The first global scientific review of insect population decline was published[$] this week in the journal Biological Conservation. This is the first global study of its kind, and the term "impending catastrophe" would not be hyperbolic with respect to the findings:
Highlights
- Over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction.
- Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and dung beetles (Coleoptera) are the taxa most affected.
- Four aquatic taxa are imperiled and have already lost a large proportion of species.
- Habitat loss by conversion to intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines.
- Agro-chemical pollutants, invasive species and climate change are additional causes.
For some time now we've been warned by scientists that pollinators are having a hard time, creating problems for humanity WRT many food sources. However, this study paints a far more dire picture with the possibility of irreparable harm to ecosystems on a global level. Without strong insect populations, it's not unreasonable to conclude that humanity may not continue either.
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Mass Extinction of Insects Underway
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(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:27PM (5 children)
Finally, humanity will cease to exist in the current form. Earth will bounce back to a new equilibrium in a couple of 10..100k years. Problem solved.
Is there any way to accelerate this process (of human demise)?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:31PM (2 children)
Yes, there is: Like all revolutionary ideas, the first step is to start with yourself.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:40PM (1 child)
No problem... the body is already going downhill. The rest will follow soon enough. Then I will be automagically reduced to carbon dioxide, water and some trace elements. May nature be gentle with my elements ;-)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:43PM
Sorry, we can't allow that to happen. You're going to have to pay to have your body hermetically sealed to keep the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Just be glad nobody has thought of all the CO2 you're producing by breathing or they wouldn't be willing to wait that long.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:18PM
Executive Order: make it possible to launch the nook-u-lar weapons from twitter!
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday February 13 2019, @10:40AM
Do you actually think that meatbags are chaotically bringing extinction to themselves?
IMHO, instead, the pit of hell has these circles, starting from above: thirst for money -> for wealth -> for power -> for control (hello there satan).
The circle of those that already obtained money, wealth and power, and pursue control is SIMPLY doing that.
Control is exerted through dependence or constriction. All independent actions must therefore be reduced to dependent ones.
Having a plant grow freely with sun and water dug out of a hole, pollinated by insects and yielding a fruit whose seed can be freely replanted is anathema for those people.
Having an energy intensive method of making the soil nutritious, the water drinkable, the sun not harmful, the winds not destructive, plus mechanical pollination, sterile plants, and strictly controlled distribution is the ultimate objective of those people. NOT a side effect of greed. How many people will the system be able to sustain? who cares!
So, unless some rebel guy intentionally blows up parts of the planet (the biblical fatal blow which the beast miracously recovers from, maybe?) the plan is to have everybody under the system just to breath eat and not get ill.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:42PM (8 children)
if by "humanity" you mean a population of beings that can reproduce successfully with homo sapiens, and it's genetically diverse enough to not die out from "married my cousin" mutations, then humanity will continue.
if only remote populations of eskimos/innuits etc, but still we can survive without insects.
human "civilization"? I doubt it. In fact the biggest danger to humanity as defined above comes from the fact that many people will be staring starvation in the face, and they may just decide to fuck up the entire planet (i.e. nuclear weapons etc) out of spite.
what can you do?
accept that part of yearly crops will be eaten by insects, stop spraying everything with insecticide.
start using a bike instead of a car.
start eating locally grown food.
dress approapriately for the weather and use less heating/cooling.
eat less meat, especially beef.
take your vacation as close to home as possible, or make it so that you can travel there by train/bus/boat instead of plane.
lobby to have ocean transporters use sails in addition to fossil fuel based engines.
I doubt that insects as a whole will go away, even if we do go nuclear, but I don't think it's worth going through the years when they are reduced to only a few survivors that can then evolve into new species (like mammals did when the dinosaurs went byebye).
if we fight insecticide use and habitat loss due to climate change/agriculture, we can maybe save them.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:01PM (5 children)
Some of your points are reasonable, but not all. The biggest one is the "eat locally". While supporting local business is a good thing in principle, this does not make agriculture more efficient. Transport is the smallest part of agriculture, and all the rest benefits from mass production.
