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Warning
of 'ecological Armageddon' after dramatic plunge in insect numbers
Three-quarters
of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in
25 years, with serious implications for all life on Earth, scientists
say
18
October, 2017
The
abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the
past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists.
Insects
are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey
for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as
butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the
losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on
course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human
society.
The
new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany but has
implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture, the
researchers said.
The
cause of the huge decline is as yet unclear, although the destruction
of wild areas and widespread use of pesticides are the most likely
factors and climate change may play a role. The scientists were able
to rule out weather and changes to landscape in the reserves as
causes, but data on pesticide levels has not been collected.
“The
fact that the number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high
rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” said Hans de
Kroon, at Radboud University in the Netherlands and who led the new
research.
“Insects
make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been
some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex
University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We
appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of
life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we
lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”
The
research, published in the journal Plos One, is based on the work of
dozens of amateur entomologists across Germany who began using
strictly standardised ways of collecting insects in 1989. Special
tents called malaise traps were used to capture more than 1,500
samples of all flying insects at 63 different nature reserves.
Malaise traps were set in
protected areas in Germany as part of the study
The malaise traps set in
protected areas and reserves, which scientists say makes the declines
even more worrying. Photograph: Courtesy of Courtesy of
Entomologisher Verein Krefeld
When
the total weight of the insects in each sample was measured a
startling decline was revealed. The annual average fell by 76% over
the 27 year period, but the fall was even higher – 82% – in
summer, when insect numbers reach their peak.
Previous
reports of insect declines have been limited to particular insects,
such European grassland butterflies, which have fallen by 50% in
recent decades. But the new research captured all flying insects,
including wasps and flies which are rarely studied, making it a much
stronger indicator of decline.
The
fact that the samples were taken in protected areas makes the
findings even more worrying, said Caspar Hallmann at Radboud
University, also part of the research team: “All these areas are
protected and most of them are well-managed nature reserves. Yet,
this dramatic decline has occurred.”
The
amateur entomologists also collected detailed weather measurements
and recorded changes to the landscape or plant species in the
reserves, but this could not explain the loss of the insects. “The
weather might explain many of the fluctuations within the season and
between the years, but it doesn’t explain the rapid downward
trend,” said Martin Sorg from the Krefeld Entomological Society in
Germany, who led the amateur entomologists.
Goulson
said a likely explanation could be that the flying insects perish
when they leave the nature reserves. “Farmland has very little to
offer for any wild creature,” he said. “But exactly what is
causing their death is open to debate. It could be simply that there
is no food for them or it could be, more specifically, exposure to
chemical pesticides, or a combination of the two.”
In
September, a chief scientific adviser to the UK government warned
that regulators around the world have falsely assumed that it is safe
to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes and that the
“effects of dosing whole landscapes with chemicals have been
largely ignored”.
The
scientists said further work is urgently needed to corroborate the
new findings in other regions and to explore the issue in more
detail. While most insects do fly, it may be that those that don’t,
leave nature reserves less often and are faring better. It is also
possible that smaller and larger insects are affected differently,
and the German samples have all been preserved and will be further
analysed.
In
the meantime, said De Kroon: “We need to do less of the things that
we know have a negative impact, such as the use of pesticides and the
disappearance of farmland borders full of flowers.”
Lynn
Dicks at the University of East Anglia, UK, and not involved in the
new research said the work was convincing. “It provides important
new evidence for an alarming decline that many entomologists have
suspected is occurring for some time.”
“If
total flying insect biomass is genuinely declining at this rate –
about 6% per year – it is extremely concerning,” she said.
“Flying insects have really important ecological functions, for
which their numbers matter a lot. They pollinate flowers: flies,
moths and butterflies are as important as bees for many flowering
plants, including some crops. They provide food for many animals –
birds, bats, some mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Flies,
beetles and wasps are also predators and decomposers, controlling
pests and cleaning up the place generally.”
Another
way of sampling insects – car windscreens – has often been
anecdotally used to suggest a major decline, with people remembering
many more bugs squashed on their windscreens in the past.
“I
think that is real,” said Goulson. “I drove right across France
and back this summer – just when you’d expect your windscreen to
be splattered all over – and I literally never had to stop to clean
the windscreen.”
