For the first time I can recall, our annual Japanese beetle invasion has been a relative bust (others in Kentucky report the same).
Normally by now our cherry and plum trees would have marked evidence of chewing but have remained barely touched. And these are bugs that seem resistant to radioactive fallout.
On the other hand, I went out in the backyard a couple nights ago and was swarmed by gnats.
Raindrops used to splat on my windscreen much more than they do now. And do a much better job of cleaning my much dirtier windscreen.
Now that the rain and dirt gently blows over the car, without running splat into my windscreen, I get much better mileage. I know that is not the only reason I get better mileage, but I think it’s why they design cars that way now.
My information is only anecdotal, but I’ve been regularly driving back and forth from the Chicago area to northeastern Wisconsin (where I grew up, and where my parents still live) for 36 years, along the same route the entire time.
In the past, doing the drive in the summertime – either at daytime, or at night – resulted in a windshield and front grille which was pretty heavily splattered with bugs, many of them on the bigger side (i.e., a half-inch or bigger). I did that drive twice in this past week, and while my windshield wasn’t clean by the end of either drive, the bug splats were fewer, and consisted only of smaller insects. That’s been pretty consistently the case for the past few years, at least.
We are now halfway through summer and I’ve seen no flies whatsoever outside. There must be some, because either two got into the house, or it was just one that was following me from one room to another. In any case, a fly landed on my desk and got swatted by a folded-up Chinese takeout menu, and there have been no flies since. This has been a really remarkably insect-free summer. While I’m happy about it, I hope it’s not the result of some major shift in the natural ecosystem.
Crickets may not count as “flying,” but up until 6-7 years ago, it was common for Austin to be overrun by crickets in summer, to the point where one could find ten or more hopping around in one’s house just from leaving the doors open too long. Now there’s hardly any.
I like to sit outside at night almost every night, and thanks to this thread tonight I noticed that mosquitoes are almost completely absent. I live only a few hundred feet from a pond and mosquitoes used to be a terror, so now I’m pretty surprised by their unnoticed absence.
Here’s an article from The Guardian on the subject of insect loss, which contains this quote:
The hum of wild bees has faded, and leaves that should be chewed to the stem hang whole and un-nibbled. It is these glossy, untouched leaves that most spook Janzen and Hallwachs. They are more like a pristine greenhouse than a living ecosystem: a wilderness that has been fumigated and left sterile. Not a forest, but a museum.
This part of the article feels truthy*
In Florida, the frequency and intensity of summer rainstorms has diminished. We used to consistently have intense rainstorms several times a week on average during the summer, and now some weeks we don’t get any rain, and when it does come, it’s occasionally intense, but often much milder than before. So if any insects around here are vulnerable to those mini droughts like the article has mentioned, that could be a factor.
*in a good way rather than an ironic way, but with the self-deprecation inherent in the term that recognizes that this is just a personal feeling rather than scientific proof.
I’m wondering, then, about the animals that depend on flying insects for their diet – small birds, bats, frogs, I don’t know what else. Are their populations also dropping dramatically?
Noticed today that our driveway in front of the garage was teeming with small yellow and black butterflies.
Eerie.
The only plantivorous bees I’ve encountered are carpenter bees, which also chew holes in wood siding. I think I’ve made a dent in their local population with traps this year, but the battle is ongoing.
I’m not sure about other insectivores, but the bat population in America was declining anyway due to the fungal white nose syndrome, so perhaps the two crises will balance each other out to a degree.
One thing we have around these parts is a lot of chirping insects. My apartment is next to a retention pond and I often hear the sweet hum of chirping insects at nighttime at just the right volume to be pleasant. What I don’t hear as much of these days is the deeper croak of frogs.
I took a walk in a Florida state park today and, because my mind was paying attention to looking for insects, I heard a whole bunch more chirping insects. Up until now I didn’t even realize that there were that many chirping insects in a forest during the daytime!
I didn’t see a lot of other flying insects. There were some, but not enough to bother me. Most of the time, if there are any insects in the forest, they swarm me, but while there were some that hung around me, they weren’t substantial enough for me to get a good look at them to see what they were or to make me want to swat them.
On the way back I almost hit a butterfly with my car. Come to think of it, most of the times I’ve seen a butterfly lately has been when I’ve hit or almost hit them with my car. This puts the lack of hitting any other insects in sharp contrast because previously, only the specialness of the butterfly would cause me to remember it, and now, it’s the specialness of the insect itself and the fact that I hit anything at all.
The populations of many bird species in North America have also been dropping in recent decades. It’s probably difficult to say if it’s only due to a drop in insect populations, but shrinking/changing habitat areas for wild birds are probably also affecting insects. Plus, disease like West Nile and bird flu have also killed off many wild birds of some species.
So, has anyone told the Spotted Lanternfly about this, yet?
I take bus’s everywhere and this year I have seen no bees or mosquitos.
Just fireflies.
Also anecdotal, but I’ve noticed an odd change over the years. Like above, I seem to have fewer insects to clean off my truck’s windshield. But I frequently pull a tall (13 foot) trailer behind me and the upper part seems to catch as many bugs as in the past – if not more. I seem to be spending a lot more effort on ladders scrubbing the front than in the past. An acquaintance with a similar rig reports the same. Substantial bug splats everywhere above the 6 foot level, and almost none below that.
I have almost zero training in biology etc., but I wonder if bugs could evolve over time to fly higher around roads? Or is this because vehicles are more aerodynamic - pushing the bugs upward where they are nailed by the flat front of the trailer?
FTR: None of this is questioning climate change or the other disasters happening. Just curious if bugs could actually evolve over time to avoid car windshields.
Swifts which eat bugs have actually evolved shorter wings over a few generations to be able to adjust to the traffic they fly in to catch supper.
Would not surprise me at least if the flying bugs also adapted to flying higher staying out of the turbulence.
That said we are in tropical Australia and I certainly notice fewer bugs around streetlights and our backyard light…very concerning.
Fewer frogs and geckos too…and this is a very biologically verdant region…wet tropics.
The “bug evolution” actually makes more sense than the more common alternative theory besides aerodynamics - that roads are now less biologically inviting to bugs than previously. I am not seeing that myself: if anything there are more instances of wild versus mown highway margins than 20 years ago.
And it doesn’t even have to be bugs evolving to not get hit by cars that they are actually next to - it could even be bugs evolving an aversion to automobile noises so they aren’t near the corridors in the first place. But I suspect that evolution isn’t the case, because other than lepidoptera, the change seems to be across all insects, not just some.
Do you have a cite for this? Evolution over just “a few generations” is very unusual.
Such an evolution over just 100-ish years would be extremely unusual; my understanding is that it’s a mechanism which typically takes much much longer to occur. However, yes, cars, and even trucks, are more aerodynamic than they were some decades ago, so that seems like a fair hypothesis.