I remember a drive from Devils Lake, ND to Rugby, ND (~60 miles) less than a decade ago. The bugs were so bad I had to stop and clean my windshield twice because I couldn't see.
Totally anecdotally: I have to scrub a thick layer of bugs off my motorcycle helmet after every single ride but almost never off the windshield of my car. Though this could also be a function of where I’m going (typically rural back roads on the bike and highway/interstate in the car), but even then I’m still not sure, since there is a decent amount of overlap in local routes
I think this is real, I'm traveling and borrowed a relatives car which is much lower profile and more sleek than my old Jeep. I was driving through the countryside the other day and there were a lot of critters flying about, I was surprised that often, they'd sort of just get "pushed" over the top of the car. Not sure what happened to them after that but yeah!
I did some googling to find a comparison of old and new cars in wind tunnels without much luck but this articles cover is fairly good[0].
> Not sure what happened to them after that but yeah!
One thing I did find is that for aerodynamic purposes the one place cars want turbulence is right behind them in their wake to disrupt a vacuum.
So I expect those bugs get smashed into the ground or even sucked into the radiator of any close behind cars as that air seems quite stagnant right behind a car.
Having had a VW bus all my life I can confirm they do get a lot of bugs, but far fewer these days. In the 80s my father used to try all manner of cleaning products to try and remove them but it's not such an issue any more.
They account for this factor, and several others, in the study. There's an world wide decimation of insect populations, and it has received minor coverage relative to its likely significance to ecosystems.
Think of a food chain, bugs are near the bottom meaning they are a food source for many other creatures like birds, reptiles, small mammals, fish. Fewer bugs means less food for mice, that means fewer mice, leads to less food for snakes, leads to fewer snakes, leads to less food for birds of prey, leads to fewer birds of prey.
There are many chains like this where bugs are a vital source of food. If there were zero bugs then these chains would collapse. Also, bugs are needed to pollenate many fruit bearing plants.
> So in our little thought experiment, (...), our bugs-per-windshield metric would have been cut by two-thirds even if the number of bugs had remained constant. And it hasn’t! It’s fallen precipitously.
This could also be a function of bugs flying less over busy roads, and decreasing in volume at the places where most cars drive. If so, that would explain the precipitous fall in splats. I do not think that this is very far-fetched, since most animals instinctively begin to shun areas when predators are introduced.
I can attest that. I drive a Land Rover Defender which, you know, has the aerodynamics of a wall. It's full of bugs after driving on the highway for more than 30 minutes.
Are you from the US? Never thought anyone would drive them over there because they tend to need repairs quite often and not every shop wants to work on them. And also the thing with the spare parts.
Yeah. I bought mine because it was half the price of a similar year 4runner or similar. I ended up getting rid of it for the reasons you state, but had a blast with it while I had it.
haha, had to be the reason. I would also love a 4Runner, love the look. But the mileage and the eletronics, apart from the fact that they aren't sold in Germany make it nearly impossible.
The new Defenders are awesome. I got to borrow one for the day from a buddy in Colorado and it was the ideal vehicle for the terrain. My only qualm was that the turbo lag felt pretty significant but it scoots once it's all spooled up. Very luxurious and very capable vehicles.
Yeah, agreed. Very capable and probably better than the old ones. But I like my old one because it has almost no tech and I can easily fix things even in Mongolia or something. No computers needed!
Sadly, also in Denmark as the article mentions, I’ve only had to clean my windshield once this summer (by clean I mean scrubbing, I do use the windshield washer more often). 1995 Defender.
I only have to look outside at my neighbors winter wheat field to find one of the reasons. It’s been sprayed 3 times already this fall after sowing.
> Many smart people we spoke with, including entomologists and wheat farmers, speculated that maybe the cars have changed, not the bugs. As vehicles become more aerodynamic, the thinking goes, their increasingly efficient airflow whisks the bugs away from the windshield instead of creating head-on splatters.
> But when we called experts in the arcane art of computational fluid dynamics, they sounded skeptical. Yes, today’s sleek sedans can have half the drag of the land boats that ruled the road just a generation or two ago. But that improved airflow won’t do much for a bug.
