This is a common anecdote, and a situation I remember as that's when I started driving.

Also one used in scientific study with seemingly dire results:

>The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-spla...

Everytime this "the insects are dying" thread comes up, people come out of the woodwork with anecdotes like this.

But I am one of them! I remember getting my first car in the late eighties and scrubbing tons of splattered insects off my windshield every time I went to the gas station.

Now I barely even notice them.

Antecdote is not data, but I certainly believe people when they say the insects are dying.

But people who haven’t seen fewer insects probably aren’t posting.

Anecdotes are misleading and they are always a huge trick.

Indeed. I've never seen more insects, birds, toads, and bats in PA than I did this summer. Some nights the katydids were deafeningly loud. The only thing that seemed to decline was spotted lantern flies, thankfully.

I remember in the 90s sitting on my grandmother's porch in rural PA at night. Huge moths everywhere. Luna moths being just about as common as mosquitos. Beetles bangings into the walls. Chubby spiders having so much food they couldn't even eat half of it. The walls were absolutely plastered with insects and you'd have to try to not get covered fireflies while walking through the grass.

Now there are some mosquitoes and crickets. Maybe a few moths sometimes. The walls outside are spotless.

Living in Asia now, I see insects about as much as I saw them back then. I have to wonder if there were even more back in the 90s, or if things are as good as ever here. But it's nice to see life.

Could that be explained by improved aerodynamics of cars now compared to then? Has that been studied?

Research says no: “The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.” From https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-spla... (Second hand comment from a journalist; actual research results may vary).

Is it possible for there to be so many more vehicles than decades before that the number of insects hitting each car is much less?

Insects getting better at avoiding cars in a much shorter time than we'd expect would certainly be a prediction of Sheldrake's 'morphic resonance' theory.

The comment above yours was not saying what you're saying.

They were saying, IIUC, that it could be that the same amount of bugs are splattered across a larger number of cars, so that if you look at any one car, then it looks like less bugs.

That was my understanding as well, I was proposing an alternative theory.

There’s a road in my area (rural MN) where I don’t slow down if there are deer on the side of the road. It’s a curvy road with a ton of deer, and back when I was a teenager the deer would do the normal deer thing of potentially getting spooked and run across the road…or directly in to your stopped car.

15 years later they no longer do that, just on that road in particular. I don’t know if it’s evolved behavior or learned, but they absolutely changed.

We’re seeing a comparable decline in birds that depend on them for food, so probably not.

That said, it’s fun to imagine that we just selected against insects that hang out by the highway.

This has apparently happened with birds. Some bird species have evolved shorter wings for better maneuverability near traffic.

https://www.npr.org/2013/03/22/175054275/birds-evolve-shorte...

that wouldn't be strange. I remember a friend telling me about scientists who visited a remote place twice and seeing fungus-caused dieoffs the second time and he immediately claimed that it was global warming. My first thought was "those bastard scientists brought the fungus in" (I've hiked through remote endemic-plant forests and they tell you to scrub yourself vigorously on your way in to prevent tracking non-native plant seeds)

I drive my old motorcycle with the same big windshield since the 90ies. Insects are dramatically less on it now than 20 years ago.

Yup.. I'm 50 and I will attest there is NO DOUBT insects populations have declined. It's crazy.

Fellow biker here, with as small a windshield as I can stand (meaning my helmet stands above the windshield. I still carry a can of Honda Spray Cleaner and Polish in the tank bag for scrubbing the face shield on the helmet, as well as the windshield. I used to go through several cans a year. Now, for the same miles ridden, a can might last over a year. The one variable is the bike, but I've owned a variety of bikes over the decades I've been riding, and only in the last 10 years or so did I have to cut back on my standing order of cleaner.

Huge trucks and SUVs are really popular in the US. The aerodynamics are not going to compare favorably to typical 90's cars, where even the trucks are much smaller.

For me, I noticed the change over one year. I had a job where I commuted the same stretch of highway every day. For the first few years, every May/June the windshield was always badly crusted with bugs. Then suddenly one year, no bugs. Same car.

What year? Would love to have that data point, or an aproximation.

Yeah but what about the year after?

I mentioned this in a similar discussion on HN a few years ago. I used to own a Nissan Cube (a boxy car), and it would regularly get encrusted with insects every summer, when compared to other family members’ vehicles which did not.

Insects still get hit with aerodynamic cars, but the blows are glancing and less likely to cause a “burst”.

