I cannot disagree with this. When I was young not a day went by were I did not see some butterflies in the summer and autumn. Even in the small City where I grew up.
Now that I think of it, I have not even seen a butterfly in many years, this includes hiking it the woods.
What a shame, well with global warming and the powers that be still doubling down on fossil fuels, a big correction is probably on its way, similar to this story posted here earlier about tree roots. We had 50+ years to do something about climate change, as usual profits came first.
Echoing someone else, I live in the heart of Austin and generally rarely see bees/butterflies, but last year we planted a bunch of native wildflowers in the yard and we had a) an absolutely beautiful explosion of color, and b) TONS of bees and butterflies hanging out all day in the flowers. So, regardless of where you are, I think it's worth planting some native plants to give the little guys somewhere to hang out.
One thing I've noticed is that bugs don't hit my windshield while driving anymore.
I used to have to stop at the gas station almost daily to clean the bug splatter. That just doesn't happen anymore - and I'm still driving the same car I was 30 years ago.
plus one for this, I had wildflowers and while the number of bees was disappointing I saw a lot of butterflies. they were in the house every other day over summer.
We also planted a mint plant which went to flower, and that was like catnip to them. Anytime you looked out the window there were seven or eight butterflies on this one plant, no flowers free.
i'm building a couple of planter boxes in my backyard specifically to plant native wild flowers. it will merely be a drop in the bucket, but it's what i can do where i'm at currently. i'm hoping to see any type of insect attraction. i have a running water fountain that i see bees coming to drink, so i'm really hoping wild flowers will attract them as well as the butterflies.
Excellent move! It's amazing whet even a drop in the bucket can do!
We had just a bit of milkweed growing wild off to one side of the yard, but since we've specifically left it anywhere it can establish itself in the gardens, we've definitely seen more Monarch butterflies, even got to watch some make a chrysalis on our porch, and emerge to fly away!
Also key is to plant or let grow fully native cultivars of flowering plants. The hybridized ones are often completely unattractive and non-nutirtional to the plants, but since we've let some of them go, we've got a lot more bees and types of bees.
Clover is also better than lawn. Not only is it fantastic because it fixes it's own nitrogen and enriches instead of depleting the soil, it also attracts bees, and keeps the bunnies occupied so they don't bother the garden so much.
(This is in the Northeast US, north of Boston. Where are you?)
You single out only fossil fuels, but there are so many other ways in which we are damaging the environment that we also need to worry about - PFAS everywhere, noise and light pollution, pesticides and many other chemicals in rivers, expanses of monocultures, etc. It concerns me that there is so much fixation on one form of harm, which I fear may result in less attention to the many others that we are inflicting.
There are lots of speculative culprits and maybe it's a combination, but we won't get anywhere unless we find out which ones are responsible for fouling habitability by desirable insects and selectively addressing those pollutants.
If it's, for example, fertilizers... it would not be likely we pull back on farming output with resulting starvation in other countries that depend on affordable agricultural products in a global market (yes, we rich countries can afford a 2x or 3x cost of food, but not people in poor countries from which in a global economy we'd be sucking up their agricultural production and outbidding the locals.
biodiversity loss is surely a huge one. "even in undisturbed forests" is the headline, but these undisturbed forests are lesser in size every year. Ireland's forestry cover has dropped from about 80% in the 1600s to 1% in the 1900s. It's back up to 11% now and that seems great on paper, but its all monoculture forestry for logging, with zero wildlife. meanwhile, hedgerows and wild land is shrinking all the time - the place where wildlife actually lives
Here's one that I don't think people are even considering.
I've seen insects flying repeatedly into brightly colored non flower objects. They get stuck doing it.
So even something as simple as a small piece of colored fabric can throw bees off and there's no such thing as a forest so untouched that there isn't some human left object in it.
Brightly colored objects are more common than ever too.
