Posted on 02/11/2019 1:52:51 AM PST by LibWhacker
The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.
More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.
The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.
Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: “The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet.
“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” they write. “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Understood. It -2 degrees in Moorhead this morning. Lol!
Well done.
It’s the Goebbel Warming Prize.
Lucky you.
Anybody need bugs? Come to Texas. You can take all you want. Free. Free. Free. Free.
I lived in Fargo for 35 years. I feel your pain.
I thought they wanted us to eat bugs.
I’m good with it. But looking at my windshield and grill after driving down the highway in the Midwest I see No lack of the pesky things
Yup stinkbugs....had one land on my shoulder yesterday.
At least they seem to be peaceful docile friendly critters i usually scoot them onto a piece of paper and blow them out the back door.
Probably see the same guy 3 days later back inside..i should mark them with a sharpie to find out...
Same here. I'd check right now but the snow is falling at the moment. While I'm shoveling it later I'll keep note of the insects I see.
I have definitely seen fewer insects splatted on the windshield. Thirty years ago, I would wipe down the windshield at every gas stop in the summer. No need now.
Fireflies are doing well in NJ but the first ones are coming out a month earlier than they used to, still in small numbers.
Honeybee numbers, way down. When I was a child a clover lawn would have a couple bees every square foot. Now you can walk barefoot without looking.
We used to have toads. My guess is that the deer population and the destruction of the woodland floor is responsible, rather than insecticides.
Yea it was magical...like out of a fantasy movie.
Long discussion on SlashDot
Everyone has confirmation bias, and all sides have people that will overlook the sins of their fellow compatriots because the ends really do justify the means. Take an politically polarized subject and you will find someone calling for criminal charges, fines, imprisonment, and even the death of those disagreeing with them. There is no faster proof of an unscientific moron than when someone trots out one of these following fallacies...
Consensus = Truth/Fact/Proof.
Correlation = Causation.
Gatekeeping qualifications... Only a certified, licensed, or recognized group/institution/team are allowed to have an opinion... except skeptics because their opinions are invalidated by the professionals that I happen to agree with.
Gaslighting people for not believing in something.
Asking for skeptics to prove a negative, or asking that they provide scientific evidence for their position when the evidence being unable to convince them is the evidence.
Acceptance of controvertible evidence, scare or abundant, as good enough to be proof as though it were incontrovertible evidence.
I’m going to plow snow in a bit. I might spray on some Deep Woods Off just in case.
They’re being eaten by the Venezuelans.
Pretty breathless.
It’s the Guardian.
Don’t even bother.
From Wikipedia—
Estimates of the total number of insect species or those within specific orders are often highly variable. Globally, averages of these predictions estimate there are around 1.5 million beetle species and 5.5 million insect species with around 1 million insect species currently found and described.[42]
A pie chart of described eukaryote species, showing just over half of these to be insects
Between 950,000–1,000,000 of all described species are insects, so over 50% of all described eukaryotes (1.8 million) are insects (see illustration). With only 950,000 known non-insects, if the actual number of insects is 5.5 million, they may represent over 80% of the total, and with only about 20,000 new species of all organisms being described each year, most insect species likely will remain undescribed, unless species descriptions greatly increase in rate. Of the 24 orders of insects, four dominate in terms of numbers of described species, with at least 670,000 species included in Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera and Lepidoptera.
As of 2017, at least 66 insect species extinctions had been recorded in the previous 500 years, which generally occurred on oceanic islands.
So there have been 66 species gone extinct in 500 years. Now we are to believe there are at least 1,000,000 and maybe 5,000,000 species and 40% (400,000-2,000,000) that are threatened in the next 80 years. What nonsense.
Here in SE Virginia, we have a surplus of mosquitoes and “noseeums.” They can have ours.
Only now to find out it's because of fat Al Gore and his 10,000 sq ft home, frequent jet flights, huge SUV for daily driver, and flatulence from massive quantity of food he eats.
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