FRESH

Hacker News

Home

A looming 'insect apocalypse' could endanger global food supplies

50 points by Brajeshwar

by WillAdams

0 subcomment

Habitat seems to play a large role --- I've always raked leaves and piled up sticks which fall from trees in our yard into a compost pile in a shady area, which I've been careful to disturb as little as possible from from fall through spring, since fireflies lay eggs in such piles, and their larvae mature in such conditions.
My kids would invite their friends over on nice summer evenings to see fireflies, since none of the McMansion neighborhoods had nearly as many.

by warpspin

0 subcomment

While I support protecting insects and I literally see how their amounts decreased since I've been a child, I wished people would stop the alarmist "food supply in danger" headline. It's not, at least not because of the insects. Most of our food supply is not dependent on wild insects, instead people usually pay for cultivated bees to pollinate their plants. Business is too serious to rely on circumstance.
The real problem is that loads of the wild plant life depends on wild insects, and we do not want to lose that.
Don't get me wrong. Neither I deny climate change, nor do I say we should destroy nature as much as we do.
But we need to start talking the truth instead of invented talking points, or people won't take science serious anymore... even more than they already ignore it.

by PaulKeeble

1 subcomments

We keep getting these warnings, for decades now insect biomass has been in sharp decline and so far we have done very little to try and reverse it. At some point ecosystems are going to go into collapse including ones critical for our food chain.

by cryptonector

0 subcomment

^Fpesticide
Nothing here in this thread.
We're overusing pesticides. It's a problem. We should stop.
Here in the Texas hill country we don't have much agricultural use of pesticides, but out in East Texas we do. In the hill country I see plenty of insects.

by Retric

3 subcomments

The windshield test is somewhat deceptive as improved aerodynamics plays a role, but the difference is still quite noticeable when driving around in a classic car.

by CheeseFromLidl

0 subcomment

I wonder what the influence of wind is on survival of flying insects. Over here - W. Eu. - we’ve seen storms on a monthly base now. I don’t think the energy balance of foraging adds up if there’s too much wind.

by Helmut10001

0 subcomment

This is an even bigger issue than climate change because the intensity of the change is even harder to notice. I still see glimpses of biodiversity loss all around me, and it scares me.

by jmclnx

3 subcomments

Plus I heard somewhere song birds are declining due to this apocalypse.
But mosquitoes are not declining, the one insect I wish would decline real fast :)

by acessoproibido

0 subcomment

Archive Link:
https://archive.ph/mpOkK

by mschuster91

3 subcomments

There's one reason not mentioned - habitat loss, be it caused by urbanization [1] or by land consolidation ("Flurbereinigung") [2][3].
It used to be the case that rural areas were splintered into many small farms, with bushes being used to mark borders, and these bushes in turn provided harbor and food for insects and cover for small rodents and other mammals.
"Thanks" to mechanisation however, which prefers large uniform land because thats easier for ever larger machines to process, a lot of these splinters were consolidated together and so there is nothing left to support any wildlife, be it insects or small animals, which in turn also causes bird populations to drop - when there are no mice because they don't have any place to build their nests, the birds don't have food as well.
[1] https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/...
[2] https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/flugbegleiter-umfrage-...
[3] https://naturschutz-initiative.de/aktuell/neuigkeiten/landwi...

by Tanoc

0 subcomment

A large portion of the habitat loss I suspect isn't actually lawns, which have been decreasing in size as suburbs have been increasing in density. Many suburbs built since the 1990s are so tightly packed that you can't fit a car between the houses to get to the back yard, and the back yard itself is two thirds of the footprint of the house itself.
What I suspect is driving it is actually pavement and development ready property. The footprint for pavement for a building is usually three times the footprint for the building itself. This includes parking lots, connecting roads, sidewalks, and even the concrete slabs needed to place things like air conditioning units or tall signage. That pavement denies undergrowth and pioneer species that small insects thrive on seasonally.
It also denies water runoff. Without the water being able to saturate the ground it gets redirected to elsewhere. There's several issues with that, including unnatural subsidence and runoff pollution. The ground has some ability to naturally filter out small amounts of pollution as water seeps down through the soil and to the water table. But if there's pavement all of that water torrents to a single area which gets oversaturated. The soil can't hold any more, and so the water is rejected and pools above the surface. This is why you see so many puddles at the edges of parking lots or road intersections. This allows the pollutants to concentrate, and when the ground finally does absorb the excess water it pulls in those pollutants all the way down to the water table as they're in too high a concentration for the soil to capture.
And development ready property is an actual serious problem. Companies buy real estate and then deforest and regrade it in anticipation of someone eventually buying it. They don't have a buyer lined up, they're just expecting someone to eventually want to settle there, be it a business or a home. In the meantime they keep the land stripped, with no trees or shrubbery, no native plants, and sometimes without even grass. There are places I've seen that were turned into development ready property that have sat hollow and scarred for twenty years.
Even in places where there's native plants, undergrowth, and pioneer species that overcome this, the continual removal of trees makes it almost impossible for animals to stay there for long. Part of this is that with the heat island effect of nearby pavement you get constant blowing lateral winds. Winds which birds can't use as updrafts, winds which blow away rodent ground nests, and winds which scatter colonies of insects. But even if they survive all of that, the constant grooming of the land to keep it "presentable" means zero turn mowers rolling over all of that and destroying it, irrigation being dug that drains naturally forming ponds that house insects and amphibians, and the turfing that chokes out everything with fast growing non-native grasses.

by exe34

0 subcomment

I moved to the countryside in the last year. it's night and day as compared to the nearby town that I lived in, when it comes to insects and spiders. I constantly find corpses of insects on the window sill and the spiders are chunky, given how well they feed.

by metalman

0 subcomment

it will likely come as a double wammy, polinator/benificial/comensual insects will be reduced past self sustaining number and destructive bugs will increase to uncontrolable levels. plants have been managing this for millions of years, needing polinators and preditory insects, but fighting destructive and seed eating bugs the fight is older in animals, where there is a direct connection in the amount of abrasive silica in plants, and the development of teath and dental enamil is parellel in the fossil record we humans, fucking with shit big time is not going to go good, nature negotiates in ways and time frames that quite clearly exclude our direct partisipation, with nature ready, at any time, for a complete reset.

by onetokeoverthe

0 subcomment

[dead]

0 subcomment

by terminalshort

4 subcomments

> The second driver is habitat loss — the inexorable creep of urbanization, deforestation and sterile suburban lawns, which host fewer and less-diverse ranges of insects.
I don't buy this as a cause of a global decline, though. In many areas things have gone in the opposite direction. The Appalachian mountains were clear cut in the 1800s and now are back to forest. If this theory is correct, I would expect there to have been a massive increase in insect populations on the east coast.