I don't doubt numbers are declining. Yet, where I live in the suburbs outside a city in the US northeast, I see bees, butterflies, and fireflies all the time when it's warm out. There was a time period when I didn't. But I may not have been as observant then.
Anecdotally, I noticed a pronounced drop in bugs in general after a nasty heat wave we had back in like 2018. Took several years, but they seem to have bounced back a bit now.
Seems to be some degree of fluctuation in populations after these big climate events.
Not butterfly- or bee-related, but growing up in the suburbs of Toronto in the 70s (hence, an urban environment), I remember seeing several grasshoppers per day in our neighborhood during the summer. These days, I'm lucky to have seen a single grasshopper in the past several years, and I spend a lot of time in nature. Very sad and disconcerting.
I remember in the 80s that there were bees all over the grounds at my elementary school, they had dandelions, clover, and a few other weed/grass species in the mix but bees went whole hog on them. About a decade ago I went back to that school during summer and noticed not a single bee was around the grounds. It's wild how fast insects are dying off these days. Heck, I remember summers in my hometown where it was a bad idea for me to be out since mosquitos would bite me furiously but now I rarely see them.
Weirdly enough, it seems like the last few years here in SoCal I’ve seen more butterflies than normal. I’ve seen more bees than normal, but I’ve planted some native plants that they seem to love.
Saw six butterflies last night while walking in a highly developed area. I’ll probably see six more tonight. Are anecdotes really how we want to measure this?
It would be better to do a systematic study, and publish the results in a scientific journal like Current Biology. Then maybe to help get the word out, publish a summary on a website like Science.
The charts going down to the right and the maps showing territory shrinking are both important. That’s why they’re posted here frequently.
It’s also important to remember what those charts and maps mean, which is future generations having magic and beauty and wonder stolen from them. The destruction of the environment is heartbreaking on its own, but the destruction of the human experience is a whole additional layer of tragedy.
>"Are anecdotes really how we want to measure this?"
Anecdotes aren't always bad, or even inappropriate. We're on an internet forum having a casual discussion so my expectations for intellectual rigor are quite low.
Lucky. I haven't been seeing anything for a long time and due to old habits from studying entomology, I habitually identify any butterfly I see. I can tell a Monarch from a Viceroy at a distance just because the latter flies differently.
I haven't seen either one since early covid, when they were suddenly more common for whatever reason.
I know its a drop in the bucket, but I hope this can inspire more drops in the bucket. I tend my yard with plenty of plants that make food and habitat for bees and butterflies. This includes native milkweed for the monarchs, carrots, fennel, and parsley for the swallowtails, and many other flowering plants for the bees. Chemical warfare is completely banned from my property. All kinds of insects are here and in balance providing food for the rest of the ecosystem.
This is the way. I'm going to do the same even though I only have a balcony. I was thinking of building a fountain for birds too to help them cool down and bath in the dreadful hot days. That's the least I can do.
Are you saying that intermittent pollinator gardens don't serve to bolster the ecological network? Because that would be wrong. Every bit helps and even small gardens have a large impact.
It's the pesticides. Consider the world from the POV of an insect. Even if you're a bee, your metabolism is similar to other insect pests. There are huge fields of dense crops with plenty of pollen but if you partake, you die.
You may be partially right, but IIRC one of the studies which found a significant decrease was specifically taking bug samples from number plates rather than windscreens because number plates have been the same shape and in the same orientation for years.
It's still an anecdote, but I've been driving the same truck for 15 years now. It definitely feels like I don't have to clean my windshield nearly as often as I used to in the summers.
I think it's to do with the predators that used to keep the grazers in check. They are fewer because we shot them in protection of or livestock. This lead to a swath of plant extinctions...
I would also suspect that as people get older they are less adventurous in their driving habits. Your to/from work commute and grocery trips expose the ol’ jalopy to a very different ecosystem than the road-trips you would do as a younger person looking for trouble/adventure/memories.
