Decline in insect populations

[kassy]

What 88 Bee Genomes and 10 Years of Studying Apples Tell Us About the Future of Pollinators


The team surveyed bees in 27 orchards in New York for over 10 years, identifying over 8,700 individual bees. We’re not talking domesticated honey bees — they found an amazing 88 different species of wild native bees.

Over those years, they watched the landscapes around the orchards become more and more cultivated. Natural spaces like woodlands were replaced by alfalfa, corn and soybeans. And they saw fewer and fewer bee species in the orchards as the habitat around them disappeared.

Then they sequenced the genomes of all the species to make a phylogeny — an evolutionary family tree — to see how related the different bees were. They learned that the species that disappeared weren’t a random pick from the 88. Instead, the species lost were closely related to one another. Likewise, the species left behind were closely related to one another. Habitat losses had led to entire branches of the tree of life being pruned away — meaning phylogenetic diversity took a major hit.

The researchers estimate that for every 10 percent of land area that gets converted to agriculture, 35 million years of evolutionary history are lost from the bee community.

...

They found that the number of bee species didn’t matter for pollination. But the phylogenetic diversity did. Their giant dataset allowed them to learn that although more agriculture in the landscape decreases both, the latter is what really hurts the fruit. Cutting away whole branches from the tree of life hurts the whole ecosystem.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2019/01/18/bees-diversity-loss-pollinators-death/#.XEQvF1xKjcs

[Klondike Kat]

When decline morphs towards extinction....

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems

Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’

Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished

“We knew that something was amiss in the first couple days,” said Brad Lister. “We were driving into the forest and at the same time both Andres and I said: ‘Where are all the birds?’ There was nothing.”

His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by far is global warming.

“It was just astonishing,” Lister said. “Before, both the sticky ground plates and canopy plates would be covered with insects. You’d be there for hours picking them off the plates at night. But now the plates would come down after 12 hours in the tropical forest with a couple of lonely insects trapped or none at all.”

“It was a true collapse of the insect populations in that rainforest,” he said. “We began to realise this is terrible – a very, very disturbing result.”....

...“We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet,” Lister said. “It is just horrifying to watch us decimate the natural world like this.”......

Data on other animals that feed on bugs backed up the findings. “The frogs and birds had also declined simultaneously by about 50% to 65%,” Lister said. The population of one dazzling green bird that eats almost nothing but insects, the Puerto Rican tody, dropped by 90%.....

......Lister calls these impacts a “bottom-up trophic cascade”, in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain.

“I don’t think most people have a systems view of the natural world,” he said. “But it’s all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect.”

I find it rather suspect to conclude that the most likely culprit is global warming, especially considering that the temperature in the study area has actually show a slight decline over the time frame mentioned.

http://luq.lternet.edu/data/luqmetadata16

[Bernard]

I find it rather suspect to conclude that the most likely culprit is global warming, especially considering that the temperature in the study area has actually show a slight decline over the time frame mentioned.

I tend to agree. This is just waving over our ignorance. Can't find the reference now, but I read in some article on this topic a scientist saying "there's no obvious smoking gun". If I was researching this subject, I would look closely at the global diffusion of many molecules known as potential endocrine disruptors. Insects behaviour, including mating, relies heavily on chemical signals (e.g., pheromones) acting at very low concentrations, which can be blurred by the presence in the environment of similar molecules. Just an idea.

[kassy]

The way they explain it in the article:

“If you go a little bit past the thermal optimum for tropical insects, their fitness just plummets,” he said.

As the data came in, the predictions were confirmed in startling fashion. “The number of hot spells, temperatures above 29C, have increased tremendously,” he said. “It went from zero in the 1970s up to something like 44% of the days.”

The temperature data linked by Klondike Kat only cover the last 26 years of the period. Their old count was 35 years ago (so 1983)

However it is a problem that this is just two snapshots. We don´t know what species started disappearing at which years so all we have left is a scary number.

Then again someone else must have done some insect counting there in all the time in between.

[gerontocrat]

re :- Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’
Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished

Then the question is - will the insect population recover?
If yes, could be the hurricane. Recovery should be quick.
If not, another nail in our coffin.