> For starters, many aero improvements happen on the rear of the car rather than the bug-hitting front. Consider the optimally aerodynamic teardrop shape, with its blunt, round front and long, sleek tail. But more importantly, it’s just surprisingly difficult to use air to push a bug out of the way of an onrushing Buick.
> If it were possible to design a bug- and debris-proof car, then Kevin Golsch probably would have done it by now. An auto-industry veteran, Golsch has spent decades around wind tunnels, both real and simulated, and is now vice president for strategic fluid design and simulation at Altair, a global tech company that makes simulation and AI software. Altair’s customers include massive automakers that would be thrilled if airflow could protect both windshields and the delicate sensors on self-driving cars.
> “From an aerodynamic standpoint, I’ve done a lot of studies on contamination of sensors, especially for autonomous vehicles,” Golsch said. “And I think most everybody’s given up on trying to influence what happens at the vehicle level for dust and particles and rain.”
> Consider raindrops. They’re about the size and weight of a larger insect, but nobody thinks fewer raindrops hit our windshields these days. Any forces that cleared our windshield of bugs would presumably do the same for rain and road debris, Golsch said.
> To be sure, one element of modern auto design could be reducing bug spatter. Windshields today often have a lower slope than the more-vertical front windows of yesteryear, and while the broader shift to SUVs and trucks with bigger, steeper windshields will negate some of that, it might reduce splats for people who are driving similar vehicles.
> “If the windshield was laid back slightly more than another windshield, that bug may have a chance of just skipping off and going up over the windshield rather than hitting the windshield,” Golsch said. “It might be a glancing blow at the last second rather than a splat.”
> But we also saw 60 percent declines in insects between 2004 and 2021 in a British study from the Kent Wildlife Trust, which built on a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds effort in which thousands of people used “splatometers” to measure bug splatters on license plates, which aren’t much affected by aerodynamic advances elsewhere.
To everyone replying “aerodynamics”, I’ve had the same car for about 9 years now and the drive along the 5 from Bay Area to LA feels like there’s fewer bugs on my windshield (granted not recorded diligently for scientific purposes but whereas before I’d need to scrub the windshield at least once halfway these days I can drive all the way and still don’t need a wash at the end)
Same goes for the argument that bugs have evolved to migrate away from the roads - the 5 has been a busy thruway for a long time with lots of cars and trucks.
The article is short but says scientists have clear data that populations have plummeted and the larger vehicle consumer trend + more people on the road means that there’s fewer bugs to encounter per windshield on top of that.
Also, the "bugs evolve away" would need evolutionary pressure being involved. But the explanation I got was the available biomass for bugs is such that any chunk of bugs killed on the road was easily filled by other bugs eating their lunch and procreating.
> Also, the "bugs evolve away" would need evolutionary pressure being involved
I do not claim that evolution is the reason for the reduction in dead bugs, but if "go near road" has a increased risk of death due to automobiles, there absolutely is selective pressure to not "go near road". Bugs that get killed by cars don't procreate (again) after all.
Yes but the pressure is weaker than one might intuitively guess. There are billions of bugs. Even near roads, very few of them are going to be hit by cars, comparatively. Near roads there often are ditches with some water or moisture, making an environment otherwise beneficial for bugs.
Also, decreased road side windshield bug smashing coincides with measured loss of insect biomass:
> Disputing that feels more and more like disputing global warming being a thing.
There's a reason I started my comment with "I do not claim that evolution is the reason for the reduction in dead bugs". I was just nitpicking and not trying to be the devil's advocate.
Also note that "species are evolving to adapt to XYZ" really means "everything that can't deal with XYZ is dying". If the ecosystem just doesn't have any species that can deal with XYZ, then that part of the ecosystem just dies.
What if, with more cars and bigger windshields, we're just grabbing less and less of these bugs due to more of them being killed by other cars / trucks?
The environment around those roads contains millions of other insects. The amount killed by cars is a tiny percentage. That would obscure any affect from the small increase in automobiles or their windshields.
> To everyone replying “aerodynamics”, I’ve had the same car for about 9 years now and the drive along the 5 from Bay Area to LA feels like there’s fewer bugs on my windshield (granted not recorded diligently for scientific purposes but whereas before I’d need to scrub the windshield at least once halfway these days I can drive all the way and still don’t need a wash at the end)
Hasn’t California had extremely climate events over the last decade (wildfires, ongoing drought)? Given that bugs tend to be sensitive to air quality, this would likely local population decline which would then lead to the effect you’ve observed.
