Interesting. So maybe it wasn't just my imagination.
I remember butterflies being everywhere in Spring in this area when I was a kid. Fields and air full of 'em for weeks. Monarchs especially, but all kinds. I haven't seen that kind of thing even once in probably a decade, at least.
And the windshield thing. I hadn't really thought about it, but I remember my parents having to scrape the windshield just about every gas-station stop to get rid of several really bad splatters. Now I rarely get even one bad one, and almost never need to scrape, even on road trips.
I always just chalked it up to the "there were more thunderstorms when I was a kid" phenomenon (that a large number of people will remember there being more thunderstorms when they were children, despite studies suggesting the number of thunderstorms has remained constant).
It's not really surprising to me though, at least in my neighborhood in Toronto there has been massive urbanization; there are no more wild fields. Parks and even hydro fields (land under power lines) are being mowed bi-weekly, destroying any chance of native plant biodiversity. I haven't seen a mosquito in literally years. But to be fair once you leave the city, not much has changed; insects are still plentiful.
I'd be wary to draw any conclusions from this study, since the areas the researchers set up their monitoring stations may have experienced a similar level of urbanization.
> I always just chalked it up to the "there were more thunderstorms when I was a kid" phenomenon
That's a thing? I thought that since the house I grew up in at the time didn't have A/C and had a leaky roof just meant that thunderstorms were more important to the family. Not having A/C meant that the windows were open on hot days when thunderstorms were more likely, then had to hurry and close them when one happened. The leaky roof meant get some buckets and towels.
Merely conjecturing; if memory recall is correlated with the intensity of emotions during events, kids with their heightened sense of wonder are probably more likely to remember rare events like thunderstorms.
And mine. BTW I was wondering what use will be that famous "ark" they're building with seeds - in a world without insects for pollination? Like having a backup of half of your data only...
Edit: clarified.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like eating insects is all the rage when it comes to talking about the future of food...?
Mid 90's - Mid 2000s: We did a 10 hour road trip twice every summer to visit family, and always joked about how the car had a mustache because the front bumper was peppered with bugs.
2007/2011 - During college, I used to do 6-8 hour road drives up and down Florida to visit friends and we used to catch a butterfly or 2 on the window.
2011-2013 - After graduating college, I made a few more of those drives and I can't remember catching a butterfly in the windshield wipers. I've never had the bumper-mustache problem since becoming a driver, either.
The only bug that seems to thrive now-a-days are mosquitos. Still plenty of those in Florida... probably less, but I don't have any good childhood reference
I wonder how global this trend. Driving on a highway in southern Europe in summer made me realize why white cars were not popular there. My car was visibly covered in blood of killed insects after 500 km of scenic road.
When you say "blood", do you mean a red substance? I'm asking because insects don't have blood- they have haemolymph which doesn't contain hemoglobin and is not coloured red (it's actually bluish). If the colour of the substance on your car was red, it was probably human blood from mosquitoes.
Those little flying bastards are plentiful in southern Europe and they can get real fat on human blood and make a surprisingly bloody mess when splatted. They would definitely leave a mark on a white car if it hit them.
I've noticed a decline in Monarchs here in Northern California as well. The very few I do see are colored differently than when I was a kid.
They used to be a deep orange hue, but now they are all a pasty yellow color. At first I thought it was a different species. I've mentioned it to other people, but they don't really care. They're more interested in upgrading their cell phone or checking their instabook.
The monarch population is actually declining to dangerous levels. Scientists believe this is due to the decline of the milkweed plant which is the monarch's main source of food.
I was wondering the same thing. Butterflies, and even many dragonflies in a big Polish city where I live. I chalked it down to "we had more flowers". But it seems global ? And even in Poland, which uses relatively little pesticides ?
> No one can prove that the pesticides are to blame for the decline, however.