It's not like we were all driving in Chevrolet Bel Airs in the 90s and now switched to Lamborghinis.

My intuition for aerodynamics must not be as good as yours. But looking at https://caradvise.com/blog/2019/08/17/most-popular-cars-in-t... and https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g36005989/best-selling-car... is interesting. In particular, the way the headlights sit on the front of the car seems to have changed a lot. Cars in the 90s look to have lights that pointed straight ahead. That seems to have evolved over time to a more streamlined position and orientation.

It's mind-boggling how many trucks and SUVs this country owns...

It is an variable that very obviously needs to be controlled and is worth mentioning.

Yup, not only that, but the Lamborghini Countach has a Cd of 0.42, while every car on this list has a lower Cd, except for the original VW Beetle [1].

(Although, TBF, the Lambo's wing and aero package adds a lot of drag in exchange for much greater downforce)

[1] https://ecomodder.com/wiki/Vehicle_Coefficient_of_Drag_List

The studies for this are scarce, but this is curious and counterintuitive:

"The research also found that modern cars, with a more aerodynamic body shape, killed more insects than boxier vintage cars up to 70 years old."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon

Are they, though? So many trucks, SUVs, and other cars that don't have sloping windshields. Also, I would expect even pastier windshields given that the nationwide speed limit was 65mph until 1995, and it took years for states to nudge it upwards to where it is now (85mph at some places in Texas).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law

It also depends on the bugs spawning behavior. There are still species which blot out the sky when they spawn along the Mississippi.

I feel like this is something we could check with simulations. Given the same insect clouds, would an older car hit more of them than a newer one?

Same here, but in California's Central Valley.

Remember need to scrape off bugs from windshield after each trip thru I5 ~10 years ago. No need to do that anymore.....

On the other hand, in my back yard, I grow a lot veggi, strawberry with worm casting from kitchen scraps. I do still lot of insects. A lot of birds nested around my house. Produce 10-15 young birds. I found a very cool looking giant tomato worm a size of my biggest finger. It ate half of (7 ft height ) tomato plant in 2 days.

The Strawberry, cucumbers, other veggies grow with worm casting taste SO much better than from anything store .

I love creating little sanctuaries and do think they’re useful as pockets of support and diversity. Also, the Tomato Hornworm is an awesome creature and results in a Hummingbird Moth. I try to feed them vegetative branches and keep them separate if I can so that they hang around and we still get tomatoes.

A lot of those drives of mine were on highways between planted fields.

YES. Drove with my parents to the Catskills in upstate NY almost every weekend in the early 2000s. The windshield was covered in bug splatter. Now - nothing.

Edit: it was a Hyundai Excel

https://retrocars.fandom.com/wiki/Hyundai_Excel/Accent

I didn't drive to much until 20 or so years ago but I think I saw a lot more of ot back in the day.

In according to the more usual explanations I've been working if lights along the road might be part of the problem.

I drive long distances through Europe every now and then since 2009-ish. That's only 12 years and much of my drive is through farmland and forests, no lights other than the cars for at least 1000km in aggregate. In 2009 the windshield and lights would need a solid scrub every couple hundred km. Now I don't bother cleaning when refuelling.

I recall my dad checking the washer fluid level before road trips because we ran dry on a previous trip and it was clear we wouldn’t make it home without hitting a gas station ASAP.

I just drove across the US (down the east coast, across the south, up the Rockies) and found I had to do this only after driving across Texas.

meaning bugs are doing well in Texas, but not nowhere else?

Really weird

People aren't as densely packed in most parts of Texas, so it might be explainable that way. A lot of the state is also hay fields instead of food crops that are more intensively controlled for pests.

But I've noticed a big change in Texas in recent years. The last two years I haven't had to use pesticide in my residential vegetable garden. I've had to control for mold/fungal infections, but not for insects. And I live up against a nature preserve and try to keep most of my property as natural as possible.

Meaning Texas has the highest speed limits in the country

The speed limit went up to 85 in Texas. It seemed to max out at 75 or 80 in other places. I'm not sure if an extra 5-10mph made the difference, but it could have.

Try south of St Louis, MO on 55 (specifically south of Cape Girardeau, MO) in the summer. That might be where all the bugs have gone. \s

This also stopped being a problem for me in the 90s when I started driving my mom's Dodge Intrepid, which was significantly more aerodynamic than other cars of the era.