I remember it from my parents driving, mostly. I haven't cleaned my windshield at a gas station since something like 2006 or 2007, though it used to be needed constantly. I remember air so thick with insects that the space illuminated by the headlights was alive—and that wasn't unusual. I haven't seen that since the 90s.
For me it is actually the opposite, I drive much more cross country now since I moved to other side of Norway and both me and my wifes family lives a 400km drive away.
Couldn't evolution partially explain this? Bugs that avoid roads, cars, etc. would have an advantage. They'd be able to live longer, and be more likely to reproduce. Over time the bugs that get hit by cars would be replaced by the bugs who've adapted to not get hit by cars.
Bugs reproduce pretty quickly, so this trait could have propagated pretty quickly.
rain and winds brings contamination into the most remote corners of the world
for example the Aral Sea has not dust but salt storm, to top it of they are highly toxic due to extrem over use of pesticides upstream and toxines from there have been fund as far away as in snow in Sweden (probably further away too, I just don't remember).
another example dust from the Sahara somewhat frequently get carried as far as Germany
> An early version of the technology – which detoxified a widely-used group of insecticides called organophosphates – is described in a new study, “Pollen-Inspired Enzymatic Microparticles to Reduce Organophosphate Toxicity in Managed Pollinators,” published on May 20, 2021, in Nature Food. The antidote delivery method has now been adapted to effectively protect bees from all insecticides, and has inspired a new company, Beemmunity, based in New York state.
The company (I think it's the same company) currently makes flower pots to attract and feed native bees, and they make food bricks that help boost bee immunity and robustness. Still a small company, and frequently out of stock.
You can click through the "health action" drop downs on their lickbrick page to see what each of the ingredients do. https://www.beemmunity.co/lickbrick
Why has massive biodiversity losses at multiple previous points in earth's history always resulted in an even larger subsequent explosion of biodiversity?
I lament we've been given this amazing Eden filled with boundless flora and fauna -the complexity and beauty of which we can barely comprehend- and we're trading it in for parking lots and shiny baubles.
> Early Triassic faunas lacked biodiversity and were relatively homogeneous due to the effects of the extinction. The ecological recovery on land took 30 million years.
I guess it eventually works out if you are willing to wait very, very long.
I don't know the answer to that, but I can say that you and I are likely to be long gone before any explosion in biodiversity will occur. It won't happen for many tens of thousands of years (probably many millions).
People often seem to think the whole climate change is worrying about the earth and all the animal life. The earth will be fine, individual animals will hardly notice (they have much more immediate concerns most of the time, like being eaten).
It's humanity that is going to suffer, with the risk of many of our highly optimised systems becoming unsuited to task (think many cities and food production needing to shift, leading to starvation/conflict).
IMO, because the "tournament" of evolution between competing species comes to place where "winners" are declared, they live. Losers die off. While lamentable, this opens the field for the next round of competitors to fill the voids left by the losers which drives more diversity and the process repeats itself.
It opens the space for less well adapted creatures to evolve into and adapt. For a short time (on an evolutionary timescale) you get a much larger variety of adaptation strategies until the best ones win out.
Unless humanity completely erases life on earth I'm sure it'll bounce back. There's still time ahead, although not as much as there was behind. However, I'd rather we destroyed less and restored more, at least in my lifetime, so we could enjoy its existence.
Its hard to have a rational response to the steady trickle of warnings.
We know that things are not going well on many fronts.
We also know that we are locked-in along an unsustainable path that is extremely difficult to change given that people are not equipped mentally, socially, politically, economically to do the right things.
We also know that the negative effects will not be the kind of in-your-face "wake up" call that will panic people into some sort of action.
Species don't make a lot of noise when they disappear. Its just silence.
Not that panic reactions could change anything. Changing course into a sustainable economy would require massive, coordinated and persistent changes over decades.
So we must resign to a steady degradation of the environment across the planet, the loss of many beautiful things, the creation of fragile human monocultures, recurrent epidemics and ecosystem disasters and just hope that some deus-ex-machina will grant us at some point a way out - despite us not deserving it.
