'Hyperalarming' study shows massive insect loss.

[Cattledog]

By Ben Guarino
October 15
Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, and the forest’s insect-eating animals have gone missing, too.

In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees had decreased by 45 percent. In places where long-term insect data are available, mainly in Europe, insect numbers are plummeting. A study last year showed a 76 percent decrease in flying insects in the past few decades in German nature preserves.

The latest report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that this startling loss of insect abundance extends to the Americas. The study’s authors implicate climate change in the loss of tropical invertebrates.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming-study-shows-massive-insect-loss/?utm_term=.3472a86b95ab

[sandensea]

1. But Heaven forbid Monsatan lose a single penny in share value.

Can't have that, don'tchaknow.

[bronxiteforever]

2. Kick and recommend for visibility

[donkeypoofed]

3. Yeah, thanks Monsanto. You realize you're dooming yourselves, too, right?

Fuck you, Monsanto, fuck you.

[NNadir]

4. It's always nice to have a bogeyman, but I suspect bogeyman hating will do absolutely nothing...

...to address the real problem.

In general, newspaper reports are always a little off the mark when discussing science; I'm certainly developing a sense that one cannot get a journalism degree if one has actually passed a college level science course.

This said, I think the newspaper reporter may have picked up on the real crux of the issue in the rain forest about which what the paper being addressed apparently is.

The newspaper reporter writes:

Lister and Garcia attribute this crash to climate. In the same 40-year period as the arthropod crash, the average high temperature in the rain forest increased by 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures in the tropics stick to a narrow band. The invertebrates that live there, likewise, are adapted to these temperatures and fare poorly outside them; bugs cannot regulate their internal heat.

Maybe the problem is that self satisfied but overly bourgeois people who spend lots of time with bogeymen and very little with science books thought that the real environmental problem on earth was to displace nuclear energy with solar and wind, and not fossil fuels with nuclear. So we bet the entire planet on solar and wind.

The latest results on the huge investment - on a multi-trillion dollar scale - in so called "renewable energy" are in, and are written in the atmosphere: We hit over 411 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere this past May.

As of 2016, combined, solar and wind produced less than 10 exajoules of energy out of the 576 the world was consuming then, less than 2% of world energy demand in the percent talk so called "renewable energy" advocates love so much. The WEO report for 2018 will be out next month, and having followed them for roughly 20 years, I predict that they will show that energy conservation is non-existent - energy demand will rise - and further that the solar and wind industry combined will not match the growth in the use of dangerous fossil fuels.

There are plenty of bogeymen in the real tale, I think, but mostly I think we can find them by looking in the mirror.

If Monsanto disbanded tomorrow, insect populations and the populations of many other species will still be threatened, because we continue to do nothing about climate change other than to look for bogeyman.

The first step to not being a bogeyman seeker might be to open a science book.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

[Farmer-Rick]

7. Monsanto is not a mere bogeyman.They are a suicidal out of control, corrupted capitalist corporation

let lose on the planet with deadly dangerous poisons to spill throughout our environment with no accountability except for their own profit.

Yeah global warming is destroying the planet too but there's plenty of blame to go around especially if you are looking for the destruction of the planet's insects.

But hey, coming to the defense of Monsanto seems to be all the rage much like Russian trolling.

[mountain grammy]

16. You nailed it there.

and not that I entirely disagree either, but he is all in for nukes anytime anywhere.

[NNadir]

18. Exactly...

...and I back up what I say with data.

I note that I started my adult life as a dumb-ass anti-nuke "renewables will save us" cretin, this almost half a century ago.

Then I learned how to read, and read widely.

I make no secret that I believe that anti-nukism is a very, very, very, very, very dangerous and ignorant fact of life, and I appalled, absolutely appalled, by its popularity on my end of the political spectrum.

And yes, I'm too old and too educated to accept what clearly are delusional pipe dreams.

We hit 411 ppm of carbon dioxide this year in the planetary atmosphere. Maybe you didn't hear about it.

