Having grown up in the mid-West, I have very clear memories of my dad's station-wagon driving through clouds of big, fat bugs which hit the windshield like hail. I remember Dad needing to clean the windshield every thirty miles or so during various periods of the summer.
Now, I can legitimately drive all summer and only need to wash my windshield if I park beneath trees with birds or aphids in them.
Where did all of those bugs go?
One group of people claim there are as many bugs as there ever were and attribute the perception of fewer bugs to modern vehicles being more streamlined and the bugs smoothly pole-vault out of the way as the air flows over the vehicle.
Academics* looked into the problem and they boiled it down to no less than eleven "important" causes:
- Habitat destruction due to intensification of agriculture
- Urbanization
- Pesticide use
- Introduction of new species
- Climate change
- Eutrophication (depleting oxygen in the water)
- Pollution
- Genetically engineered plants
- UV radiation
- Ozone depletion
- Light pollution
The first cause plays out in a couple of different ways. As marginal areas come under-the-plow, the more diverse ecosystems are simplified into just a few different species of plants. Much of the production of the diverse systems was consumed by bugs and wild animals. The entire point of agriculture is to create a surplus that is harvested by humans and not bugs and wild animals.
The other way it plays out is that modern, economics-driven agriculture is rarely as diverse as earlier, subsistence-based agriculture. The subsistence model have very few inputs entering or leaving the farm. Most of the nutrients were quickly cycled and didn't leave the farm. The modern model trucks in nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous from Algeria, Canada and Morocco and then trucks corn (with the embedded NPK) to feedlots in the high-plains of the US, dairies in California, to turkey batteries in tidewater Carolinas or to Poland to raise hogs. Those nutrients do not get returned to the farm.
Even though the hobby-farmer or the sundowner are not "economical" in the monetary sense and are perceived as "quaint" in the same way that Revolutionary War re-enactors are, those kinds of farmers generally have a much richer tapestry of ecosystems and a much quicker cycling of nutrients than mono-culture agriculture.
The loss of on-farm animals (cattle, sheep, hogs, chickens, horses) and the loss of fence-rows and hay-in-rotation may be the biggest reasons why my windshield stays clean.
*The current belief is that areas close to Universities (and are therefore convenient to study) lost 75% of the flying insect biomass in the last 25 years. There is no data going back to the 1960s.
We have the same experience with lack of windshield impacts with bugs as well. That clear - yellowish smear. I attribute to roadsides being much less empty of fields and now occupied with building - structure which cause bug populations in roadsides to be much less.
ReplyDeleteI still see fire flies at night, but much less than before. Birds of many species in days past - now gone. Butterfly migrations (man - the Monarch migrations were very cool !) but they too are noticed much less. At least this is what my native deep south Texas (RGV) is at the moment.
One of the suspects in the declining numbers of Monarch Butterflies in the Eastern US was the use of 2,4-d on public property like roadsides and medians in Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. Those are the states where the migrating Monarchs create the generation that continues south to complete the migration. Loss of milkweed plants created a major bottleneck.
DeleteI might be wrong, but I am under the impression that KOAM Departments of Transportation are selectively NOT spraying areas known to have milkweed.
I have a clump of milkweed every summer on our farm on the edge of a field next to the gravel road that had Monarchs in it for over 30 years. None the last three years and I carefully protect it. No idea why.---ken
DeleteERJ, I have noticed the same thing - and in more than one geographic location.
ReplyDeleteThe general fact that we do not practice regenerative agriculture on so many levels essentially dooms us at some point on a large scale. The ability to import cheap fertilizers relies on cheap energy and economies of shipping.
Retired truck driver here.
ReplyDeleteI noticed starting about 25 years ago, that wherever there were row crops planted, the bugs became fewer over the years. When I drove the forested areas of N Wisconsin, U P of Michigan, N Minnesota, and Western Ontario, there were still plenty of bugs.
I concluded that it was likely due to all the sprays the fields were getting.