Anyway, all of these problems have the same root cause: too many people on the planet. Countries and cultures that still produce more than two children per mother need to be reigned in. Education will help with this automatically, but in some cases more stringent means may be required. China's one-child policy was not wrong. The simplest, if cold-blooded, method would be to cut off any and all international aid, as long as countries populations are exploding.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:17PM (2 children)
It might have been ok in theory. Then the people fucked it all up by deciding that they all wanted boys and started to mass-abort female fetuses. Now they have a really messed up population mix. China is hardly alone in this. Mother nature needs to start some sort of self-correcting world war to get rid of a lot of the male surplus.
Cutting aid to the developing world might work if one is just ok with large amounts of people starving to death, followed by them breeding even more offspring in the hope of at least one of them surviving -- sort of what they are already doing. So it might not really solve anything. Might be better in that case to just put some drugs in the food to prevent them from breeding. But then that would not go down well either as a solution.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:11PM (1 child)
Exactly - thank you.
The thing that reduces population is LESS poverty and MORE aid. The useless fucks that brought you austerity (only for the poor) are now shipping it abroad. It's really almost as if devastation and WW3 are really the goal. (Endtimes perhaps?)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @03:07AM
Less poverty? Sure, and better education is a part of that mix, and a great predictor of reduced population fertility when the education is extended to women specifically.
More aid? You're going to have to be one hell of a lot more specific about this. Lots of aid has been shown to be counterproductive because:
a) Food aid in particular tends to reduce the incentive to farm, thus wrecking local economies
b) Food and financial aid alike have an ugly way to enrich strongmen, and thereby either fail to improve or outright worsen the lot of the common populace
c) Industrial aid ends up with massive debts, as a rule, usually cash losses on the parts of investors, and is a tool of geopolitics anyway
Could you be a little more detailed?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:51PM
Tommy [wikipedia.org], is that you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2019, @03:07AM
Search for the research of Hans Rosling.
The two things you can do to have the biggest impact on population growth are:
1. Give women washing machines for their laundry.
2. Give them western television programming.
Seriously, look it up.
Easy to do, low cost. A hell of a lot cheaper and quicker than that high-falutin education everyone keeps going on about.
(Baby steps. We'll get to the education problem next.)
(Score: 2, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:17PM (1 child)
You sound like my daughter. It's amazing, she buys almost all the food for her family. She's into the Organic Food, big time. And the Locally Grown. She goes to the Farmers' Market, she buys the Avocado. And the Banana. From the guys that grow them. And New York is amazing that way, it's a place where almost anything will grow beautifully.
Bug spray, give me a little bug spray. Now they don't want us to do the spray. You know you’re not allowed to use bug spray anymore because it affects the ozone, you know that, right? I said, you mean to tell me, because you know bug spray’s not like it used to be, it used to be real good. Today you put the bug spray on, it’s good for 12 minutes, right? So if I take bug spray and I spray it in my hotel, which is all sealed, you’re telling me that affects the ozone layer? "Yes," they tell us. I say no way, folks. No way. No way. That’s like a lot of the rules and regulations you people have in the mines, right? It’s the same kind of stuff.
Let me tell you, we spray very heavily. And we're going to keep spraying heavily. Because it works. Used to work a lot better and we want to get back to that one. Because there are still folks that check in, they stay the night. And when they check out they say, "oh, bedbugs, so horrible!" And they'll show you the bites. The so-called bites. Because they don't want to pay. They want a free night. In one of the world's most luxurious hotels. Crooked! And I wish the bedbugs would all die. Why don't they die? So those bedbug scammers will have to come up with a new scam!!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Snow on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:05PM
As golf course owner, you should know all about the negative effects of bug spray!
I hope you aren't using it on your beautiful, beautiful greens!! [iastate.edu]-
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:46PM (2 children)
I am reminded of an argument I had with someone... I can't remember if it was here or slashdot... but their point was that humans couldn't be the cause of a mass extinction event because things haven't died off yet.