Doesn't the article suggest the opposite. If populations are declining in untouched forests far from human activity, wouldn't that be evidence that human activity is not the cause of population decline
It only suggests that local effects are not responsible. That leaves as some of the possibilities: climate change, air pollution, other chemicals that still make it in to 'untouched' forests.
Microplastics have been found everywhere, from high mountains, to antarctica and deep ocean sediments. I am not claiming thats the vector responsible in this case but the human footprint is now everywhere.
We also should archive everything we can, like we do with books. Assuming civilization will survive there's a small chance to rebuild the ecosystem on this planet or some another in distant future. It's not a given, but definitely possible.
When we moved to the mountains my son really wanted to see a porcupine. I talked to an oldtimer forrester friend and he said that in the 60s/70s they sprayed to kill all the underbrush to make logging easier and that that changed the fauna quite a bit and that was when porcupine's became uncommon. I thought it sad we thought we were hiking through natural forests but they had been heavily changed by an expedited business practice from a few decades in the last century.
We saw everything from otters and beavers to lynx, grizzlies and cougars in our journeys, but never a porcupine.
Interesting. I live in the city and I see porcupines just walking the dog. Usually they're up in oak trees. They seem well adapted to city life since they just need to live in and eat tree tops.
Readit News
Now that I think of it, I have not even seen a butterfly in many years, this includes hiking it the woods.
What a shame, well with global warming and the powers that be still doubling down on fossil fuels, a big correction is probably on its way, similar to this story posted here earlier about tree roots. We had 50+ years to do something about climate change, as usual profits came first.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35054175
(edit, fixed the link, paste issue)
I used to have to stop at the gas station almost daily to clean the bug splatter. That just doesn't happen anymore - and I'm still driving the same car I was 30 years ago.
The overall population of insects has plummeted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_hotel
We also planted a mint plant which went to flower, and that was like catnip to them. Anytime you looked out the window there were seven or eight butterflies on this one plant, no flowers free.
We had just a bit of milkweed growing wild off to one side of the yard, but since we've specifically left it anywhere it can establish itself in the gardens, we've definitely seen more Monarch butterflies, even got to watch some make a chrysalis on our porch, and emerge to fly away!
Also key is to plant or let grow fully native cultivars of flowering plants. The hybridized ones are often completely unattractive and non-nutirtional to the plants, but since we've let some of them go, we've got a lot more bees and types of bees.
Clover is also better than lawn. Not only is it fantastic because it fixes it's own nitrogen and enriches instead of depleting the soil, it also attracts bees, and keeps the bunnies occupied so they don't bother the garden so much.
(This is in the Northeast US, north of Boston. Where are you?)
Enjoy!
Deleted Comment
If it's, for example, fertilizers... it would not be likely we pull back on farming output with resulting starvation in other countries that depend on affordable agricultural products in a global market (yes, we rich countries can afford a 2x or 3x cost of food, but not people in poor countries from which in a global economy we'd be sucking up their agricultural production and outbidding the locals.
I've seen insects flying repeatedly into brightly colored non flower objects. They get stuck doing it.
So even something as simple as a small piece of colored fabric can throw bees off and there's no such thing as a forest so untouched that there isn't some human left object in it.
Brightly colored objects are more common than ever too.
Seems to be some degree of fluctuation in populations after these big climate events.
It would be better to do a systematic study, and publish the results in a scientific journal like Current Biology. Then maybe to help get the word out, publish a summary on a website like Science.
The charts going down to the right and the maps showing territory shrinking are both important. That’s why they’re posted here frequently.
It’s also important to remember what those charts and maps mean, which is future generations having magic and beauty and wonder stolen from them. The destruction of the environment is heartbreaking on its own, but the destruction of the human experience is a whole additional layer of tragedy.