No one can prove that insecticides are responsible for killing insects? If only someone would do some sort of study on this, or perhaps if we somehow had some way to know the purpose or function of pesticides and insecticides.
Pesticides contain warnings about being carcinogenic, related to brain and heart failure, harmful to children, deadly to pets, harmful to plants, and destroys helpful bacteria.
But other than that, it's part of a balanced breakfast.
Reminds me of the "firefighters" in fahrenheit 451
The issue of pesticides was considered and some countries did pass legislation based on it. While intuitively the connection between pesticides and insect population collapse looks attractive, the facts are a little more murky.
Some scientists suspected that neonectide pesticides were linked to the decline in insect populations, particularly bees. Despite the fact that this connection was not fully proven, many EU countries banned the use of neonectide pesticides in 2013.
While bee populations recovered slightly, the issue is that bee populations started recovering before the ban was even issued. Also the recovery was also felt in Canada, where there was no pesticide ban 1. This suggests that the decline in bee population was more related to climate than to insecticides . . . suggesting similar possibilities for other insects.
Yes insecticides kill insects but I don't think that's enough to conclude that they are causing the general massive collapse in insect colonies - which is a relatively recent phenomenon, while insecticides have been used for quite some time.
Pesticide sales went up 13% between 2006-2007[1] (current growth is about the same[2]). While pesticides have existed for a while, their use is growing quickly and the chemicals used are getting stronger and more refined. This same wild growth pattern is copied by drugs - the other chemical market.
Compared to 30 years ago, drugs and pesticides are everyday items now.
This could easily explain the more recent detection of insects like bees being affected as levels of pesticides in the environment could now have reached high enough levels.
The claim was that the generic actor 'pesticides' could not be proven to be the cause of the general decline for these specific tests and locations. No one was asserting that insecticides could not be proven to be responsible for killing insects.
The statement is very amusing though since vast sections of our country use pesticides for their intended purpose. It is not hard to find pesticide traces in every part of our country. Especially near cities where almost every landscape and pond is sprayed.
On the coast it is very common to see "foggers" driving around spraying pesticides in the air hoping to flood the area with enough chemicals to kill all the mosquitoes.
... and two minutes later the name of the brave person will be manure. Not because one's egregiously wrong, not because of lack of ethics, but because it'll be affecting many powerful people and their emissaries in the academia. Common story in the GMO industry. Oh, and it doesn't hurt to be prepared for all the ad hominem hit pieces: "Left loony" "commie" "anti-science" ...
The conquering grounds for the corporatocracy is also the developing world, a place which naively swallows whatever any of the reigning superpowers throw at it (hint: India is not/never will be a superpower). Very sad this.
So I mean, if you're trying to take a stand against pesticides, you should _be in favor_ of the Bt-toxin GMOs. The GMOs that produce their own pesticide are great, because there ends up being _less_ pesticide in the field in general. (The alternative to having a plant producing their own GMOs is that, obviously, they'll just dump the field with pesticides.) Bt-toxin is also fairly specific to which insects it effects: https://gmoanswers.com/ask/how-can-adding-lot-toxic-poison-p... (this is a pro-gmo site, but the guy answering is still an Associate Professor, which has to count for something.)
Please note that organic foods still use pesticides, even though the pesticides come from "natural sources". Keep in mind that "natural sources" doesn't mean anything-- arsenic is naturally occurring. :) https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/httpblogs...
"The mass of insects collected by monitoring traps in the Orbroicher Bruch nature reserve in northwest Germany dropped by 78% in 24 years". That number is scary. If that number is even close to the same across the world, the planet is in more trouble than anyone realizes
They studied 100 sites, but said only 12 showed declining populations. Only for one site did they give a percentage change. From the article:
[in]"one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by nearly 80%"
What about the other 88 sites? What about the percentage decline in the other 11 declining sites? How were the sites chosen? How have the sites changed over the years?