I never tire of saying that we just spent in the last ten years two trillion dollars on this delusional pipe dream, on wind and solar alone, 2.2 trillion to be more precise and reference the most recent reports. Both industries shut down several times a day, depending on the weather, the solar industry because of the existence of something called "night." No one notices, because they're trivial and useless. Prattling on about them, as if we "needed" them - we don't - is frankly, just as you report me saying (and I say it often) delusional.

As I often repeat: It didn't work; it isn't working; and it won't work. The reason is physics.

So called "renewable energy" was in wide use for more than 2,000 years, but was abandoned in the early 19th century because most citizens of the world lived short, miserable, dire lives of poverty even more so today. When it was abandoned, the world population was less than 1 billion. It's more than 7 billion today. I am always interested to find out, who we'd like to nominate to die so we can all live again in this putative "renewable nirvana." The Chinese perhaps? The Indians? They seem particularly disinterested in our bourgeois electric cars powered by solar energy fantasies.

Some people have a fondness for the expansion of poverty. I don't. It's not my liberalism; it may be yours, but not mine.

Frankly, I consider this issue in Energy and the Environment the most important issue before humanity.

You may call it "pimping" but in the current case, but I would consider any other approach, based on what I have learned, to be morally appalling. I'm not one of the people around here whoring for gas, which is precisely what the so called "renewable energy" industry has brought us. Gas, more and more and more of it.

My life is approaching its end, and when I die, I want to do so with a feeling that I at least struggled to become decent. My fierce nuclear advocacy is a part of that. You may find that amusing, but I really don't care what anyone thinks. One must do what one believes to be right.

Stick to watching Coen brothers movies. They're cute; meaningless, but cute. I have something far more important to do.

[mr_lebowski]

19. I like your spirit, man, I hope you don't get me wrong ...

Keep fighting for what you believe in ...

And I respect your obvious degree of expertise, btw ...

[NNadir]

15. I have the full PNAS scientific paper before me.

Nowhere in the entire paper, is the words "Monsanto" mentioned.

Here, for example, is a graphic from the paper:



Here is the caption:

Fig. 5.
Trends in the abundance of canopy arthropods and walking sticks in the Luquillo forest El Verde study area. (A) Linear regression of the total number of canopy arthropods captured per foliage weight sampled at El Verde against the period when the samples were taken. (B) Cubic regression for the total number of canopy arthropods captured per foliage weight sampled against the MnMaxT during the period when the samples were taken. (C) Quasi-Poisson regression of total number of walking sticks vs. the period when the population was sampled. (D) Quasi-Poisson regression of total number of walking sticks vs. the MnMaxT during the period when the population was sampled. The 95% confidence intervals are shown around the best-fit regression lines. For the Poisson regressions, Pr(? is the result of a likelihood-ratio ?2 test of whether the independent variable improves the Poisson model beyond an intercept-only model. P < 0.05 indicates a statistically significant regression

The word "chemicals" does not appear in the text; but the word "pesticides" does. Here is the excerpt of the only place - other than the references - where the words appear:

Research on causal factors has focused on anthropogenic disturbance and pesticides (57, 58). Given its long-term protected status (59), significant human perturbations have been virtually nonexistent within the Luquillo forest since the 1930s, and thus are an unlikely source of invertebrate declines. Due to the ongoing reduction in agriculture and associated farmland, pesticides use in Puerto Rico also fell up to 80% between 1969 and 2012 (SI Appendix, Fig. S7). Most pesticides have half-lives measured in days, not decades (60), making it improbable that, despite precipitous declines in their use, remaining residues are responsible for waning arthropod abundance.

Now, if one took time out to learn some science instead of screaming bullshit paranoid rhetoric about their primitive anti-corporate fantasies, one could clearly see that this is a paper about a serious environmental issue involving, rather than having one's head up one's ass in a Monsanto hate fest, heat.

I've been writing here about science for over a decade, sixteen years in fact.

I am not surprised to hear someone who clearly cares nothing at all about science, but has some kind of angry but highly superficial political agenda that has very little to do with reality spewing it all over an important scientific environmental issues.