[vox_mundi]

Daily average by year (for the last 40 years) of minimum, maximum, and average temperature values, in urban and rural locations of the northern coast of the island of Puerto Rico. The solid, broken, and dotted lines represent the projections for minimum, maximum, and average temperatures, respectively. 

Urbanization, Global Environmental Change and Sustainable Development in Latin America. An Introduction
Chapter (PDF Available) · July 2007
Editors: Roberto Sanchez Rodriguez and Adriana Bonilla, pp.7-30

[vox_mundi]

Plummeting Insect Numbers 'Threaten Collapse of Nature' 
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature

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.

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.”

The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors.

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” said Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, at the University of Sydney, Australia, who wrote the review with Kris Wyckhuys at the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing.

The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is “shocking”, Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”

One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. “If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death,” he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years.

... “When you consider 80% of biomass of insects has disappeared in 25-30 years, it is a big concern.”

The new analysis selected the 73 best studies done to date to assess the insect decline.



https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320718313636
Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers 

[gerontocrat]

Plummeting Insect Numbers 'Threaten Collapse of Nature' 
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature

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.

"Silent Spring" warned us.
So what is going to do for us?
- climate change?
- deforestation?
- pesticides and fertilisers?
- collapse of the ocean web of life?
- pick'n'mix of the above and all sorts of other screw-ups?

And the IPCC system still looks at 2100 when
- the tragedy of the commons will arrive so much earlier,
- the effects will continue for n years, where n has a few noughts on the end of the number.

Shock? Horror?
No. All you have to do is wander through the highways and byways of this forum and there it is for all to see.

[Sebastian Jones]

Plummeting Insect Numbers 'Threaten Collapse of Nature' 
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature

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.

"Silent Spring" warned us.
So what is going to do for us?
- climate change?
- deforestation?
- pesticides and fertilisers?
- collapse of the ocean web of life?
- pick'n'mix of the above and all sorts of other screw-ups?

And the IPCC system still looks at 2100 when
- the tragedy of the commons will arrive so much earlier,
- the effects will continue for n years, where n has a few noughts on the end of the number.

Shock? Horror?
No. All you have to do is wander through the highways and byways of this forum and there it is for all to see.

The destruction of the holocene climate caused by GHGs is far less easy to see, to intuit, than the destruction of life caused by drenching the land (and our food) with poisons. Yes, Rachel Carson warned us very clearly, but honestly, what kind of idiot really thinks that literally spraying poison on fields and forests is a good strategy for survival? Why do we even need to argue this still? Why are these poisons still even legal?

[vox_mundi]

... And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

[kassy]

On the upside not all insects are effected... 

But researchers say that some species, such as houseflies and cockroaches, are likely to boom.

...

"Fast-breeding pest insects will probably thrive because of the warmer conditions, because many of their natural enemies, which breed more slowly, will disappear, " said Prof Dave Goulson from the University of Sussex who was not involved in the review.

"It's quite plausible that we might end up with plagues of small numbers of pest insects, but we will lose all the wonderful ones that we want, like bees and hoverflies and butterflies and dung beetles that do a great job of disposing of animal waste."

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47198576

[vox_mundi]

Add scorpions to the list kassy ...

Brazil's cities provide an excellent habitat for scorpions, experts say. They offer shelter in sewage networks, plenty of water and food in the garbage that goes uncollected, and no natural predators.

... Scorpions, like the cockroaches they feast on, are an incredibly adaptable species. As the weather in Brazil gets hotter due to climate change, scorpions are spreading across the country – including into its colder southern states that rarely, if ever, had reports of scorpions prior to this millennium.

The number of people stung by scorpions across Brazil has risen from 12,000 in 2000 to 140,000 last year, according to the health ministry.

... the species terrorizing Brazilians is the highly poisonous yellow scorpion, or tityus serrulatus. It reproduces through the miracle of parthenogenesis, meaning a female scorpion simply generates copies of herself twice a year – no male participation required.

Each parthenogenesis can spawn up to 20 to 30 baby scorpions.

Brazil's urban scorpion infestation is the result of poor garbage management, inadequate sanitation, rapid urbanization and a changing climate.

