We’re undoubtedly in the midst of another mass extinction, caused by human activity. Here’s another one that will freak you out:
Why is that supposed to freak me out? We cultivate animals for consumption and there’s not a 1:1 absorption/usage ratio. Now add insect biomass.
TIL there are animals called Ass
This makes no sense… It says pets aren’t included.
There are 500-700 million dogs worldwide. There are only just under 59 million horses.
I don’t believe any of this as a result.
Edit: and 35 million camels …and only a billion cattle. This entire thing is demonstrably bullshit.
Here’s a fun one about the fish:
And that’s only because whales and elephants are so massive.
It doesn’t help that we chose the meatiest animals to keep as livestock and then made sure they got even fatter than they started by any means necessary. One factory farmed cow probably weighs like 12 wild deer and a few wild rabbits for good measure.
When I was a kid, there used to be hundreds of fireflies in my backyard in the summer. Now, I get excited to see even two or three.
I blame the anti-mosquito pesticide services half my neighbors seem to hire.
Blame the raking of the leaves. No leaves in fall means no place for the eggs to be laid and no place for the larvae to grow. It’s another casualty to grass lawns. A “clean” nature is a place where nothing has room to thrive.
I’m 51, I spent the 90’s in Louisiana, and since my wife doesn’t fly, we have driven across the USA more times than we can count. In the 90’s, if you didn’t have a bug screen on your grill, the LoveBugs would clog your radiator and you would over heat. You also needed the windshield scrib and squeegee to scrub off the bug splatter every time you filled up. Now, you don’t need either of them.
I have been thinking about this recently. How much of this is lack of bugs vs aerodynamics. I mean back in the day we all drove big rectangles. I’m not denying the fact that it could be a mass extinction of bugs. Just curious.
Nope, seems to purely be the mass extinction thing. In fact:
modern cars hit more bugs, perhaps because older models push a bigger layer of air – and insects – over the vehicle.
200,050: a giant cockroach at the wheel.
This has bothered me for years. It’s a really strange thing to be telling younger relatives about how you legitimately could not drive any substantial distance without windshield cleaner at certain times of year. I remember them being plastered across the front edge of the hood and against the radiator after a long trip.
It’s one of the most visibly different things about the world today, IMO, and it’s a little eerie.
Not quite correct. The 2020 image should have a car completely covered in a dust of green pollen because city planners only planted male trees for decades because female trees would produce fruit or seed and be a “nuisance” and/or create trash/animal bait etc…
But if they only planted female trees, they would never get fertilized, so they wouldn’t produce fruit anyway… Or pollen.
Worst case scenario, they would produce fruit, and cities would still smell bad and have rodent problems. But without the allergies.
But girls are gross! We can’t let our city streets and parks be sissies!
(/s)
Oh, my. I hadn’t even noticed how much less I’ve had to clean my Windshield lately. That is a very bad sign…
It’s been a couple years since I’ve had to scrape the bugs from my windows.
I had to last week. It was the first time in years.
Couldn’t that also be new improvements in car aerodynamics where bugs simply glide off instead of getting squished?
Apparently, it’s the other way around, presumably because unaerodynamic cars pushed around a big air cone, which deflected the insects.
I wonder if the insects have just learned to avoid highways, is there any data to indicate a shift in behavior like that? I couldn’t find anything
Yeah the data indicates we’ve killed so many they haven’t been able to repopulate fast enough.
They’re not avoiding the roads there’s just not as many bugs flying around anymore
