My current point of concern is that I can go out and sit all evening without a mosquito bite. That was unheard of even 30 years ago when I was a kid. You'd be lucky if you didn't have one for every minute you spent outside. I think the insects are dying, and it's frightening.

Second item would be watching the bison migrate on the plains. Literally horizon to horizon, a hundred thousand individuals or more in a group. More than ten bison for every person alive on the continent. Same with the passenger pigeons - the sky would go dark from dawn to dusk with the movement of 6 billion birds.

My experience of this is that 10-15 years ago, when I was a child, my dad would often take us on road trips by car, sometimes arriving home late into the night. (the trips were around Central Europe)

The headlights, windshield and parts of the body were always significantly covered by dead insects.

For the past 5 years or so however, they have almost always been perfectly clean. This has amazed me.

I wonder if any of that can be attributed to improved aerodynamics pushing bugs around the body of the car?

No, its farmers and their monoculture:

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/19/europe/insect-decline-ger...

Also, quite relevant to the topic at hand ..

Improved aerodynamics makes it worse not better.

Less of a bow wave to divert them away from the vehicle earlier.

As someone who has just done a 13 hour drive from Amsterdam to Krakow, I can assure you that my car was absolutely covered in dead insects, the front licence plate was barely readable, the layer of dead bugs was so thick.

That must have been the last part of your trip then. When I drove from The Netherlands to Bretagne (about 900km, ±10 hours) last Summer I had less insects on the car than I had in my parent's car 35 years ago for 1/10 of the trip length.

IMO The lack of mosquitos is the single positive aspect of a crippled nature. Allegedly a Pharao had a slave covered in honey to get some peace from those beasts. New Zealand is paradise except that on some beaches you just can't stop unless you want to get drained.

For your human comfort yes. But mosquitoes are part of the food chain, and also help mixing blood from very different species. This, in turn, allow micro-organisms that should never meet to interact with each others, giving a new path to biodiversity.

As annoying as it is, it's a useful critter.

You see, the way you react is the very cause of our current troubles: we only see the living systems as a way to please us, and only on the short term. When they don't please us, we start hating them, and find a way to bend them to our will.

Now we destroyed most of the systems, or at least their balance, and we are painfully discovering that it may dooms us all.

So let's try to adopt a different point of view before we face even more terrible consequences of our gluttonous actions.

Just to clear, there are about 3500 or 4000 species of mosquitoes, and if we eradicated the tiny handful that carry malaria, Zika, etc. it would only have positive results. That would leave thousands to continue pollinating and serving as food for fish, frogs, and other wildlife.

> and if we eradicated the tiny handful that carry malaria, Zika, etc. it would only have positive results.

for humans yes - which was his point. looking at this from a human perspective is a problem. there are likely unknown consequences elsewhere in the food chain if we completely eradicate a species for our own gain

No, in this case. That was my point. Those individual species would have no impact on the overall ecosystem.

Isn't it the case that we just need to wipe out mosquitoes in an area long enough for malaria to die off? Didn't that happen in the US with DDT, the mosquitoes came back but the malaria stayed away. Or am I mistaken?

Though frankly I'd be willing to risk them gone for good.

Yes, I just think they're the most durable bastards out there, and if they're being affected by whatever it is, surely all the more shy and retiring species are basically gone as well.

If we were being deliberate, sure, a targeted assassination of the Anopheles mosquito might not be a bad thing. But I don't get that sense at all... More like collateral damage.

> I think the insects are dying, and it's frightening

At least in New York, we put tremendous resources towards keeping harmful mosquito populations down. A better canary insect might be the bee.

Wasps, beetles, grasshoppers, caddis flies, crane flies, are all substantially reduced in number. Just gone, by comparison.

People bitch about wasps, but there are almost none now a days. I used to see plenty.

The only species that thrive are the opportunist ones that tied their fate to the humans: cockroaches, fruit flies, dogs, cattle, chicken, etc.

Those don't pollinate plants, they don't eat plant parasites , they pollute the water and air, and because we feed them with so much crap, even the land instead of fertilizing it.

