A decline in insects

When I was growing up I would commute with my dad to and from his job a lot. He worked throughout the region on construction sites. I was often the one to jump out of the truck at gas stations and clean the windows on our family truck, jeep, or car with the squeegee. A few years ago I noticed how I rarely do this anymore.
There could be several explanations for this. I personally haven't ever had to commute to work, I stopped riding with him as often when I got older, and aerodynamics of vehicles have gotten better. After taking all of this into consideration, I still think there is a notable decrease in insect hits.

I can remember back when you could drive over Mt. Rose highway 431 and hardly see another vehicle sometimes. It was still a one lane road with nothing but sagebrush down to Old Virginia St that you had to take into down town. In just one trip I could count insects hitting the windshield.

If you think about the sheer numbers of increasing vehicles moving around in the world every day it seems like a reasonable assumption. In the Lake Tahoe area specifically, there has been an exponential increase in commuters due to wealth pushing the working class further and further away.

For every lost insect from a vehicle strike, that's one less meal for another creature since this dead biomass is often moved to car washes and sewer drains. There are some years in the Sierras that see amazing butterfly hatches. I something feel like getting a bumper sticker that says "I slow down or stop for butterflies," however, I don't want the trouble of some crazy tailgater interpreting it wrong. As it is, people on the roads around here are already getting unbearably selfish, rude, oblivious and in a such a hurry.

Several national parks clearly mark reduced speed limits indicating that it helps prevent wildlife strikes. I think this is true of insect strikes as well. Vehicles these days are engineered so well that it's easy to feel safe driving fast and it's easy to forget that we share the planet with other life and a whole ecosystem that supports us. On a trip to Canada I was impressed by some of the wildlife corridors they have built around highways. I also like seeing these kinds of studies and things taken into account over near Sagehen.

A quick search on google scholar every once in a while shows more and more studies related to my subjective observations. Here is one I just saw specifically orientated around my hypothesis.
Flying insect abundance declines with increasing road traffic
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/icad.12300

It appears much of the research on this is done in Europe. I remember in the early 90's a group of science students doing some insect studies out in the Royal Gorge area. I wonder what happened to their data.
More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809

Publicado el junio 12, 2021 06:29 TARDE por