Someone
took a lot of effort to try to persuade me to BAN “Natural News”
(ie. Censor) and by so doing point my attention to the following
article.
Even
climate change deniers can bring some truth to the table.
I’d
hate to cut out all views that do not coincide with my own. If I did
I’d probably find myseelf rather lonely and in the company of folks
that support war, fascism and Killary Clinton.
I
invite people to use their own discriminative intellect instead of
rushing down into the rabbit hole of censorship.
The
global ecosystem is rapidly collapsing… insect biomass plummets 75%
in one generation… scientists warn of “decimation”… humanity
may not survive much longer
19
October, 2017
For
years, I’ve warned that humanity is a
suicide cult which
has engineered its own destruction by relentlessly poisoning the
natural world with chemical
pesticides,
heavy metals and GMOs. Now, the collapse of living systems across the
planet is accelerating like never before, with ocean
fisheries collapsing by
the day, topsoil vanishing by the inch, and wildlife populations
being decimated by the accelerating destruction of habitat.
Humanity,
it seems, has broken
the planet, and
the mass die-offs are now impossible to ignore. Adding even more
weight to the horrifying realization that humanity is committing mass
ecological suicide, a new study published in the
science journal PLoS One has
documented a
75 percent decline in insect biomass over
rural Germany in just the last 27 years.
The
study, authored by Caspar A. Hallmann and others, is entitled, “More
than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass
in protected areas.”
The
abstract of the study, which should be screaming alarm bells over the
devastating collapse of the food chain in Europe, reports rather
mildly:
Our
analysis estimates a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline
of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study. We show
that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while
changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot
explain this overall decline. This yet unrecognized loss of insect
biomass must be taken into account in evaluating declines in
abundance of species depending on insects as a food source, and
ecosystem functioning in the European landscape.
Even
more concerning is the fact that this insect decline was observed in
“protected areas” that are supposed to preserve and protect
wildlife. As the study authors explain in their conclusion:
The
widespread insect biomass decline is alarming, ever more so as all
traps were placed in protected areas that are meant to preserve
ecosystem functions and biodiversity… our results illustrate an
ongoing and rapid decline in total amount of airborne insects active
in space and time.
The food web is now collapsing… insects are just the beginning
The
stunning news of this insect biomass collapse is, of course, just the
beginning of a series of events that will ultimately spell doom for
humanity unless causative factors are quickly reversed. Insects are
the pillars of the food web, providing protein and nutrients to bats,
birds and reptiles, among other animals. When the insect population
collapses, nutrient depletion cascades up the food chain, causing
devastating declines in populations of larger animals upon which
ecological diversity depends.
As
the study authors explain:
[The
insect biomass collapse] must have cascading effects across trophic
levels and numerous other ecosystem effects. There is an urgent need
to uncover the causes of this decline, its geographical extent, and
to understand the ramifications of the decline for ecosystems and
ecosystem services.
Even
more worrisome, insects
are the pollinators that keep 80% of wild plants aliveby
facilitating pollination. When insect populations collapse,
pollination of wild food sources — as well as many domesticated
food sources such as almonds — also face imminent collapse. Without
insects, in other words, human populations will also collapse within
just a few years as the ripple effect of insect die-offs works its
way up the food chain.
The
rapid timetable of this collapse is nothing short of alarming, if not
catastrophic. As the chart shows, below — sourced from the PLoS One
journal article — the biomass decline from 1989 to 2016 is
catastrophic. The second chart, below, shows how insect biomass loss
is even more pronounced during summer months:
Warming temperatures actually increased insect biomass, so this isn’t a “climate change” problem
The
study carefully documented variations in temperature, wind speed,
humidity and other environmental factors in an effort to determine
root causes of biomass variance. Interestingly, the study was able to
determine that warming temperatures did not reduce insect biomass. In
fact, the warmer the temperature, the more insect biomass was
measured.
In
other words, “global
warming” actually increases insect biomass,
so this is one phenomenon that can’t be blamed on the climate
change hoax.
From the study results:
Over
the course of the study period, some temporal changes occurred in the
means of the weather variables (S2
Fig),
most notably an increase by 0.5°C in mean temperature and a decline
0.2 m/sec in mean wind speed. Yet, these changes either do not have
an effect on insect biomass (e.g. wind speed) either are expected to
positively affected insect biomass (e.g. increased temperature).
