Lack of insects

[Humble Village Farmer]

Maybe, we get a lot of the same articles here though and I don't know many farmers (livestock admittedly) that don't use insecticides.

Some wormers aren't supposed to be good for dung beetles apparently and there's not many sheep without insecticide on...

 

[Cowabunga]

As a fly fisherman there is a notable reduction in some flylife on rivers and reservoirs. Making a link to herbicides and pesticides is difficult to make, especially as there are residual chemical combinations that are possibly disruptive even if the base is not considered harmful.
I see many more different insects here in Wales than l did in the arable east of England, which is encouraging, but then spraying is the exception rather than the rule.
50 or 60. Years ago if my memory serves, insect life was common. Corn carts heaving with wildlife. Now nothing is in the trailer but grain.

It varies with the time of year and indeed from season to season. Some years when cutting grass at certain times the mower cover is absolutely heaving with insects and sometimes massive numbers of ladybirds. Other times and years, much fewer.
I think everything was better when we were young. The mind was considerably sharper.

Windscreen splatter is very seasonal and the main crop is in the early Autumn, assuming the car’s airflow is rather less aerodynamic than most. If you don’t believe that has a great insect-saving effect, try riding a bike fast with your mouth open during late Summer evenings and see how far you get before you’ve eaten your fill. Or try driving a tractor in the dark with your work lights on and you may find that there are clouds of the darned things.

Just because people say that there are fewer and that there are sheeple that will agree, it does not make it so.

 

[Paddington]

Plenty of flies here, flypapers going up tomorrow.

 

[Cowabunga]

Harvest of grass is different these days , years ago it would have been 1 cut of hay , now its 3 or 4 cuts of highly fertilised young grass , so all those insects that breed in grasses are taken out repeatedly, im sure thats where the grasshoppers / crickets go . as a kid walking home from school the lane was full of them , hardly hear one these days

Your hearing has deteriorated, as it does for everyone as they get older. Eyes also.
My intensive grassland is teaming with insect life and at times when the billions of spiders breed, whole fields and lying cows are covered with cobwebs with not an inch spare over hundreds of acres.

 

[Cowabunga]

Plenty of flies here, flypapers going up tomorrow.

First fly crop of the year here also.

 

[Humble Village Farmer]

It varies with the time of year and indeed from season to season. Some years when cutting grass at certain times the mower cover is absolutely heaving with insects and sometimes massive numbers of ladybirds. Other times and years, much fewer.
I think everything was better when we were young. The mind was considerably sharper.

Windscreen splatter is very seasonal and the main crop is in the early Autumn, assuming the car’s airflow is rather less aerodynamic than most. If you don’t believe that has a great insect-saving effect, try riding a bike fast with your mouth open during late Summer evenings and see how far you get before you’ve eaten your fill. Or try driving a tractor in the dark with your work lights on and you may find that there are clouds of the darned things.

Just because people say that there are fewer and that there are sheeple that will agree, it does not make it so.

It's also dangerous to dismiss what the experts say because what they are reporting is unpalatable....

 

[Cowabunga]

It's also dangerous to dismiss what the experts say because what they are reporting is unpalatable....

Experts like to sensationalise. Have you not noticed? In the last thirty to forty years many of them have gone from doing honest science to trying to justify their existence and raising income by sensationalising everything and anything that creates a panic amongst the gullible public.
Just this afternoon while spreading slurry there was a Radio 4 programme discussing investments and how to avoid investing in fossil fuels and anything they considered ‘unethical’ like livestock farming. Not a single person brought up the current energy price emergency where a slight shortage of fossil fuels has and will cause extreme poverty worldwide and even within the UK. Just before it there was indeed a news article highlighting UK fuel and food poverty. The irony was not lost on me.

 

[DaveGrohl]

It's also dangerous to dismiss what the experts say because what they are reporting is unpalatable....

Quality of study is everything though.

 

[DaveGrohl]

Perhaps the reason there's less bugs flying over roads is because there's far higher volumes of traffic. Over time the bugs would evolve to fly in areas where they don't get obliterated like some kind od bug holocaust.

Higher volumes of traffic = more emissions above and around each road. That alone could explain a lot.

 

[Humble Village Farmer]

Experts like to sensationalise. Have you not noticed? In the last thirty to forty years many of them have gone from doing honest science to trying to justify their existence and raising income by sensationalising everything and anything that creates a panic amongst the gullible public.
Just this afternoon while spreading slurry there was a Radio 4 programme discussing investments and how to avoid investing in fossil fuels and anything they considered ‘unethical’ like livestock farming. Not a single person brought up the current energy price emergency where a slight shortage of fossil fuels has and will cause extreme poverty worldwide and even within the UK. Just before it there was indeed a news article highlighting UK fuel and food poverty. The irony was not lost on me.

Agree but unfortunately an "expert" on ethical investing is not a scientist. I say unfortunately because once you realise it's a salesman talking to you, everything they say becomes grossly devalued.