However, as a scientist I am uninterested in irrelevant bullshit, particularly paranoid bullshit.

I do note, that Putin, a former KGB agent, worked for many years for the Soviet state, which advertised itself as the primo anti-capitalist organization in the world. When not reading science, I did, in fact read a considerable amount about the tawdry history of the nominally corporate hating Soviet State that Putin used to serve, concluding that the allegory put together by Orwell, animal farm.

Look kiddie. Because someone does buy into paranoid horseshit put forth by someone who is clearly disinterested in science, it doesn't make them a Russian. I don't expect a small mind to understand this, but I do wish people who are clearly disinterested in science would take their rhetoric to the anti-capitalist super-socialist websites on the far, far, far, far left that I'm sure are all over the internet, along with other extremist bullshit website equivalents on the far, far, far, far right.

You would need to know some history to know what Russian trolling might be.

I'm a Democrat, a left of center democrat - one who will plainly confess that I have met with and know Monsanto scientists who actually do not have horns and hoofs and whatever else is in your fantasies. In fact, I would consider many of them as having a high degree of environmental awareness and scientific integrity, as well as a strong interest in feeding other human beings. I believe in a well regulated capitalist state in which the government serves to protect the common resources and respects the tenor of Section 1, the 25th Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads:

Article 25.


(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

You see that part that reads, "...including food?"

The Ag industry is not perfect, and I have profound scientific agreements with some practices. But I also know that without the participation of agricultural scientists the world food supply might only support granola munching "organic food" airheads muttering anti-GMO claptrap with complete indifference to the poor who depend on the world food supply we have.

I'm a Democrat; an old school Democrat; which means I care about the poor more than I care, for example, about Elon Musk's car for billionaires and millionaires, to use one of my favorite examples. But frankly, while I care deeply about the poor, I am proud and happy to say that I care about them in a very different way than say, Leon Trotsky, and I know what Leon Trotsky thought, because I've actually read some the his writings.

They have nothing to do with climate change; nothing to do with science; and nothing, in fact, to do with the real issues in human decency. They're about power and its abuse, and, of course, a disturbing political agenda.

My personal opinion is that you are polluting something, specifically the wonderful science section of a fine political website. There must be plenty of places on this website to cheer for Monsanto hating. Why are you in this forum?.

I think I'll exercise my "ignore" button in this space. I have no use for ignorance.

Bye. Have a wonderful life.

[mr_lebowski]

20. That's fair, but it's also fair to say that you're referencing the PNAS study

Whereas others are referring to the 2014 study referenced elsewhere in the article.

Just because climate change is (for all intents) the only thing responsible for population declines in the particular tropical rain forest(s) studied by PNAS does NOT rule out widespread pesticide use being (at least partly, if not largely) responsible for OTHER insect population declines ... happening elsewhere.

Does it?

Things can have multiple 'causalities', can't they?

Seems to me that DEATH ... would be a phenomenon that's particularly 'varied in it's causes', no?

[NNadir]

22. At the risk of being told I'm "pimping" for Monsanto instead of routinely "pimping" for nuclear...

...energy, I will offer my "pimp" opinion that I am discussing the paper referenced in the news article referenced in the OP.

I am not an expert in any sense of the word in arthropod biology, physiology or ecology. However, as often as is possible, when confronted with an environmental issue which affects the people for whom my pimping is directed - that would be all future generations - I try not to rely on journalists, most of whom mangle science when they try to discuss it, but go to the primary source.

I can do that fairly easily, since I am extremely fortunate to have access to almost all of the world's scientific literature, from which my pimp clarion calls derive.

Now since I have been described as a "pimp" for nuclear energy - about which I am an expert - I might note that I have a significant interest in pimping about climate change, the real object of my pimpery, which is actually, and in the case of the PNAS paper referenced, if one digs deeper, a factor in the PNAS paper to which the news article in the OP refers.