I welcome anyone to come to Prince Edward Island and enjoy the many, many mosquitos and midges our Island has to offer. They can be heard as small “pops” while driving.
A boom of one particular species is not necessarily indicative of a healthy ecosystem. We don't welcome algal blooms as signs of life bouncing back; rather, they are brutally disruptive to ecosystems. They leave mass death in their wake. Without a closer study of which species you're observing (they might be human-borne invasive species after all), it's not really easy to say if what you're seeing is healthy at all. And the timescales are important. This year or this decade might be a boom and 20 years from now they've managed to deplete their environment of resources and crash.
Yeah, I certainly don't doubt that there are global changes going on, but that particular drive along I-5 is confounded by many other local variables.
I too notice changes in the amount of bugs having driven that route periodically for about 30 years. Due to economic and weather conditions over decades, there are very obvious changes in whether you are driving by grassland, irrigated crops and orchards, defunct and desiccated crops and orchards, or graded and developed human environments. The road has also widened and gotten much more traffic.
The general trend is more human presence year over year, but the agricultural activity is more cyclic. As I understand it, these areas are only viable to irrigate in wet years, because the senior water rights are held and used much further north and east along the CA-99 corridor. In droughts, these more recently developed farms dry up first.
It's also of course very seasonal, with bug populations booming and then disappearing much like wild flowers and migrating bird flocks along the same route. In the heaviest bug carnage periods, driving this section of I-5 can be like driving through the US midwest during a grasshopper or cicada boom.
Same tests have been run on licence plates. As they have remained in a similar position for decades, aerodynamics is clearly not the major contributing factor.
> Same goes for the argument that bugs have evolved to migrate away from the roads
There are many studies in all kind of environments, even in the middle of the woods, in natural reserves; insects are going down both in term of diversity and numbers everywhere
NY state has a long running study where on July 15th every year they would put up a super bright lighthouse bulb in the middle of the woods and put it over a tarp. After they night they'd weigh the physical mass of insect life that had come to the light, and died, overnight.
I forget the exact %, but they'd seen a 50 or 60 percent reduction in mass since the 70's, some depressingly high number.
I don't think this would stop anyone from using the evolution argument, since in their mind this would just show that they evolved to not fly towards the deadly light.
What about a thousand lit streets and a million cars every night swashing bugs? What about night lights helping predators see the bugs to weed out those light lovers?
I’m not saying these are true. But your response lacked imagination :)
I actually find it rather interesting how many people here, in a forum I generally assume to be better informed than elsewhere, seem wholly unaware of the dramatic decrease in insects over the last few decades.
People who think they know better are more likely to comment than those who will simply say "huh, interesting!" You will often get a somewhat biased set of comments.
I also find it rather interesting to see talks about insect decline while it's only one part of the larger issue, rated by some as important as the climate crisis: the biodiversity crisis. Dramatic decreases are happening for way more species than just insects.
I mean, hop into any threat remotely related to COVID and you'll see people come out in swarms of common science denial.
Just because people might be knowledgeable about certain technologies doesn't make them knowledgeable about anything else. In fact I'd argue that it heavily biases them to making more mistakes in other fields, especially considering that many tech problems are 'solved' by going to a search engine -- that's not a good way to do science.
The last time this was discussed I found some articles showing that the more boxy and angular windows of older vehicles were less likely to have bugs smashed on them. This is why these studies often use license plate splatters to get a better count -- that really hasn't changed.
> some articles showing that the more boxy and angular windows of older vehicles were less likely to have bugs smashed on them
Do you mean "more likely"?
> This is why these studies often use license plate splatters to get a better count -- that really hasn't changed
Do you claim the amount of license plate splatters remains consistent today as, say, 30 years ago, or some other time frame? I think this claim really needs to be sourced, can you produce these studies you allude to? Thanks
No, I absolutely meant "less likely". The bugs don't hit as often against the old vehicles. The older boxy vehicles were more likely to push the insect away, while the modern aerodynamic vehicles allowed the bug to hit the windshield more frequently. I'll see if I can find the study, I don't have it handy at the moment.