It is likely too late to stop the spread of scorpions across Brazilian cities.

https://m.phys.org/news/2019-02-venomous-yellow-scorpions-brazil-big.html

Always look on the bright side of life - Monty Python - Life of Brian ...
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DWoaktW-Lu38&ved=2ahUKEwjBg_fmh7TgAhVGmeAKHfpIAMgQ3ywwAnoECAsQHw&usg=AOvVaw1uslggdIchENVlmwYDh-Ay

... Life's a piece of shit,
When you look at it.
Life's a laugh and death's a joke it's true.
You'll see it's all a show.
Keep 'em laughing as you go.
Just remember nature's last laugh is on you.
And...
Always look on the bright side of life.
Always look on the right side of life.
[whistle] ...

[kassy]

Those scorpions eat cockroaches so they have a bright future ahead...

[rboyd]

So I will need cats for the rodent control and scorpions for the cockroach control. Will just have to remember to look inside my shoes before I put them on.

[Tor Bejnar]

I was thinking, "the return of the eurypterids", except we need lots of free O₂ for that. I guess I'll just check my shoes more often.  (I grew up with scorpions but rarely checked my shoes, but once when I did check, out came a little yellow fellow.  We had centipedes and black widows, too, but the worst 'neighbors' were discussed in this [functionally unavailable, but 'tags' give a clue] article.)

[vox_mundi]

Politicians are Complicit in the Killing of Our Insects – We Will Be Next
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/12/politicians-killing-insects-ecosystems



... Some of the members of the European parliament’s agriculture committee are themselves farmers who have grown increasingly dependent on powerful and toxic pesticides. But others have taken the agribusiness shilling and believe that their role in policymaking is simply to support the corporations that sell these poisons.

... the agrichemical industry is literally writing pesticide assessments that are then presented as the work of regulators.

For example, a recent report exposed how EU regulators based a decision to relicense controversial glyphosate on an assessment plagiarised from industry reports.

Around 50% of some chapters were actually a copy-and-paste job from papers Monsanto and other agrichemical corporates had written.

The European Food Safety Authority (Efsa), based its recommendation that glyphosate was safe for public use on this industry assessment. 
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/eu-glyphosate-approval-was-based-on-plagiarised-monsanto-text-report-finds

... Tearing apart the web of life damages us all. Only a farming system that views itself as part of this web has a long-term future.

[magnamentis]

just to remind you that the killing of people in the millions is not next but is an ongoing truth for thousands of years. only because it currently does not happen on big scale where we live does not mean that it does not happen at all.

the biggest killers are our governments and it has been that way for a long time, only that they learned to do it smarter and more often elsewhere and nowadays they first try to "kill" non-conformist's reputation and wealth before they take physical action. nevertheless not much changed and it's not restricted to the declared evil doers, happens where the hypocrites live

in short, we are not only next but are right now and in the past.

[vox_mundi]

Germans in Bavaria Rally to Save the Bees
https://www.dw.com/en/germans-in-bavaria-rally-to-save-the-bees/g-47494191

A record 1.75 million Bavarians signed a petition to seek a referendum to "save the bees," a move that could have huge consequences for the German farming industry and environmental protection.

The proposal for a vote to protect species diversity sets a target to have 20 percent of farmland meeting organic standards by 2025, before reaching 30 percent by 2030.

Ten percent of green spaces in Bavaria should also be turned into flowering meadows, while rivers and streams must be better protected from pesticides and organic fertilisers.



-----------------------------------

Border Wall Construction Threatens Texas Butterfly Sanctuary
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/border-wall-construction-threatens-texas-butterfly-sanctuary-180971416/

... U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) designs indicate that the wall will extend to the height of an existing flood control levee next to the Rio Grande river, and be crowned with 18-foot steel posts. CBP also intends to clear a 150-foot “enforcement zone” in front of the wall. Seventy of the National Butterfly Center’s 100 acres will lie south of this new barrier, as will much of the land belonging to the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park, which is home to more than 500 bird species, according to Waters.

... the center said that a police officer told them they would not have access to this land, and that the authorities were ordered to stop anyone who tried to set foot on the levee. “Effective Monday morning, it is all government land,” the officer reportedly said.

[vox_mundi]

US Judge Rules Against Butterfly Sanctuary Opposed to Trump's Wall
https://m.phys.org/news/2019-02-butterfly-sanctuary-opposed-trump-wall.html