>The only species that thrive are the opportunist ones that tied their fate to the humans: cockroaches, fruit flies, dogs, cattle, chicken, etc.

rats :-(

To be fair, mosquitoes are the target of a fairly narrow, focused attack.

That said, bees seem to be dwindling, so you have a point.

You clearly don't live in Minnesota, where the mosquito is the unofficial state bird.

I come inside quickly in summer because there are mosquitoes and flies all over the place. Doing fireworks with my kids last week, I was deliberately standing downwind in the path of the smoke bombs to get some relief. I'm religious about not having standing water around, our cars are covered in bug carcasses after a 10-mile drive. I literally feel mosquitoes bouncing off my forehead as I walk through my dark backyard. I kill massive deer/horse flies constantly.

If insects are dying, it sure ain't around here!

This is all really bad and we're not on a good path here as a species...

But one thing to remember is that nature works locally. I think there is a chance to protect the environment through isolated "islands" - with no human contact whatsoever - where flora and fauna have the chance to come back.

Interestingly, Chernobyl is quite a good example for that: https://nordic.businessinsider.com/wildlife-near-nuclear-rea...

But I'm not worried about nature at all, although the massacre disturb my sense of aesthetic and empathy.

It's sad we destroy it. I wish we would not.

But it will survive, thrive even.

The problem is that our current actions will kill us.

My idea is to preserve nature so it can safe us. If there are large areas where no human being has access to, nature will thrive and we can then use that area to take whatever we need, whatever has been extinct through us and grow it back. Think of it as a safe for your most valuable things, in this case, nature

Islands as Noe's ark. Why not.

It's a good complement to old seeds data banks like kokopelli's.

Exactly. It won't save many from dying, once some regions start collapsing, but it'll help us to survive as a species

The following is conjecture, but I'm guessing that insects of the last century mainly survived off of crops from farmland, either directly or indirectly.

So, if true, that means that it was hardly natural beforehand either. It may be we are just using better pesticides, so we moved from one artificial environment to a different one. Both are out-of-whack compared to what would naturally be there. How do you know the previous conditions, where there was lots of farmland, but no good pesticides was the better one?

I never understood why such changes -- dramatic as they may be -- were seen as a cause of concern, except in cases where the changes affected our food supply.

Humans may be responsible for the decimation or outright extinction of entire species, but isn't that how Nature works? Nature has encountered countless extinctions before us (where's the Megalodon now?) and at least 5 mass extinctions, so why should this dynamic cease now?

(I get the emotional argument for conservationism, and I even share it, even though I might not sound that way. But I've always considered that something purely subjective, not objective, and arguably just as manipulative of Nature.)

Conservationism is about conserving a place in the world where humans can survive, full stop. It's not just food, it's disease, it's mycology, it's everything, and if we're not careful, we will render the planet uninhabitable for naked apes.

You're right, in the sense that of course the tardigrades, archaea around deep ocean vents, and blue-green algae will continue trucking along more or less whatever happens. We, however, are not tardigrades.

Because we depend on biodiversity to survive. It's what allows animals to not be wiped out by only one super parasite. It's what allow plants to bread so that they get robust and nutritious. It's what allow all our bodies to not be vulnerable to only one disease and all die.

It also supports the balance of all the ecosystems: forests, seas, rivers... Which we also depend on to survive.

It's what makes us live on a beautiful, comfortable planet instead of survive in a terraformed rock we have to fight against while rushing to the next scientific way to palliate yet a new deficiency.

In our planet system, everything is connected.

Let's take a very naive but simple to understand example, the tomatoe.

Planting so much, and always the same kind of tomatoes makes the land nutritionally poor and the plant susceptible to parasites. We compensate this unnatural state by addition artificial nutrition and pesticides to the plant.

The result ?

Most tomatoes are tasteless garbage that looks more like a plastic ball than a fruit. Their nutritional content has been divided by 10 during the last 80 years, so that you need to eat much more to remotely get the same minerals and vitamins. When you eat them, you also absorb a small amount of all the products we put on them, with consequences we still don't know about.

