OT: Where have the bugs gone?

I don't recall my car windshield ever being covered in a thick insect-goo after a long drive in New England in the summer like some of the pictures in those articles, at least not in the ~25 years or so I've had a driver's license. Looks like something out of a horror film, yech.

Here in suburbia I know one of the reasons there are less "pest insects" like mosquitos, horseflies and gypsy moths in the summer is, well, they actively spray for them by truck and helicopter during the springtime and the municipalities are better about draining standing water and keeping them under control than they were years ago, I do remember there being huge swarms of gypsy moths around every bright lamp years ago that's not a great thing for the environment they're srsly destructive and gobble through forests. Also to address the problem of West Nile virus and EEE which are more serious issues than they were several decades ago.

Those "bug zapper" lamps I remember from summer evenings as a kid probably got few mosquito and were mostly just grinding through hundreds of gypsy moths, not really accomplishing very much.

Fireflies do seem more uncommon than they used to be, I remember one summer about 20 years ago I was spending at my college girlfriend's home on the Ohio river near the Ohio/WV border. We were walking at dusk one evening by the river and in a grassy dell by the river there were huge clouds of fireflies, swarms of maybe thousands of them, with large groups of dozens or hundreds all flashing in synchronization. One of the more remarkable natural displays I've ever seen - never seen anything like it before or since.

My car got bugged up pretty badly when I drove up into Oregon to see last year's total eclipse. Between Klamath Falls and Chiloquin, the highway goes alongside Upper Klamath Lake, and some species of small fly was in copious and enthusiastic presence along the lake-shore.

By the time I got to my chosen viewing site in Mitchell around lunchtime, the sun had baked the residue into something like a cross between textured-ceiling "popcorn", and enamel. As luck would have it, I saw a sign saying "Parking. Carwash $5", followed it to a homestead where I struck a deal for overnight parking/camping, and the kids did a fine job of washing the bugs off of my car (I tipped 'em an extra $5).

y.

tell that to the concert of noisy birds around here that start at 4 am and never stop

Now that you mention it, we didn't have a love bug invasion this spring!

interesting. where is here?

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in the middle of a city in denmark

This may just reflect the better aerodyamics of cars. Bugs get splattered when the air changes direction abruptly; the air goes upwards and the bug stays where it is until it impacts the windscreen. With smother aerodynamics the bug has a better chance of getting pushed out the way with the air. Whether the bug survives is another matter.

Sylvia.

You left out Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring".

It was published in 1962, which may be before your time, but it discusses exactly what you are seeing.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Sounds plausible, as one of the "younger" members of the group (i.e.

30s) the earliest production car I've ever owned was a 1990 model year, 1996 after that and then sedans from the 2000s so mostly from when auto manufacturers really started working to improve drag coefficients.

I've never seen anything like some of those photos on cars I've owned, looks terrible.

A more aerodynamic windshield has a less abrupt transition from laminar flow to the turbulent flow around and up and over the windscreen; there's probably a larger volume of more gradually increasing pressure that extends further out from the aerodynamic windshield as opposed to a small region of ram pressure right in front of a speeding flat plane. The small region is too narrow to overcome inertia and prevent them from hitting but the larger region gives enough time to nudge them to the side or up and over. Something like that :)

The book was mostly about the effect of DDT, but DDT has been banned in the US for decades and I'm pretty sure almost nobody runs around spraying broad-spectrum organophosphates all over everything anymore

The birds here in the Boston suburbs start chirping at goddamned 3 AM sometimes in the springtime. My car is already covered in a layer of pollen and a crust of bird shit (just washed it a week ago!) so they're definitely out there eating something that is for sure.

I used to travel fortnightly from London to Manchester in the 1980s (I was at university in Manchester). The locomotives then ceded nothing to aerodynamics, having a flat vertical windscreen. They travelled for extended periods at 100mph, and wrote off so many bugs, one had to wonder how the driver (engineer in US parlance) could still see out at the end of the 2 hours 40 minute[*] run.