This is alarmist ecological drama. Some readers on this website are extrapolating the results from a single experiment at a single site to the entire world. And I think Science magazine did a poor job of reporting this correctly.
Here's a link to another alarmist post about this study. Note the url:
The authors of the paper are doing good work, but the alarmism here on HN far exceeds the scope of any validity of the original paper. People should be wary of their confirmation bias.
And if a HN reader cannot make a reasonable judgment about the scope of this study, I doubt that (s)he would be successful in an enterprise such as Machine Learning, given that science and statistics are the very basis of ML.
OTOH Woody Allen once said, and I begrudgingly admit he has a strong point, "Showing up is 80 percent of life".
People really shouldn't forget this is what we're up against. For those that don't know, this is what Trump said (0).
Given the rest of the Republican's resistance in stemming pollution, CO2, NOx's, plastics, and other nasties, we have to do this ourselves. I look at the boom of comments on Tesla's Powerwall and solar roof as a great way to help. We also have to do what we can in our communities and state to turn this tide..
We have to make this a National Security issue, and a State Security issue. Who cares about wildlife? But most certainly the farmers care about weather. And everyone affected cares about oil spills from pipelines. It's time to re-frame this, and challenge this on the same plank of "Think of the Children", primarily because that approach does seem to work.
I wonder what the long-term impacts of so many homeowners applying lawncare chemicals will have. It just seems like a bad idea to spray chemicals all over the lawn, yet so many do it it. I also wonder how many are over-applying, thus making matters worse. Any thoughts on how to change people's mindsets. It seems herd mentality has taken over, even though most likely know this is not healthy or environmentally friendly.
I can attest to lawns being the enemy. For many years I grew a dense native plant yard and literally have tens of thousands of pictures of terrestrial arthropods ok a lot of dupes of individuals but also amazing biodiversity and multispecies and social phenomena like ant symbiosis which I wrote about here: http://www.elegantcoding.com/2016/05/my-ant-symbiosis-storie... and opiliones social behavior. It was amazing. They only problem is that it is illegal and I was forced to destroy all of my native plants by my local municipality. As a result the insects disappeared.
I doubt it has much to do with homeowners and lawn care. If anything, it has to do with the thousands of square miles of cropland that gets sprayed for insects each year.
Then again, you get outside any of the cities and the windshield gets bug splattered as always.
Trillions upon trillions of insects versus humanity? I'd bet on the insects.
This belief that nature has control over the planet is sadly mistaken. If humanity wanted to, it could nuke the planet eliminating all insect life. Humanity has invented things far beyond the reach of nature and far beyond what nature can cope with.
"it could nuke the planet eliminating all insect life"
We'd have to spend a while building a supply of big cobalt-salted bombs because the nuclear arsenals we've actually had have come nowhere near to the level required to wipe out all people let alone all insects.
This is just entirely untrue. We have plenty of nuclear warheads, enough to nuke the thousand most populated cities several times over. All humanity would be dead or dying. those not killed immediately have to deal with fallout and new weather patterns caused by huge amounts of dust blocking the sky.
It is conceivable a few might live, but it is also entirely possible the survivors would be too irradiated to sustain a breeding populations. Vast plant populations would die off, only those not directly blasted and able to survive a few years of artificial global winter survive. This presumes the dust is also non-reflective, because if it lowers the Earth's albedo enough it could trigger an ice age. If that happens then pretty much no individuals survive the triple threat of nuclear blasting, perpetual winter and loss of vegetation, unless they have some uncommon radiation resistance and incredibly low nutrition requirements. In this last paragraph was I talking about humans or insects? Doesn't matter; the cost of nuclear war is too high for us to talk about it lightly, because it is an awesome power that can destroy us if used lightly.
I think even with nuclear weapons we'd have a hard time eliminating ALL the microfauna out there. Of course the recovery time would be measured in hundreds of millions of years at that point.
I suggest you take a look on what a big asteroid impact can do. (You can start on the one 65M years ago, it is a good example.)