That's just for a simple tomato. Bring together all the food, the water, the air, the temperature, etc. together, and that's how much we are disturbing.

It's not just emotional. We are seated on branch we are sawing.

From a purely objective concern, if the a perfect storm of global warming, pollution, massively reduced fish stocks, elimination of pollinators and ocean oxygen depletion run to their end game, humanity will suffer decimation.

Due to nutrient pollution of the ocean, large dead zones are spreading, these are zones without enough oxygen to support life caused by nitrogen and phosphorous pollution. 70% of the earths oxygen is produced by marine plants. Forests produce most of the rest and we are cutting them down at an accelerating rate.

So from an objective point of view, not enough oxygen is a pragmatic cause for concern. Looking at it from the perspective of nature, species evolve to survive, it is their prime directive. We are actually doing a pretty good job of working against this directive to our species own detriment.

> but isn't that how Nature works? Nature has encountered countless extinctions before us (where's the Megalodon now?) and at least 5 mass extinctions, so why should this dynamic cease now?

This mass extinction caused by humans is an order of magnitude faster and affects far more varity of species and plants.

Even if that were true (and I'd challenge the variety of species and plants, see [1]): what, objectively, is the problem with that?

Furthermore, even if the pace and breadth of current extinction were that dramatic, isn't the argument against that a purely emotional one? I sincerely doubt that most humans can even name a hundred species; would they really miss a few million if a few million others remained?

Just to be clear again: I'm not arguing against conservationism, I'm interested in the arguments being made for it. I believe we are conserving for own selfish purposes, and I'm perfectly OK with that. I just think it's wrong to call that "natural".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...

> what, objectively, is the problem with that?

Nothing. But you can say that about asteroids that kill the planet as well.

That's basically nihilism. Many people want to live and enjoy nature, that's why. We just got conflicting interests of short-term thinking that resembles nihilism (Nothing matters - let's live life to the fullest) and long-term thinking / delayed gratification (I want my kids / all the animals / the next generation to have a nice life as well).

edit: for the semantics of "natural" - humans can be seen as a part of nature. It's just intellectual gymnastics if one defines us as natural or not. Some say humans aren't natural and have good reasons for it, some say they are and have good reasons for that. This discussion really isn't that meaningful. Many peole say we have responsibility because we have consciousness, but even that could be argued. It all depends on what you believe.

The problem with that is, its an unknown, the effects could be far more devastating than previous mass extinctions, even the worst one about 252 million years ago.

If you extrapolate the speed of current devastation, extinction and let it play out over the time-span of the last mass-extinction, there really wont be anything living on earth besides micro-organisms.

Non-selfish arguments for why we should not kill off other species? Why should we not kill all life bigger than a pea on earth? Ill let you take that one.

It's a hugely worrying trend. If it continues, a potential outcome is no other species exist.

There are medicinal and practical uses for plants, and some are have only recently been discovered. Losing them is losing this these potential discoveries and uses.

Humans inherently enjoy nature. We like to see trees, greenery , wildlife. The loss of these things hurts our enjoyment of the world.

Side effects. We don't know what the effect of all these species disappearing will be.

Others are making the good general case argument, but I will add one other thing: sometimes there's actually some very positive "side benefits" that you get from having a biodiverse ecosystem around, that you may not initially think about as far as the general conservation case is concerned.

Examples that come to mind immediately include the huge number of medicines that have been derived by isolating compounds derived from plants, an area which we are probably far from done exploring. Another more specific case I can think of, is how one of the most important compounds in molecular biology today (Taq polymerase) came from bacteria found in the Lower Geyser Basin at Yellowstone. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermus_aquaticus)

I sometimes get a little irritated at some of the "save the planet" type arguments. The planet will be just fine, it's gone through a lot of changes over the years and will continue to go through changes. One example I often show is the sea levels 16,000 BC as explained here https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/ by National Geographic.

What is going to have problems is the health of the ever growing Human population. Us Humans may well be heading towards a crisis, the planet won't even notice.

BTW, I think we should be working hard to support a sustainable future for Humanity and the rest of the environment.