Proper experts don't decide what the aim of a trial is before they start. Iyswim

 

[robs1]

Experts like to sensationalise. Have you not noticed? In the last thirty to forty years many of them have gone from doing honest science to trying to justify their existence and raising income by sensationalising everything and anything that creates a panic amongst the gullible public.
Just this afternoon while spreading slurry there was a Radio 4 programme discussing investments and how to avoid investing in fossil fuels and anything they considered ‘unethical’ like livestock farming. Not a single person brought up the current energy price emergency where a slight shortage of fossil fuels has and will cause extreme poverty worldwide and even within the UK. Just before it there was indeed a news article highlighting UK fuel and food poverty. The irony was not lost on me.

It is in an experts interest to create a demand for more research and we all know the number of times the red wine is good then red wine is bad or the dairy is bad then dairy is good research projects. Then of course the media love to grab a sensationalist headline

 

[Cowabunga]

Agree but unfortunately an "expert" on ethical investing is not a scientist. I say unfortunately because once you realise it's a salesman talking to you, everything they say becomes grossly devalued.

Proper experts don't decide what the aim of a trial is before they start. Iyswim

Unfortunately a vast number of so-called scientists and ‘experts’ do so these days, especially in the pseudo science involved with climate change modelling and forecasting and even in assessing historical data, a massive amount of which is manipulated [falsified] in order to fit a certain alarmist agenda, especially with respect to the many revisions to modelling. It debases science and scientists in general. The very many ‘last chances’ and missed deadlines for ‘catastrophe' makes them out to be nutty religious zealots of the same ilk as Jehovah’s Witnesses who have forecast the end of the World with set dates several times in my own lifetime, each time missed in case you hadn’t noticed. Whether it is a religion or climate science, the distinction gets smaller with each passing year, there are masses of people gullible enough to believe their drivel time after time, deadline after deadline.

 

[DaveGrohl]

I’m quietly amused by the notion that scientists are never wrong. Medical students used to be told on day one that 50% of what they’ll be taught will turn out to be wrong. Trouble is they just don’t know which 50%.

 

[yellow belly]

Driving to day on the hidike plenty of inspects hitting my windscreen

last aprils frosts reduced all inspects

my combinable arable farm has had no inscecticide used in the last 8 years there is no effective inscecticide that is legal

 

[Bongodog]

We have the worst greenfly infestation in the garden I can ever remember, lots of whitefly as well. Just driven alongside the river at dusk and windscreen covered in insects, once again very large amount for early May. Think the mild winter is going to make it a bad year for insects on crops.

 

[Forkdriver]

This article disagrees with .@cowabunga

UK's flying insects have declined by 60% in 20 years

The UK's insect population has fallen sharply as the invertebrates are affected by rising temperatures and fragmented habitats.

www.nhm.ac.uk

Plenty of other scientific papers agree.

 

[Cowabunga]

This article disagrees with .@cowabunga

UK's flying insects have declined by 60% in 20 years

The UK's insect population has fallen sharply as the invertebrates are affected by rising temperatures and fragmented habitats.

www.nhm.ac.uk

Plenty of other scientific papers agree.

They are trying to justify their own existence. With the climate getting generally slightly warmer and with verdant herbage growth as a result of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, insect life is probably more prolific, not less. If there was a 60% decline in reality, we would all have noticed it long ago.
Last year was particularly ‘bad’ for us with massive numbers of insects in this area. A 60% increase in numbers if anything but certainly a very noticeable increase over previous years. There’s less winter frost than there were in the years prior to 2000 or so, resulting in more favourable conditions for many species to survive in greater numbers to emerge sooner in Spring.

People with agendas will try and make the data fit their desired outcome. In this case they wish to create an ‘insect emergency’ frenzy to go along with their ‘climate apocalypse’, which never seems to arrive and probably never will to anything like the degree they claim within many hundreds of years, if then.

 

[wanton dwarf]

This article disagrees with .@cowabunga

UK's flying insects have declined by 60% in 20 years

The UK's insect population has fallen sharply as the invertebrates are affected by rising temperatures and fragmented habitats.

www.nhm.ac.uk

Plenty of other scientific papers agree.

Why would any insects breed just to splat itself on a car ? Darwinism is at work, those insects which fly close to the ground over stone or clear areas are being killed and replaced by those that don't.

 

[DaveGrohl]

This article disagrees with .@cowabunga

UK's flying insects have declined by 60% in 20 years

The UK's insect population has fallen sharply as the invertebrates are affected by rising temperatures and fragmented habitats.

www.nhm.ac.uk

Plenty of other scientific papers agree.

So they took 2 measurements of number plates 20 years apart and extrapolated. This is the study that the thread is about.

 

[Cowabunga]

So they took 2 measurements of number plates 20 years apart and extrapolated. This is the study that the thread is about.

While we all know that flying insects vary greatly from day to day, let along from week to week and season to season, mostly dependent on the weather and their breed cycle in both the short term and annually.

Just take aphids in cereals or leatherjackets in grassland or first cereals after a long term lay as examples. Anyone with some experience under their belts will know that some years there are hardly any and the next year one might get massive infestations and it varies, seemingly randomly, from year to year, over and over again through the years. Which is how and why crop diseases and predation occur in some years and not others.

This particular so-called study exemplifies the depths to which ‘scientists' and ‘experts’ have fallen in order to justify their own existence and financial backing. To say that this is infantile is an understatement. It is demeaning to all scientists everywhere.

Yes, I know that leatherjackets don’t fly but they soon morph into crane flies [daddy longlegs] which do.