We are on the path, but we still didn't create something that Nature couldn't outdo. And then there are those interstellar (e.g. supernovas) and pan-galactic (e.g. gamma ray bursts) killers...
> Trillions upon trillions of insects versus humanity? I'd bet on the insects.
Yup, we'll just be left with the insects that can adapt quickly - cockroaches, aphids, ants - and not the insects we need/want - bees, butterflies, etc.
Cockroaches, aphids, ants are still insects we need and want. Having the distinction between good and bad insects is part of the problem. Similar problem with the distinction with good plants (grass) and bad plants (weeds). More diversity is healthier.
And if the bees continue their die-off, they'll take a majority of the mammals and insects with them, because as much as 80% of plants are pollinated by these creatures. Goodbye food chain.
As if that's not enough, imagine global warming if even a 50% decline in CO2 converting plantlife were to happen.
Lawns, in general, are not environment-friendly because of the need to use fuel to cut it and for spraying chemicals to keep the weeds and mosquitoes out. I lost the battle with my HOA to completely take the lawn out and instead just plant some useful trees. People don't realize how much money they spend on a 30 year basis to keep the lawns healthy.
I don't understand why more people don't use push reel lawnmowers. I've used one ever since I stopped living in apartments, and they are not that difficult to use. They are lighter-weight than their gas-powered cousins, and you don't have to fill it up with gas every damn time you mow. Also it doesn't make 9000dB of noise.
Push reel lawnmowers perform poorly unless the grass is completely dry. If the grass is damp, the mower doesn't get enough traction and slides. So, here in the PNW, I switched to a corded electric mower and now I'm not so restricted on when I can mow.
same here. Switched to a modern reel mower* and my poor thin lawn has benefited. it cuts like scissors, not like an axe, and it's both small and nearly silent so mowing the lawn isn't as stressful as before, what with fumes and noise. Not saying I love mowing the lawn (it's still work, after all), but it's a very different more pleasant experience compared to a gas mower, and just as quick.
The cordless mowers appear to be getting better and better. With my new yard full of beds, trees, and other obstacles, half the mowing time is time managing the cord. So, I'm buying a Ryobi battery operated 21" lawnmower.
Depends on the size of your lawn. If you have a little postage-stamp lawn, reel mowers are great. If you have a sizeable lawn (the kind you really need a riding mower for), then you're looking at hours and hours of backbreaking work every week.
The big problem with reel mowers is that they only work well when the grass is already short. If the grass grows too tall (which isn't that much), the mower just pushes the grass over, or gets bogged down in it. So you have to be absolutely religious in cutting the grass on time. I've used reel mowers at a couple of houses I've lived in; they were great when the grass area of the yard was tiny and the grass didn't grow too quickly. But where I am now, there's just no way.
Agreed. Also, apart from mowing, a lawn can really be as easy or hard to maintain as you choose. Mine it kinda bumpy, has several patches of moss and has plenty of dandelions; I don't think "fixing" these problems will ever become enough of a priority to get it done. And of course, I'd never use chemicals of any kind for the lawn.
Got one of this for my lawn about 8 years ago and it was probably the best investment i've made for the lawn. Not only does it remove the maintenance but it also keeps the grass cut to a certain length, drying out the weeds and fertilising the grass with the smaller cut off parts. On top of that it's electric.
I agree, trees would be better but in your situation i can only recommend it.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, mine been running for 8 years with only 1 battery replacement and the occasional razor blade replacement. The climate where i live is really rainy and it has survived so far.
Nowadays they start at around $1300 for 10000 square feet and goes upward in price the larger lawn you have. But with that price you also never have to attend your lawn again.
I get loads of flies, wasps, bees, spiders, butterflies, snails and slugs; in my back 'garden' every year.
The garden is badly maintained; located in a town in highly polluted south east England; it features long grass; random weeds; stinging nettles; and brambles; this green stuff just grows and I occasionally hack it down again.
