sure you could repopulate any number of the worlds' spider species with the numbers and variety in my basement (cellar). We've identified two MAIN populations in the house: the living area spiders who are darker, quicker, and smaller across both hunting and orb-weaving spiders. The basement orb weavers are much bigger, territorial, and translucent. They DGAF about humans and are pretty much just busy waging constant wars against each other and the also-sizable centipede population.

    Occasionally we'll get the sense that there's been some resolution to the politics of our basement arachnids, for a short time we'll see a wave of the 'basement style' spiders crop up, mostly in a radius around the basement door (refugees, we believe) but their insouciance about humans and other spiders costs them where they don't have dominance.

    Just saying. Feel free to come and negotiate with the mother spiders down there about maybe taking some of their overflow. We'd be fine with that...as long as she is.

    • OK, so I realize your house is terrifying, but when you say "also-sizable centipede population" are you referring to a large population of centipedes, or a population of large centipedes? Again, probably equally terrifying.
  • The spiders are dying? So you're saying we're winning?
  • Renewable energy has grown dramatically [wikipedia.org] while we've seen this massive die-off of insects. Let's blame the solar panels and wind turbines for the issue...
  • by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @04:14PM (#59388294) Journal
    It is long past time to change our Ag approach. In particular, we should be having robotics running over fields, and tending to individual plants. Cheap/easy to use a laser on bugs, or can give small squirt on plant. Likewise, fertilizer should be directed at the roots of wanted plant and not just sprayed all over.
  • Massive use of debugging methods had unexpected collateral effects. Stop using dbx, and go back to ddt, or better printf(), it is more environmental friendly!

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