Anecdotes aren't always bad, or even inappropriate. We're on an internet forum having a casual discussion so my expectations for intellectual rigor are quite low.
I haven't seen either one since early covid, when they were suddenly more common for whatever reason.
I've tried other solutions, but now I mostly just suffer :(
One improvement that really worked was adding an electric bug zapper inside the house so at least I'm not harassed while I sleep.
Also the suction plungers for a recent bite surprisingly really do work.
No. It’s a hobby.
If I set up my own email server, I’m not fighting the Gmail Dominance. I’m pursuing a hobby.
I have been driving for exactly 21 years now. My first car I remember the drudge of cold soaking it through the summer to get off the layers of bugs.
I don’t see more than the odd bug on my current car through the summer.
It is anecdotal, but it tracks the science and feels very real when it is so observeable personally too.
Not to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon
"The research also found that modern cars, with a more aerodynamic body shape, killed more insects than boxier vintage cars"
I think it's to do with the predators that used to keep the grazers in check. They are fewer because we shot them in protection of or livestock. This lead to a swath of plant extinctions...
Bugs reproduce pretty quickly, so this trait could have propagated pretty quickly.
there are no really undisturbed forests
rain and winds brings contamination into the most remote corners of the world
for example the Aral Sea has not dust but salt storm, to top it of they are highly toxic due to extrem over use of pesticides upstream and toxines from there have been fund as far away as in snow in Sweden (probably further away too, I just don't remember).
another example dust from the Sahara somewhat frequently get carried as far as Germany
and climate warming affects remote regions too
> An early version of the technology – which detoxified a widely-used group of insecticides called organophosphates – is described in a new study, “Pollen-Inspired Enzymatic Microparticles to Reduce Organophosphate Toxicity in Managed Pollinators,” published on May 20, 2021, in Nature Food. The antidote delivery method has now been adapted to effectively protect bees from all insecticides, and has inspired a new company, Beemmunity, based in New York state.
The company (I think it's the same company) currently makes flower pots to attract and feed native bees, and they make food bricks that help boost bee immunity and robustness. Still a small company, and frequently out of stock.
You can click through the "health action" drop downs on their lickbrick page to see what each of the ingredients do. https://www.beemmunity.co/lickbrick
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Triassic
> Early Triassic faunas lacked biodiversity and were relatively homogeneous due to the effects of the extinction. The ecological recovery on land took 30 million years.
I guess it eventually works out if you are willing to wait very, very long.
People often seem to think the whole climate change is worrying about the earth and all the animal life. The earth will be fine, individual animals will hardly notice (they have much more immediate concerns most of the time, like being eaten).
It's humanity that is going to suffer, with the risk of many of our highly optimised systems becoming unsuited to task (think many cities and food production needing to shift, leading to starvation/conflict).
Which is fine until you realize kill most biodiversity may include humans. Even if the earth survives doesn't mean we will.
Unless humanity completely erases life on earth I'm sure it'll bounce back. There's still time ahead, although not as much as there was behind. However, I'd rather we destroyed less and restored more, at least in my lifetime, so we could enjoy its existence.
And which usually happens on a time scale which most of us would consider "long"
We know that things are not going well on many fronts.
We also know that we are locked-in along an unsustainable path that is extremely difficult to change given that people are not equipped mentally, socially, politically, economically to do the right things.
We also know that the negative effects will not be the kind of in-your-face "wake up" call that will panic people into some sort of action.
Species don't make a lot of noise when they disappear. Its just silence.
Not that panic reactions could change anything. Changing course into a sustainable economy would require massive, coordinated and persistent changes over decades.
So we must resign to a steady degradation of the environment across the planet, the loss of many beautiful things, the creation of fragile human monocultures, recurrent epidemics and ecosystem disasters and just hope that some deus-ex-machina will grant us at some point a way out - despite us not deserving it.
Deleted Comment
We saw everything from otters and beavers to lynx, grizzlies and cougars in our journeys, but never a porcupine.