There is evidence that nicotinoid pesticides have played a significant role in colony collapse disorder among bees. This is not entirely surprising since nicotinoid pesticides are designed to kill insects. Of course, if, in some circumstances, no insects were killed at all, this might have an impact on the world food supply, just as the extinction of bees might have an effect on the world food supply. So pesticide use is a legitimate topic for someone who actually knows something about arthropod biology, physiology, ecology etc.

And though this might inspire other people to pimp for balance, I am not about to pimp for any topic about how to address or create balance in pesticide use. I did work in the relatively distant past professionally on agricultural issues, but my work was mostly about genetic modification, which I call "directed evolution" and other people call "vicious capitalist pig corrupt money grubbing blood sucking criminality." So be it. My interest in genetics today is mostly concerned with biomarkers and genetic modification of bacterial and Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells to make drugs that save people's lives.

This said, I do note that there are 7 billion people on this planet, and all of them would like to avoid starvation, but I am not in a position to pimp for them on the issue of the food supply. Because of my sometime ago exposure to this "blood sucking criminal industry" the ag industry, I did develop some scientific respect for the people who work in it, some of whom (gasp) worked for MONSANTO/SATAN.

Just as I think about, and have written here on, the topic of Why Birds Matter - although this interest was attached to my interest in pimping the question of whether pimping for the so called "renewable energy" industry represented an environmental interest or something else, I do care about the avian ecosystem of which insects are a prominent part.

In my pimping, I noted that there was a lot of hand waving and not a lot of sound science to support turning continental shelf avian ecosystems into industrial parks to generate, albeit temporarily, insignificant amounts of electricity:

After poking around a bit for some more updated stuff than what's in my files, I came across this nice piece: Lack of sound science in assessing wind farm impacts on seabirds (Green et al, Journal of Applied Ecology 2016, 53, 1635–1641) I believe it may be open sourced, so you can read it yourself if you're not in a library. (I'm in a library as I write, so I can't tell if it's open sourced, but I think it is.)

.

Of course, when I pimp my beliefs, I also note that half a century of cheering for wind and solar - through which I have personally lived - this may have something to do with my pimpery which, in a self serving fashion I describe as "caring" - did nothing to prevent the carbon dioxide concentrations in the planetary atmosphere as measured at Mauna Loa from rising to more than 400 ppm permanently. (For the week ending October 14, 2018 the figure was 406.00 ppm, 23.18 ppm higher than it was 10 years ago.)

People seldom note this, focusing on my pimping against the wind industry, but my pimping on the topic is actually because I note that the entire industry - which cost humanity a trillion dollars in the last ten years - is merely a red herring to conceal the realities of the gas industry, against which I claim I am really pimping. Again, from the same post on the topic of avian ecosystems just lined above I wrote:

By the way, birds and bats are only part of the reason that the wind industry sucks, but it is, I think, an important part.

The wind and solar industries are nothing more than fig leafs for the dangerous gas industry, and the dangerous natural gas industry is killing us as surely as the dangerous coal industry is.

In their smug, but deep and highly nuanced remarks noting that I am a pimp, most people ignore the question of whether my pimping against the wind industry many actually involve pimping against the gas industry - which by the way is shutting the nuclear industry in this country, raising the carbon dioxide cost of electricity by about 500 grams/kWh. There are people here who are actually cheering for this outcome, just as they cheer for the so called "renewable energy" industry, for which they pimp mindlessly and relentlessly with complete indifference that no one alive today will ever see carbon dioxide concentrations at the mountaintop at Mauna Loa of less than 400 ppm again.

I am certainly not popular for calling out the so called "renewable energy" pimps for pimping for gas in reality, but reality is not determined by popular beliefs. As a scientist, I believe that reality is often revealed by meaurement and the resulting data, like say, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, along with measurement - very simple measurement - of its IR spectrum. In fact, I may be only regular contributor to this site who pimps against wind and solar, although I believe such pimping certainly needs to be done, since solar and wind did not work, are not working and will not work to address climate change, although their popularity is consuming vast amounts of rapidly declining resources.