The
conclusion of the paper specifically rules out “climate change”
as an explanatory factor, saying, “…[O]ur analysis renders two of
the prime suspects, i.e. landscape and climate change as unlikely
explanatory factors for this major decline in aerial insect biomass
in the investigated protected areas.”
In
fact, the paper points out that warming temperatures are
actually saving
the insects to
some degree by compensating for some other factor that’s killing
them off:
Our
final model, based on including all significant variables from
previous models, revealed a higher trend coefficient as compared to
our basic model (log(λ) = −0.081, sd = 0.006, Table
4),
suggesting that temporal developments in the considered explanatory
variables counteracted biomass decline to some degree, leading to an
even more negative coefficient for the annual trend.
Insect biomass “decimated” in mere decades… this won’t end well
The
study authors were unable to pinpoint a specific cause for the
collapse of insect biomass, but that’s likely because they did not
measure pesticide exposure, GMO pollution or other chemical
contaminants that severely impact insect populations.
Even
without that knowledge, the study authors concluded the rapid decline
in insect biomass was catastrophic:
Our
results demonstrate that recently reported declines in several taxa
such as butterflies [7, 25–27, 58],
wild bees [8–14]
and moths [15–18],
are in parallel with a severe loss of total aerial insect biomass,
suggesting that it is not only the vulnerable species, but the flying
insect community as a whole, that has been decimated over the last
few decades…
The
authors also affirm they are aware that pesticide exposure could be
one of the plausible explanations for the collapse, stating:
Agricultural
intensification (e.g. pesticide usage, year-round tillage, increased
use of fertilizers and frequency of agronomic measures) that we could
not incorporate in our analyses, may form a plausible cause. The
reserves in which the traps were placed are of limited size in this
typical fragmented West-European landscape, and almost all locations
(94%) are enclosed by agricultural fields.
Intensive
agricultural practices, in other words, are a primary suspect in this
devastation of insect populations. And that points directly to
pesticides and herbicides — chemical poisons that are developed
specifically to kill living things.
Unless something changes, humanity won’t even survive long enough to cause sustained global warming
All
this brings me to (at least) one obvious point: While the left-wing
media and science talking heads are losing their minds over so-called
“climate change” — an entirely made-up problem — even their
own predictions only show tiny increases in ocean levels over the
next hundred years.
Yet
the collapse of insect populations is happening now,
with devastating consequences already initiated that may spell doom
for a global human population of over 7 billion people, all of whom
demand food on a regular basis. Without insects, the food
supply collapses.
Without food, human populations collapse. And without humans, there
is no sustained global warming problem to worry about anyway.
In
other words, climate
change alarmists are
focusing on the wrong crisis. If we don’t figure out what’s
decimating the insects — and it’s very likely agricultural
chemical contamination of our world — then nobody will be around to
burn fossil fuels and run the coal plants anyway. Global warming, in
other words, is not a problem if everybody dies from starvation
because the global food web collapses.
Climate change cultists are ignoring the real problems that threaten all of human civilization
Yet
isn’t it fascinating how the entire climate change cult that
demands totalitarian control over our lives in order to “save the
planet” absolutely refuses to acknowledge any consequences
whatsoever from agricultural pesticides and GMO genetic pollution?
While the natural world is collapsing around them, all they wish for
is more power, profit and control over nations and economies.
These
science imbeciles are ignoring the real causes of catastrophic
collapse, all while patting themselves on the back and proclaiming
they are the science saviors of our world: Al Gore, Neil
DeGrasse Tyson,
Bill Nye and other climate change cultists who typify the
idiocy-celebrity status of those who hide behind fake
science to
portray themselves as Christ-like saviors for a world that’s
crumbling for reasons they absolutely refuse to acknowledge.
That’s
why I’ve dubbed humanity a “suicide cult.” No one in a position
of power cares about anything other than their own fame, fortune and
perceived brilliance. No one in a position of authority has any
empathy or compassion for preserving the natural world and its
essential ecosystems. Every sector of politics has been exploited,
distorted and reformed into idiotic propaganda parades featuring a
steady stream of academic morons who reject scientific reason in
favor of political obedience and left-wing conformity.
Consequently,
“science” is dead. And soon, unless something drastically
changes, humanity will be too.
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