doomer

There was just an article in ~~SciAm~~ New Scientist arguing that insects have essentially never experienced a mass extinction - any time higher animal diversity drops off, they just keep on truckin'. ~~I need to dig it back up so I can post it.~~ Posted here: https://hexbear.net/post/5127673

Take insects, of which there are millions of species today. In 2021, Sandra Schachat, now at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Conrad Labandeira at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC assessed the fossil record of insects and concluded that the tiny animals seem never to have suffered a mass extinction. This doesn’t mean they have had a crisis-free existence. Most notably, insect communities changed dramatically near the end-Permian, says Schachat. Important groups, including the dragonfly-like Palaeodictyoptera, vanished. Others, such as the Hemipteroidea – which includes the true bugs – rose to dominance. But crucially, she says, we have no idea how these changes came about because the insect fossil record is extremely patchy, with a gap of about 20 million years near the end-Permian. Over such a long period, insect communities can change gradually, but drastically, through evolution by natural selection alone. “When the fossil record is so incomplete that your best snapshots of a group of organisms come tens of millions of years apart, you’re going to expect to see big changes, with or without a mass extinction,” says Schachat.

Anywho, that makes this finding even more terrifying.