As for the license plates, they are no more aerodynamic than they were 30 years ago, which makes them a better source for insect measurement.
> As for the license plates, they are no more aerodynamic than they were 30 years ago, which makes them a better source for insect measurement.
I agree with this, but not the claim that there are studies showing this number is consistent with the past. The linked discussion also seems to imply that sampling rate corresponds with the decline in insect populations, unless I missed something.
I've not said that they (bug splatters) are consistent with the past. Perhaps my wording wasn't the best, but I was trying to say that the aerodynamic properties of a license plate have not changed.
I see, "that really hasn't changed" was a statement on aerodynamics and not volume of insect collisions. Thanks, I agree with what you're saying, good tidbit about the more aerodynamic cars leading to lower probability of insect survival.
I’ve noticed the same with snails. When I was a child in the 90s, the sidewalks were full of snails, and during a 10 minute stroll, I’d often find tens of small snails.
Today I find 1 or 2 snails after rainfall, if at all.
Fireflies for me. I live in Italy and between the vineyards it was full of them. Now I occasionally see one or two. It's a pity not only because it is a concrete sign of habitat degradation, but it was also mesmerizing to walk and have them filing around you. Something my kids won't experience.
Between two long trips to Italy in my childhood, the fireflies we could see from the terrace of a small B&B we stayed at in a small village not far from Genoa is one of my most enduring memories.
I'm sure it's a regional impact on different types of creatures. I don't notice windshield bugs but my back patio in the city gets dozens of snails after every rainfall to this day.
You can come here and take away all the snails you want. It's impossible to walk around at night without stepping on them, and they have utterly destroyed my garden. I've never seen a crop of kale or broccoli fail in 30 years until this year.
I guess whatever reason it is local, because last summer drove from Lisbon to Berlin and this summer drove from Berlin to Milan and every time I stopped at a gas station I had to clean the car because boy did it have A LOT of dead bugs.
Completely anecdotal, but this does seem to be a North American issue, I did a two week roadtrip through Croatia this year and I had to stop just to clean bugs off the car more often than stopping just for gas. I've done quite a few roadtrips in America and never once had to stop just to clean bugs off the windshield.
Yeah, I do quite a lot of road trips and that is always a pain. Thankfully all gas stations even have the bucket of water and the scraper to clean off the bugs.
It's possible that it's happening more in NA, but the article started with a research made on Denmark roads 1996-2017 with a 80-97% fall of insect splats in the period.
Anecdotally, I hardly had to clean my windscreen when I was living in a city. I'm living in a small town with fields all around it now and I never have a clean windscreen anymore. However nothing like the one in the first picture of the article. That's how my front license plate looks like.
Probably a large part is due to the increased frequency of cars inside broadly the same volume of road space. Assuming that you have the same number of bugs per m^3 and the same number of bugs entering per m^3 per minute as before, then bugs splattered per car will change in inverse proportion to cars per minute.
I think you grossly overestimate how much space does car infrastructure hold in relation to literally millions of km^2 of free space around it. Assuming your observation is right its impact would be minuscule.
But we're not discussing the free space around roads, I'm talking about the width of the road X length of road X 2.5m where the bugs get splatted. If there are more cars travelling in that space, fewer bugs will be splatted by each car even if the level overall remains the same.
I see what you mean. This still seems far fetched especially when taking into account rural and remote places where even doubling the traffic would mean passing 1 car every 10 minutes.
It's partly due to mowing alongside highways and medians. That is primarily motivated by keeping the number of small animals down, reducing fire risk, and other reasons, but fewer tall grasses means drastically fewer bugs. Also, pesticides and general global insect decline. This is not primarily due to aerodynamics.
It's smart to keep it maintained for safety reasons, but that doesn't explain the full story - there's bound to be plenty of unkempt grassland and whatnot further away from the road where insect populations SHOULD be thriving.
It's partly due to mowing alongside highways and medians. ... fewer tall grasses means drastically fewer bugs
This is way too general: in some countries and alongside specific highways, the state of grasslands is actually really good. Like: good enough to grow rare orchids and having >10 or >20 plant species/square meter. Because of correct mowing regimes for that vegetation type.