The most charitable reading of ”save the planet” is: save those parts of the biosphere that might be critical to our long term survival.

The problem with that, though, is that you can't just saw those parts off and tuck them away. Cascading failure of systems is a global phenomenon.

That seems to be an almost willfully obtuse reading. Yes, obviously, Earth in some form will continue to exist whether we do anything about pollution or not.

Yes you could see it like that but my thoughts are more we are in one of the many phases the planet goes though and it is part of evolution. I still don't want it to happen any time soon, or at all really, but have an acceptance of our transient time here.

But we ourselves are ushering in the transience

I know very little about ecology, but my understanding is that lots of insects, including but not only bees, are key to plant reproduction. Maybe my math is wrong, but fewer insects probably implies fewer plants, with a delay. Given that I'd like to survive and all, I'd like there to be plants so I can eat them. And breathe air and whatnot.

I already conceded the survability aspect ("except in cases where the changes affected our food supply").

Well I suppose the most pressing problem is that we will create conditions such that we ourselves are not longer able to survive, or at least some significant portion of us will not. Rising sea levels and increased extreme weather events will also cause substantial financial loss, even if you don't care about the loss of natural wonders.

> but isn't that how Nature works

It might be how the nature works, but it is definitely not how Nature works. Capitalisation matters.

Well yeah, stuff goes extinct all the time, but on scale of millions/tens of millions of years. the pace we're seeing these days is unprecedented and the pace is more on level of mass extinction rather than business-as-usual evolution state.

Sure, we can keep looking at the half-full glass focusing what is not extinct yet, but over few generations, we might be pretty lonely on this planet when it comes to complex life. It's more an indication of how badly we're screwing our own environment, also for ourselves. It's clear that life itself will survive much harsher situations compared to mankind and repopulate once we're long extinct.

The mosquito situation might be due to the availability of CO2 based mosquito traps.

You don't mention where you're located but perhaps you're in an area that isn't as hospitable for mosquito breeding as the location where you were a kid.

Family has lived on the same land in a very rural area for 38 years, so that is not really applicable. I would doubt there are enough mosquito traps in the county to make a difference.

Droughts, less open water available, more activity in said waters? That could account for some mosquito reduction.

But in other comment you mention other insects, so this indeed seems like a broader problem.

I don't know what it is, but it's absolutely disturbing. Insects are, by comparison with us mammals, incredibly resilient. Anything that is reducing insect populations on a massive scale is bad news for the entire world.

Try leaving out some old tires to collect water.

In our area mosquitos are killed on purpose, by poisoning their main breeding areas when they are still in the water. (And I am just finding out that this is done by a sanctioned non-profit organisation.)

Maybe something similar is done in your region?

https://www.kabsev.de/ (German)

Where I live in South Africa the local Springbok deer herds were so large that they were once recorded to take 5 days to pass a camp.

> Going into downtown office buildings (no staff in the lobby), up and into an office, and wandering around looking for someone to ask where to find the person you're looking for (instead of presenting government-issued papers to be photographed by a security guard in the lobby in order to attend a meetup).

I truly cannot tell which is supposed to describe the past, and which the present. Both seem common today in Seattle, depending on the building.

  extinct and unGoogleable Christmas Tree Birds

Wait a second, what are "Christmas Tree Birds"?

Christmas trees used to have candles. So a flock of flame-colored birds sitting in trees resembled Christmas trees with candle flames. Thus a (nick?)name, "Christmas-tree birds". My very fuzzy recollection is 1600's Manhattan. So perhaps I saw it in the Mannahatta exhibit/project/book? But I don't quickly see it on [1]. And Google/Bing are giving me nothing related.

Upon reflection, I'm now unsure the "yell to be heard in Manhattan" story was the same bird - I may well be folding together two stories there.

[1] https://welikia.org/

exactly!

Is this what you are looking for regarding Christmas Tree Birds?

https://www.boothbayregister.com/article/christmas-tree-bird...

Hey, screw Amazon and their asinine NDAs, they've tried that same BS over here in Seattle on much less relevant meetups. All its ended up doing is killing participation and fracturing the group.