The fact that all the signs of an impending catastrophie are here, wasn't good enough. Well, he sure showed me, didn't he!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:22PM (1 child)
See that long trail of gasoline that starts a few feet away over there? Now observe as I light a match and toss it over there.
There is no way that that fire is going to follow the gasoline all around the room and eventually come to the puddle of gas that I'm standing in and soaked myself in.
I would not possibly be the cause of my own demise.
And neither could the human race's greed and selfishness be the cause of its own demise.
There. Convinced now? Humanity cannot destroy itself, because it has not done so, up to this point. And I'm still standing here and that flame has not yet reached me.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:47PM
You are doing it wrong! Use more matches to accelerate the process. Humans are notoriously impatient. So, get lightin' yourself, come on!
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:11PM (3 children)
Wasn't cockroaches supposed to outlive us all? Weaklings.
I didn't read the article, paywalled and all that -- plus I don't really know much about these kinda bugs. But it seems their study is infact more of a meta-study where they take data from other peoples studies and then try and find commonality. I'm sure if one only wanted, and knew enough about biology, could rip this study (or review) a new orifice or two. One probably doesn't even need to know anything about biology and could just rip them a new one purely on statistical grounds. Extrapolation from data based from 73 different report ... yickes. They could probably find support for almost anything. It really doesn't take much probably to blame it all on pollution and "climate change" as the main culprits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @04:41PM (1 child)
From the summary:
I'm pretty sure that much less than 60% of all insect species are cockroaches, so no contradiction there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @06:33PM
If humans go extinct then the roaches will have a hard time. No trash, no poop, no tasty humanade...
(Score: 2) by Pav on Tuesday February 12 2019, @11:52PM
Both cockroaches and sinapsids (ie. the mammal-like reptiles we're decended from) almost became extinct during the permian extinction event... the so called "great dying". Amusingly coal "fly ash" has been discovered from ocean deposits layed down during that time. They believe a monumental flood basalt event in Siberia burned through massive coal deposits releasing CO2, sulphur and other polutants causing catastrophic global warming and ocean acidification.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:46PM (2 children)
Reading that in the abstract (my emphasis) - *clickbait* - "qualification should be supported by quantification."
If there's a non-pay link, I'd be happy to provide a proper review...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @04:57PM
tl;dr
The numbers were pulled from Al Gore's arse.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:07PM
You can always direct download a paper by doing this: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.01.020 [sci-hub.tw]
Sometimes the domain changes from .tw to whatever else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @03:49PM (4 children)
Don't know anything about this in particular but in the past I've looked into these types of claims and all the numbers were generated only after a long chain of questionable assumptions.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:16PM (3 children)
Thanks for putting in the effort. In support of your position, I overheard a man at the pub saying he doesn't believe in that nonsense either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:27PM (2 children)
Imagine if you knew that "discoveries" like this typically resulted from monks praying and writing down the ideas "god" told them.
It wouldn't necessarily make what they said wrong, but in general you would just dismiss it after awhile.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @06:36PM (1 child)
True, but I wouldn't dismiss a bunch of monks writing down ideas after collecting data and doing their best to model reality. I might not take it as the gospel truth, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
Seriously, WTF is wrong with you anti-science people?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @07:26PM
I don't dismiss it, it could be right or wrong, who knows? It is just not worth the cost-benefit to learn more based on what I see here.
I've read thousands, probably tens of thousands of academic "science" journal articles. Over 99% are BS, so most of that time was wasted (but if you don't know about what everybody who ever published anything on the topic thought what you say doesn't matter).
Get this paper on sci-hub. How many of the numbers come from observations/experiments that were independently replicated? If any theories/models are mentioned, how many were verified by comparing the predictions to new data?
From that (I bet both are zero, or perhaps there are one or two out of hundreds or thousands) I think you will get your answer: this stuff isn't science. If the headline said they made a (precise, not that number of species "went down") prediction and then tested it, then I would care.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday February 12 2019, @08:50PM
I knew we shouldn't listen to those who were admonishing us to eat insects.
Washington DC delenda est.