It also lacks nuance because as explained in another comment already: not mowing at all can make things worse. Which brings us to the tall grasses: meadows featuring a lot of tall grasses but hardly any other flowering plants have can have much less insects that meadows with a coverage of only like 20% grasses where the rest is taken by a diversity of flowering plants.
I bought my first motorcycle in 2004 and my 2nd in 2007. I rode 45k km with the first one over these 3 years (mostly on my island) and 80k km with the 2nd one between 2007-2015. I can confirm that the amount of bugs crashing on my helmet's visor is definitely less. I used to clean it after riding for an hour but now I can do 4-5-6h and still have no real need to clean it.
I recently went back to my hometown in the USA after a couple of decades away. I was struck by how there we're almost none of the fireflies, grasshoppers and assorted other bugs I'd chased as a kid. I chalked it up to being a nostalgic old man, but I've never shaken that feeling that something is definitely not right.
My kids are 10 and 11 and the saw their first grasshopper last summer. They were everywhere when I was a kid. Christmas beetles are a rare find these days. I haven't seen a Bogon moth in years.
Fireflies (we call them lightning bugs in the south) fluctuate yearly. Some years there are very few of them. It’s always been like that from talking to relatives.
Sad and frightening to hear. Funny though but here in southern Sweden and Denmark I've had the opposite experience.
Sometime around 2018 I started noticing a lot of fireflies, in a park in the middle of a major city. Which was not normal to me. Since then I've noticed them almost every summer.
And on vacation in Denmark it's the same thing, the air is alive with life. It has its downsides too because there are more ticks than ever too.
A lot of cities here have started leaving grassy areas uncut, they just cut a path through it for people to walk on. Also Copenhagen has started building "walls" of twigs, encased in a wire mesh. These walls act as safe havens for all sorts of insects and small creatures.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. On hot summer evenings the fireflies were spectacular. The cooler summers of New England meant many fewer fireflies. But, in the past couple of years I have noticed more of them where I now live.
I noticed it in my grandmother's backyard, so that variable was controlled. Then I noticed it pretty much in all my old haunts. Sample size N = 1, etc.
Anecdotal, but I was pleased to see fireflies returning after not seeing them post puberty. Not denying general trends at all but it makes me wonder what is the cause of counter examples. Maybe more neighbors not overgrooming their lawns or the local park's native species garden?
Swallows. That and the fact wild animal populations swing widely to extremes sometimes. I have been paying close attention to swallows in recent few years and the numbers of them as well as the bugs they eat are skyrocketing in my area. When I moved to the area it was essentially empty field a couple hundred meters from anything. The farmer owning it converted a bit in the middle into residential building plots, a road was built, electricity hooked up etc. Most of the people that buy those plots do it as an investment so they don't do anything to them. I have observed over last 10 years how nature took over those plots. Hay that grows and is not mowed accumulates and besides being a fire hazard provides an environment for birds to nest in. Wild trees have grown to the point one wouldn't recognise it was a field a decade ago. I regularly have hedgehogs, hares, deer, lots of all kinds of birds (including a golden Eagle once). Every year there are huge numbers of swallows come in the spring. As of last 2 years there have been moose and even wild wolves. Yes, wolves, in a middle of Europe in 2022. I have photos of their dinner I once found in addition to other info.
People don't realise nature is very resilient and it will move into every area that is not polluted with toxins. Even with toxins or radiation (like the famous Chernobyl exclusion zone) nature evolves to deal with it.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadI think this is real, I'm traveling and borrowed a relatives car which is much lower profile and more sleek than my old Jeep. I was driving through the countryside the other day and there were a lot of critters flying about, I was surprised that often, they'd sort of just get "pushed" over the top of the car. Not sure what happened to them after that but yeah!
> Not sure what happened to them after that but yeah!
One thing I did find is that for aerodynamic purposes the one place cars want turbulence is right behind them in their wake to disrupt a vacuum.
So I expect those bugs get smashed into the ground or even sucked into the radiator of any close behind cars as that air seems quite stagnant right behind a car.
[0] https://eu.seacoastonline.com/story/special/2017/01/09/cars-...
