Insects on windscreen

[Farmer Roy]

F
O
O
K

That!

those pics were taken about Dec last year, through our summer. The really interesting thing is that those 2 really thick bands of bugs you see on the windows corresponded with where a shadow from a cab pillar or windscreen wiper blade fell - they were all crowding in to that shaded area ( the runs there were over 1.5 kilometre long, so tractor facing one direction for a while )

 

[Cab-over Pete]

Well you can keep them all. And your spiders. And your snakes.

 

[Farmer Roy]

haha - actually, spiders are the good guys

 

[Brisel]

Even the Redbacks that hide in the dunny? The only way I could shift them was an Actellic smoke bomb in the toilet block. The place didn't smell too nice for a day or two but it made a change from the usual...

 

[wedge]

I keep reading about people who associate the reduced need to clean their windscreen with less insects in the farmed envirionment
My Land Rover has plenty on it when I can drive fast enough 50 mph or more
Is this because it is not the best aero dinamicly compared with the modern last 20 years wind tunnel designed cars and trucks
Simply the aerodynamic shape allows the insects to escape over the top of the car

I was speaking too an entomologist from rothamstead today and mentioned this
They have been using suction traps too measure insects for the last 50 years and have not noticed a decline in insects
He said the reason you see less insects on windscreens is more aerodynamic designs on cars and more cars on the roads
The study which found steep declines in insects was had mostly short data periods of a few years and was deeply flawed
They are due to publish there own data on this shortly but it would be unlikely to be widely reported as it wouldn't show steep declines on insects

 

[yellow belly]

I was speaking too an entomologist from rothamstead today and mentioned this
They have been using suction traps too measure insects for the last 50 years and have not noticed a decline in insects
He said the reason you see less insects on windscreens is more aerodynamic designs on cars and more cars on the roads
The study which found steep declines in insects was had mostly short data periods of a few years and was deeply flawed
They are due to publish there own data on this shortly but it would be unlikely to be widely reported as it wouldn't show steep declines on insects

Thank you I have plenty of insects on my td5discovery allways cleaning them off
But more modern cars have much cleaner windscreens
Science needs to prove course and effect just because something correlates it does not mean it is the cause
Very basic science well understood by the victorians
The average human in going backwards
A lot of people believe the world is flat the moon landing was fake

If most 99.9% of the human population died tomorrow it would no legal to the extinction of the human race

 

[Fallowfield]

I was speaking too an entomologist from rothamstead today and mentioned this
They have been using suction traps too measure insects for the last 50 years and have not noticed a decline in insects
He said the reason you see less insects on windscreens is more aerodynamic designs on cars and more cars on the roads
The study which found steep declines in insects was had mostly short data periods of a few years and was deeply flawed
They are due to publish there own data on this shortly but it would be unlikely to be widely reported as it wouldn't show steep declines on insects

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It looks like the picture isn't nearly as clear cut, nor as rosy, as you or your chum suggest.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

'The factors causing trouble for the hover flies, moths, and bumble bees in Germany are probably at work elsewhere, if clean windshields are any indication. Since 1968, scientists at Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research center in Harpenden, U.K., have operated a system of suction traps—12-meter-long suction tubes pointing skyward. Set up in fields to monitor agricultural pests, the traps capture all manner of insects that happen to fly over them; they are "effectively upside-down Hoovers running 24/7, continually sampling the air for migrating insects," says James Bell, who heads the Rothamsted Insect Survey.

Between 1970 and 2002, the biomass caught in the traps in southern England did not decline significantly. Catches in southern Scotland, however, declined by more than two-thirds during the same period. Bell notes that overall numbers in Scotland were much higher at the start of the study. "It might be that much of the [insect] abundance in southern England had already been lost" by 1970, he says, after the dramatic postwar changes in agriculture and land use.

The stable catches in southern England are in part due to constant levels of pests such as aphids, which can thrive when their insect predators are removed. Such species can take advantage of a variety of environments, move large distances, and reproduce multiple times per year. Some can even benefit from pesticides because they reproduce quickly enough to develop resistance, whereas their predators decline. "So lots of insects will do great, but the insects that we love may not," Black says.'

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insects-gone