There is no way a lawn mower would even work; I use a scythe.
One issue not mentioned in the article is mono cultures and foreign plant species. With forign plant species the issue is that there are no insects that have evolved off them, and with mono-cultures the issue is that they may only support a small subset of insets. One thing people can do is plant native plants in their gardens. This creates an island of bio diversity.
Lots of speculation present in the article, which points out the need for some good science to determine whether we're facing an imminent insect population collapse or its "business as usual".
As for the cars...
More cars and more car miles this year than in yesteryear means fewer bugsplats per vehicle mile. I would assume that, once a vehicle has swept past a volume, the bug population in that volume is restored by a "random walk/fly" process that depends on the average number of insects per unit volume in the area surrounding the highways.
Also vehicles pass in clumps depending on traffic patterns and time of day, so a bug that might have splatted on your vehicle is instead swept up by a driver in front of you.
Over time, insect populations for flying insects near roadways may decline, given the death rate is higher there. OTOH that may vary depending on whether the species is attracted/repelled by light, heat, roadkill, fumes, etc.
As for the article...
The article said: "the Krefeld Entomological Society... in 2013 .. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by nearly 80%. "
Note the word "one" as in one of "100 nature reserves in western Europe". The article continues:
"Through more direct comparisons, the group—which had preserved thousands of samples over 3 decades—found dramatic declines across more than a dozen other sites."
So, perhaps 12 of 100 sites show a "dramatic decline". That's about 8% of sites, so what about the other 88 sites? Did numbers there go up, decline or what?
Like the article says, time for some good science. But NOT time for alarmism. The sky is not falling.
All-in-all, pretty anecdotal stuff that could also attract some fun modeling. But first maybe, let's get some good solid science.
"Over that time the group, the Krefeld Entomological Society, has seen the yearly insect catches fluctuate, as expected. But in 2013 they spotted something alarming. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by nearly 80%. Perhaps it was a particularly bad year, they thought, so they set up the traps again in 2014. The numbers were just as low. Through more direct comparisons, the group—which had preserved thousands of samples over 3 decades—found dramatic declines across more than a dozen other sites."
"The mass of insects collected by monitoring traps in the Orbroicher Bruch nature reserve in northwest Germany dropped by 78% in 24 years."
"The results show that, in the same two areas, sampled in the years 1989 and 2013, there was a dramatic fall in
the number of flying insects.
Using the same traps, in the same areas, significant reductions of insect populations, of more than 75%, were
found.
Our data confirms, that in the areas studied, less than 25% of the original number of flying insects collected in
1989, were still present in 2013.
Orboicher Bruch Area
The Orboicher Bruch, to the Northwest of Krefeld, is a designated Nature Reserve of around 100 hectares (220
acres). Due to the reserve’s relatively remote location and its rugged landscape, intensive farming came to the
area only recently."
> 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1—with some pretty sleek lines. "I used to have to wash my car all the time. It was always covered with insects." Lately, Martin Sorg, an entomologist here, has seen the opposite: "I drive a Land Rover, with the aerodynamics of a refrigerator"
It wouldn't surprise me at all if a modern Land Rover was more aerodynamic than a 1969 Mustang. The Land Rover wouldn't look it of course, but the 1969 Mustang had a pretty steep windshield and a front that probably did lots of crazy stuff to the air:
The Land Rover in question is probably a Defender, with a design substantially similar to the original model from the '50s. It really is a refrigerator on wheels.
When I was a kid there were a ton of grasshoppers around. Now kids don't even know what they are.
A related observation I have made is that ALL the frogs have disappeared leaving only toads. I recall reading somewhere that this is due to UV radiation that kills off the eggs.