Sylvia.

[*] Now reduced to 2 hours by running tilt-trains at 125 mph.

Denmark is a very interesting country. People should take a minute and read about it:

A lot of agriculture involves cereals. There are a number of reports on pesticide use, some of them contradictory. On the whole, I gather pesticide use in Denmark is significantly lower than in other countries. This may have an effect on the bug population and consequently the bird population.

Here are some articles on pesticides in Denmark:

The Agricultural Pesticide Load in Denmark 2007-2010

Alarming levels of pesticides found in Danish children and mothers

Alarming number of Danish farmers caught using illegal pesticides

illegal-pesticides.html

Denmark has a low use of pesticides

of-pesticides/

Pesticide Taxation

Scientists hail European ban on bee-harming pesticides

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es exactly what you are seeing.

Really? Trump got elected president some eighteen months ago, and one of hi s first appointments was to put Scott Pruitt in charge of the Evironmental Protection Agency

Spraying broad-spectrum organophosphates over everything is short-sighted w ay of minimising insect damage at the cost of longer-term damage by messing up the ecosystem, but you have to be better informed than Trump or Scott P ruitt to be aware of that.

"Pruitt rejects the scientific consensus that human-caused carbon dioxide e missions are a primary contributor to climate change" so you can imagine ho w receptive he'd be to advice that said killing bugs now may be good, but k illing everything that eats them creates longer term problems.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

DDT, OPs etc are still used in the 3rd world

NT

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sses exactly what you are seeing.

DDT has been over-used to the point where it doens't actually kill insects, even if it still makes bird's egg shells thinner.

And Trump is doing his best to make the US a third world country. The healt h care there is already third world (great if you are rich) and Scott Pruit t will make the Environmental Protection Agency more amenable to the intere sts of the well-off who want large crops immediately, and aren't too worrie d about the longer term effects on the neigbourhood.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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sses exactly what you are seeing.

his first appointments was to put Scott Pruitt in charge of the Evironmenta l Protection Agency

way of minimising insect damage at the cost of longer-term damage by messi ng up the ecosystem, but you have to be better informed than Trump or Scott Pruitt to be aware of that.

emissions are a primary contributor to climate change" so you can imagine how receptive he'd be to advice that said killing bugs now may be good, but killing everything that eats them creates longer term problems.

Spraying is passe, the newer pesticides, such as neonicotinoids, are system ic, which means they persist throughout the tissue of the plant for the lif espan of the crop, and it is applied by treating the seeds or greenhouse se edlings. For more mature trees and shrub plantations, the application is by spraying, but the pesticide remains effective for years.

It's not that they particularly give a shit about the environment it's more that in general modern narrow-spectrum pesticides are a better value for the money; every ounce of pesticide that goes into killing some irrelevant insect that isn't actually eating your crop is wasted time and dough.

Spraying everything from the air every couple of weeks during the growing season might have been a good value when aviation gas was 55 cents a gallon it's not that way in 2018.

The state DOTs treat the roadsides heavily with herbicide these days. Less informed people don't realize it, but herbicides are also pesticides. This could explain some of the absence. Hopefully most localities have become more coordinated, but there was a tim e when the la-ti-da landscape "architects", people with little to none ecol ogical or biology training, were "beautifying" the public roadways by plant ing wildflowers and ornamental shrubbery in the median strips of busy high speed highways. These planting were a magnet for insects and birds responsi ble for an enormous amount of destruction. In one instance, the scum though t it would be cool to plant a hedge of winterthur viburnum along a downtown expressway, the berries of which are famously known for making birds "drun k", resulting in thousands of deaths as the birds would stumble out into th e roadway oblivious to the danger. Hopefully enough of the wildlife populations will survive to recover after the extinction event when the shaved apes are no longer around to screw thi ngs up.

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