Who stole all the insects?

[proactive]

 

[staffordjas]

I went shopping tonight - alone. RIP Trev.

Oh no...poor Trev

I have encountered many long legged spindley spiders whilst clearing my late parents house out this week, and hoped they have survived being swept up with the tickling stick and waved outside!

Got loads of gnats in my own house, maybe that's why the bats are so keen to get inside. Heard on telly the other week that a bat eats about 3000 + insects a night

 

[Laurie61]

Perhaps the lack of insects has something to do with this? -
http://www.staffordforum.com/xf/index.php?threads/spiders.12532/page-13

I still seem to have plenty, was pursuing a fly last night that had snuck up and bit me. After swatting I made an example of it by dropping it on the window ledge for other, would be biters, to ponder on.

Have also had a visiting Hornet, it would arrive at dusk and bang on the window if a window was open it would be in like a shot. I perfected a method of capture using a big flower vase and would put it back out.

Next day it would be back. last time I removed it I just left the vase outside but a few days later I discovered it was still in there in a very relaxed state

Hornet - In original window banging condition.

 

[Withnail]

https://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_it_matters

Ah, right. Yes that's a considerably larger issue than the thread title, and its follow up question, suggests.

I don't think it is being overly alarmist to suggest that we are at some point along the curve of a mass extinction event. The interesting thing about this one is exactly that insects, usually quite resilient to these sort of things, are joining in.

Why this is so interesting is evident when you look at the last time the insects joined everyone else in dying so prodigiously, which was during the Permian extinction about 250m years ago. The interesting thing about that extinction is that it wasn't so much of a BANG! but a whimper - taking place over the course of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years.

The most likely cause was an extended period of volcanism that burned an immense area of habitat (sound familiar?), raised the acidity level of the oceans (sound familiar?), and released an huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, accelerating a 'greenhouse effect' that raised the temperature of the earth considerably (sound familiar?).

Also known as 'The Great Dying', it was the worst extinction event the Earth has - yet - experienced, and was the one that life on Earth took the longest to 'recover' from.

It's probably just a coincidence, or something.

 

[staffordjas]

I have a massive house fly / blue bottle (?) that anyone is welcome to adopt . I let it's mate out of the window earlier , but this bugger keeps evading capture and has been doing a few miles between the lounge and kitchen tonight.

 

[Withnail]

It's like Jenga, really.

Take one from the top and nothing much happens.

Take one from the bottom and collapse is more likely.

 

[Gramaisc]

More chat - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b099v344 - the first ten minutes.

 

[Withnail]

Interesting - apart from the whole habitat clearance and mono-culture thing we are, obviously, poisoning the shit out of them. If we don't poison the shit out of them, they will eat everything before we do. If we keep poisoning the shit out of them, there'll be nothing for any of us to eat.

That's quite a conundrum, what?

Interesting that, too, elsewhere 'pon 'ere someone mentions the overuse of antibiotics. Of course microbials are always going to find it easier to respond to being poisoned into oblivion, by not being poisoned into oblivion at all, and coming back at us stronger than before.

Insect weaknesses and bacterial strengths to the whole 'poison the shit out of them' approach seem to be on the verge of seriously kicking our collective arses.

 

[Gramaisc]

There is a bit of a trend to provide some small level of acceptance that they should be here as well as us.

 

[Noah]