[0] https://youtu.be/RD77nyoEyug?t=112
This could also be a function of bugs flying less over busy roads, and decreasing in volume at the places where most cars drive. If so, that would explain the precipitous fall in splats. I do not think that this is very far-fetched, since most animals instinctively begin to shun areas when predators are introduced.
I got a TD5 though, so a bit more modern ;)
I only have to look outside at my neighbors winter wheat field to find one of the reasons. It’s been sprayed 3 times already this fall after sowing.
> But when we called experts in the arcane art of computational fluid dynamics, they sounded skeptical. Yes, today’s sleek sedans can have half the drag of the land boats that ruled the road just a generation or two ago. But that improved airflow won’t do much for a bug.
> For starters, many aero improvements happen on the rear of the car rather than the bug-hitting front. Consider the optimally aerodynamic teardrop shape, with its blunt, round front and long, sleek tail. But more importantly, it’s just surprisingly difficult to use air to push a bug out of the way of an onrushing Buick.
> If it were possible to design a bug- and debris-proof car, then Kevin Golsch probably would have done it by now. An auto-industry veteran, Golsch has spent decades around wind tunnels, both real and simulated, and is now vice president for strategic fluid design and simulation at Altair, a global tech company that makes simulation and AI software. Altair’s customers include massive automakers that would be thrilled if airflow could protect both windshields and the delicate sensors on self-driving cars.
> “From an aerodynamic standpoint, I’ve done a lot of studies on contamination of sensors, especially for autonomous vehicles,” Golsch said. “And I think most everybody’s given up on trying to influence what happens at the vehicle level for dust and particles and rain.”
> Consider raindrops. They’re about the size and weight of a larger insect, but nobody thinks fewer raindrops hit our windshields these days. Any forces that cleared our windshield of bugs would presumably do the same for rain and road debris, Golsch said.
> To be sure, one element of modern auto design could be reducing bug spatter. Windshields today often have a lower slope than the more-vertical front windows of yesteryear, and while the broader shift to SUVs and trucks with bigger, steeper windshields will negate some of that, it might reduce splats for people who are driving similar vehicles.
> “If the windshield was laid back slightly more than another windshield, that bug may have a chance of just skipping off and going up over the windshield rather than hitting the windshield,” Golsch said. “It might be a glancing blow at the last second rather than a splat.”
> But we also saw 60 percent declines in insects between 2004 and 2021 in a British study from the Kent Wildlife Trust, which built on a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds effort in which thousands of people used “splatometers” to measure bug splatters on license plates, which aren’t much affected by aerodynamic advances elsewhere.
Same goes for the argument that bugs have evolved to migrate away from the roads - the 5 has been a busy thruway for a long time with lots of cars and trucks.
The article is short but says scientists have clear data that populations have plummeted and the larger vehicle consumer trend + more people on the road means that there’s fewer bugs to encounter per windshield on top of that.
I do not claim that evolution is the reason for the reduction in dead bugs, but if "go near road" has a increased risk of death due to automobiles, there absolutely is selective pressure to not "go near road". Bugs that get killed by cars don't procreate (again) after all.
Link in Swedish, not sure how scientific this is but…
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/mQQWbO/algarna-overlist...
> "plural moose or (dated, rare) mooses or (non-standard, jocular) meese" [0]
[0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/moose
https://youtu.be/CafPNEWnDhk
Also, decreased road side windshield bug smashing coincides with measured loss of insect biomass:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
Disputing that feels more and more like disputing global warming being a thing.
There's a reason I started my comment with "I do not claim that evolution is the reason for the reduction in dead bugs". I was just nitpicking and not trying to be the devil's advocate.
Hasn’t California had extremely climate events over the last decade (wildfires, ongoing drought)? Given that bugs tend to be sensitive to air quality, this would likely local population decline which would then lead to the effect you’ve observed.
I welcome anyone to come to Prince Edward Island and enjoy the many, many mosquitos and midges our Island has to offer. They can be heard as small “pops” while driving.
I too notice changes in the amount of bugs having driven that route periodically for about 30 years. Due to economic and weather conditions over decades, there are very obvious changes in whether you are driving by grassland, irrigated crops and orchards, defunct and desiccated crops and orchards, or graded and developed human environments. The road has also widened and gotten much more traffic.