However, my pimp nature is not the topic of the deeper level discussion which the OP evokes, at least if one opens the PNAS paper, which is, as I see it - and I could be wrong since everyone here is smarter than I am - is about an ecological effect of climate change.

Neither is it about pesticides, or agrochemistry, except for a paragraph in which it states that it does not attribute the decline of insect populations in a Puerto Rican rain forest to pesticides. Thus the paper is certainly not all about Monsanto, nor about traveling to some anti-capitalist meet up where one can read the writings of Leon Trotsky and his call for world wide revolution against capitalism. This is, in any case, true of the PNAS paper, which I have opened and through which I've scanned to learn about what the primary source was.

Agreeing that I am a pimp for nuclear energy - although as I near the end of my life, I claim to be pimping on behalf of the generations that come after I die, who many people claim, oblivious to reality, will be living in a 100% renewable energy nirvana, something that clearly will not happen - it is true that this PNAS paper is also not about nuclear energy either, although it is about climate change, and from where I sit, at least peripherally concerned about the worldwide growth, on a vast scale, of the use of dangerous fossil fuels.

Have a pleasant Sunday afternoon.

[Farmer-Rick]

26. The excessive posting is a sign of a serious problem

You should post somewhere no one can read you.....you know like on Monsantos web site.

[cstanleytech]

23. Biggest problem though imo is that we as a species are breeding like

blowflies and that is not sustainable for the planet and eventually it's going to all come crashing down.

[NNadir]

24. In general, I agree with this; however in many conversations I've had in my lifetime on the topic...

...I have met very few people who are willing to commit suicide to save the environment.

It is always about someone else, often Indians and Chinese. On occasion the reflection on "someone else" can border on, or even lapse into, racism.

I'm certainly attached to my life, although, again, I agree with you on the biological point of species dying off because of the accumulation of their waste products.

This, of course, with respect to yeast accounts for the existence of wine and beer. They die off from their waste before eating up everything. Certain bacteria do this as well, including those that cause fatal diseases, since they kill their "planet" - the "planet" being the victim of the disease the bacteria cause.

The problem is - and I include myself here - is most people consider themselves more important than yeast cells. Whether we are or not is a point involving philosophy or possibly spiritual views. Neither philosophy nor spiritual views, however, is likely to affect biology, which is biology nonetheless and thus subject to the laws of biochemistry, chemistry and physics.

I do think it is ethical to have fewer children - I have two which is actually below the replacement value, but in many opinions hardly low enough. (I am often lectured on my hypocrisy be people who have zero children, although my experience suggests that even among these people, very few commit suicide to show the depth of their environmental commitment to lowering the population to match the Earth's carrying capacity for human beings.)

[cstanleytech]

25. They do not need to commit suicide they just need to be freaking responsible and reign in

their urge to keep on having babies at the speed they are having them.
It wont happen though and eventually the wheels will fall off and something will happen to either reduce our species or make it go totally extinct alot sooner than it need happen.

[Farmer-Rick]

27. Rambling nonsensical pseudoscience

is difficult to read and should be used sparingly.

[NickB79]

28. This study was done deep in a protected rainforest

How exactly did Monsanto cause the insect loss there?

[Lucky Luciano]

5. I'd be ok with a mosquito extinction event, but that's it! nt

[AdamGG]

10. and bedbugs

[llmart]

12. and cockroaches...

like trump.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

6. I've noticed. I've always loved the bugs.

It not like it used to be.

[DemoTex]

8. Rachel Carson warned us ..

[llmart]

13. My all time favorite book.

That's saying a lot from me, since I've been a voracious reader since I was about 4.

[hostalover]

9. We capture critters in our house and let them go outside. And we sing, "Born free.......!"

[elmac]

11. when was the last time you had to wash insect splatter off your windshield?

its been years for me, just not seeing them in the numbers we used to see decades ago.

[mountain grammy]

17. That's exactly what we noticed in our travels..

nothing like it used to be.

[GaYellowDawg]

21. I commute in East Tennessee

And I have a ton of insect splatter on my car.