Where in the world are you? There's deer all over the damn place here, despite that it's a city where you wouldn't really expect off the top of your head to find them. And the last time I went wandering deer trails - which was last week, actually - I saw plenty of grasshoppers, including a couple the size of my thumb, along with a half dozen or so deer, one rather suspicious fox, a Cooper's hawk soaring overhead, several small furry things which might've made the hawk a good supper, and more midges, gnats, noseeums, and general tiny flies-up-your-nose things than I could guess within two orders of magnitude. Oh, and one large bush that I'm pretty sure contained a beehive, although I wasn't about to approach any closer once I noticed it was humming!
Most amphibians (frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, etc.) are getting wiped out by a skin infection that has spread around the world. The toads in your area might be resistant. The less-aquatic behavior might help.
Could the windshield thing have something to do with more cars on the roads? Instead of 1 car hitting 100 insects, 100 cars are each hitting 1 insect? When I was a kid there were a lot fewer cars on the highways. I grew up in the Western US and I remember that on road trips my dad (who was in the military) would often pull off on the side of the free way, set up some targets, and do some target shooting with us kids. It wasn't a big deal back then with few people on the roads, but if someone was to pull out some rifles right off the side of the freeway nowadays...!
I'm incredibly fortunate to live in the French countryside (Bourgogne). I can go out the front door, lie on the grass and witness JFK-scale traffic of insects. It's really astounding the amount of life around my house.
If any of you care about wildlife, you can actively contribute to its preservation just by buying a piece of land and letting it be.
If you're not doing so already, please compost organic waste. For the average household, it's about one-third of your trash. If you want to step it up, you can collect compost from coffee shops, restaurants, and grocers. You can use all that mass to build a hugelkultur, which becomes an oasis for soil organisms, insects, and birds. It also gives you a fertile spot to grow some beautiful and/or edible plants.
Interesting article. I live in Costa Rica in the country side in the mountain and we are experiencing the same issue here. Back in the date, there were really big grasshoppers and all kind of colorful bugs. Now they no longer exists. I tried to blame the bad agricultural practices the do a heavy usage of pesticides.
It may also be that with urbanization people are driving slower on average (EPA urban drive cycle for MPG ratings averages ~20MPH). It's hard to kill bugs when you're stuck in traffic.
On a trip "up north" my car still needs a good washing to get all the bugs off when I get home. I still found TFA interesting, and the traps are another data point.
The planet isn't dying. The planet is just a ball of rock running loops around the gravity well of the closest star.
We are, however, in the midst of the sixth great extinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction . The evidence for this is pretty dang convincing, even independent of things like global climate change, and it has been going on for quite a while now, starting with the disappearance of mega-fauna from the American continent.
If you do find anyone attempting to "minimize" this fact, you might try pointing something out: each prior great extinction was accompanied by a replacement of the "dominant" species on the Earth. As the current reigning "dominant" species, this seems like something that might be very concerning to humans...
> each prior great extinction was accompanied by a replacement of the "dominant" species on the Earth. As the current reigning "dominant" species, this seems like something that might be very concerning to humans...
Except this time we are the cause of the extinction. I think that's a pretty important difference.
I think the jury's still out on whether or not this is actually different from the past extinctions. Yes, there was an asteroid impact around the time the dinosaurs went extinct, but every year there's some new paper or some new bit of evidence that points to the possibility that the asteroid wasn't the only factor in the K-Pg extinction. It's quite possible that dinosaurs had some role in their own extinction as well.
What is different, in this case, is that in all past cases if the dominant species played a role in bringing about a mass extinction it was almost certainly an accident. We have the (possibly small) chance of potentially averting our own replacement as dominant species, if we're smart...
For the person on the street who does not even care about the details of ocean acidification or atmospheric CO2 concentrations, "the planet is dying" is a sufficiently strong and useful statement.
You're doing exactly what I'm saying playing with semantics. For all intents and purposes on the timescales that we actually care about, the planet is dying.
The planet; as-in this rocky, water-world orbiting Sol, will exist for BILLIONS of years.