The general trend is more human presence year over year, but the agricultural activity is more cyclic. As I understand it, these areas are only viable to irrigate in wet years, because the senior water rights are held and used much further north and east along the CA-99 corridor. In droughts, these more recently developed farms dry up first.
It's also of course very seasonal, with bug populations booming and then disappearing much like wild flowers and migrating bird flocks along the same route. In the heaviest bug carnage periods, driving this section of I-5 can be like driving through the US midwest during a grasshopper or cicada boom.
There are many studies in all kind of environments, even in the middle of the woods, in natural reserves; insects are going down both in term of diversity and numbers everywhere
They're being evolved away by pollution
I forget the exact %, but they'd seen a 50 or 60 percent reduction in mass since the 70's, some depressingly high number.
I’m not saying these are true. But your response lacked imagination :)
See also this tale: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2376002/
I see. It just sounded like you were dismissive of that one metric based on this part of your original response:
> I also find it rather interesting to see talks about insect decline while it's only one part of the larger issue.
Which is why I asked.
Just because people might be knowledgeable about certain technologies doesn't make them knowledgeable about anything else. In fact I'd argue that it heavily biases them to making more mistakes in other fields, especially considering that many tech problems are 'solved' by going to a search engine -- that's not a good way to do science.
Do you mean "more likely"?
> This is why these studies often use license plate splatters to get a better count -- that really hasn't changed
Do you claim the amount of license plate splatters remains consistent today as, say, 30 years ago, or some other time frame? I think this claim really needs to be sourced, can you produce these studies you allude to? Thanks
As for the license plates, they are no more aerodynamic than they were 30 years ago, which makes them a better source for insect measurement.
Edit: relevant discussion from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31275879
I agree with this, but not the claim that there are studies showing this number is consistent with the past. The linked discussion also seems to imply that sampling rate corresponds with the decline in insect populations, unless I missed something.
Today I find 1 or 2 snails after rainfall, if at all.
I collect snails from my garden to eat and numbers are fairly similar despite my occasionally trying to control them with pellets some years.
Similarly with the original article I only got half way down but clearly it's more to do with cars than insect numbers.
Every summer evening the house and surrounding garden were filled with fireflies, it was mesmerizing.
Thanks for making me remember this :)
Anecdotally, I hardly had to clean my windscreen when I was living in a city. I'm living in a small town with fields all around it now and I never have a clean windscreen anymore. However nothing like the one in the first picture of the article. That's how my front license plate looks like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
There are many areas that have cars but aren't in the middle of cities or in areas with high traffic.
Oh, I know. It's not looking good for bugs globally because of a lot of reasons.
This is way too general: in some countries and alongside specific highways, the state of grasslands is actually really good. Like: good enough to grow rare orchids and having >10 or >20 plant species/square meter. Because of correct mowing regimes for that vegetation type.
It also lacks nuance because as explained in another comment already: not mowing at all can make things worse. Which brings us to the tall grasses: meadows featuring a lot of tall grasses but hardly any other flowering plants have can have much less insects that meadows with a coverage of only like 20% grasses where the rest is taken by a diversity of flowering plants.
Insects that spend time on the open road have less chance of survival and reproduction than those that stay in their natural habitat.
I saw very few last year. I saw zero this year. I'm glad I got to experience them before they were all gone, I guess.
Sometime around 2018 I started noticing a lot of fireflies, in a park in the middle of a major city. Which was not normal to me. Since then I've noticed them almost every summer.
And on vacation in Denmark it's the same thing, the air is alive with life. It has its downsides too because there are more ticks than ever too.
A lot of cities here have started leaving grassy areas uncut, they just cut a path through it for people to walk on. Also Copenhagen has started building "walls" of twigs, encased in a wire mesh. These walls act as safe havens for all sorts of insects and small creatures.
Gotta say it's a bit scary. Together with air temperature in Bosnia being 27 degrees celsius, definitely rings some bad alarms.
Totally a gut feeling, but those can be correct often.
People don't realise nature is very resilient and it will move into every area that is not polluted with toxins. Even with toxins or radiation (like the famous Chernobyl exclusion zone) nature evolves to deal with it.