The _life_ on this planet AS WE KNOW IT is dying, along with ourselves. That is a huge difference and one that needs to be repeated with as much clarity as possible.
Will homo-sapiens still exist in 10,000 years? maybe.
100,000 years?
doubtful.
1,000,000 years?
nope.
Will single-celled life forms, virus, prions, etc still exist?
Probably.
This entire pyramid that we have existed at the top of is brutally fragile and will not continue as it is forever. To repeat one of most favorite quotes:
"Nature is in a constant state of recovering from the previous disaster."
This is the distinction. Something as immutable as granite can't die. We can barely wrap our brains around the concept of water being able to erode such permanence. How can you expect them to believe such histrionics? But life, that is more delicate and temporary then a snowflake in the Sahara.
>The planet; as-in this rocky, water-world orbiting Sol, will exist for BILLIONS of years.
This is not a productive comment. Everyone knows that "the planet" in an environmental context refers to the living things on Earth. It's an extremely common and universal metaphor. I have no idea why threads always have this one guy who feels like pointing out that the metaphorical language isn't literally true is insightful.
What bothers me more is that when people say "we're destroying the planet" or "the planet is dying" they are not sitting there thinking that the literal physical solid rock of the planet is somehow going to go to pieces and disappear.
What they are saying is that ecosystem which is on the planet is going to hell including the ability for said ecosystem to support life. Either all life, or more specifically the ability to support human life.
No one, no one, is thinking the literal planet is going to go boom.
>The planet; as-in this rocky, water-world orbiting Sol, will exist for BILLIONS of years.
>The _life_ on this planet AS WE KNOW IT is dying, along with ourselves.
Do you honestly think the person who said this doesn't understand that rocks aren't alive and will keep on existing whether there is life on it or not?
> The planet; as-in this rocky, water-world orbiting Sol, will exist for BILLIONS of years
Well, to nitpick a bit, not billions, for the "water-world" part. A few hundred million. It'll likely be quite parched by the 1 billion mark. Large, complex life forms are expected to have a Really Bad Time starting in the 500-600 million year range and shortly (geologically speaking) be gone entirely, assuming no acute planet-scale disasters before then.
Except that this time the disaster has probably little to do with nature. I'd add that, given current situation, 10,000 years seems a bit of a stretch. IMHO it's more like 100 years to the first "maybe" - or more probably even a fraction of that.
Sure, but the point is, the planet will be fine in 10k or 100k or 1M years, it'll still be orbiting the Sun. We probably won't be here any more because we'll have killed ourselves off, but that's OK, some other lifeforms can take over. Hopefully they'll be more successful.
> Will homo-sapiens still exist in 10,000 years? maybe. 100,000 years? doubtful. 1,000,000 years? nope.
If civilization does not collapse in the next mere 1,000 years, I'm very bullish on technology indistinguishable from magic, which would come very handy in assuring our continued survival well into the billions of years.
I remember reading about this some years ago and noticing the same windshield phenomenon. However, on a midwestern road trip a few weeks ago I noticed more and larger insect populations than I had in years. I wonder if increased organic farming and native flora projects have helped the biomass, if not the composition, of insects recover.
I was listening to a podcast about this folding microscope thing and they were talking about how this special "cell?" becomes a coil and is able to pull oxygen/becomes the 'lungs' for the insect... pretty neat.
If you get shot in the lungs lay on your side to try keep them open. PSA, I don't know I looked it up one day.
I remember butterflies being everywhere in Spring in this area when I was a kid. Fields and air full of 'em for weeks. Monarchs especially, but all kinds. I haven't seen that kind of thing even once in probably a decade, at least.
And the windshield thing. I hadn't really thought about it, but I remember my parents having to scrape the windshield just about every gas-station stop to get rid of several really bad splatters. Now I rarely get even one bad one, and almost never need to scrape, even on road trips.