doomer

The first three paragraphs are wild. That must have been agony.

Then yes, it just gets depressing as fuck.

The slider image is pretty shocking.

It is true though, for those that drive or ride motorbikes (and are old), think back to how many bugs were squished on the windscreen/headlights/visor 20 years ago compared to now.

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.

I saw a butterfly in my backyard the other day. I can't remember the last time I saw one around here

Kids need to go outside and touch grass

The outside:

You will eat bugs❌
you will live in a pod ❌
you will own nothing✔

That is the future they have for you.

Well, hey, one outta three ain't bad!

"we'd all be fine if we had just embraced nuclear" - the dumbest motherfuckers on the entire planet

thank you for sharing this article.

kind of related - i mulched a 3x8' plot of my front yard this last year, from november-may. yard waste, fall leaves, grass clippings, etc. last week, i spread the mulch out to use as planting soil for some pumpkins. the mulch was so alive with decomposers, especially pillbugs. it felt good to provide them with habitat for a few months. i hope they're nice to my pumpkins

can a Science Understander please explain to me why insect species in particular (as opposed to plant species or vertebrate species) are dying off in such large numbers? is it just because of the new prevalence of pesticides, or is it because there are lots more insect species to begin with, or something else?

i know nothing about science

It would be wise to start sequencing species so we can bring them back later or have the chance to at least.

dawg I couldn't even read the whole thing

I have mostly become a filter of depressing information and it doesn't get to me too much in the moment... but reading that stuff... I literally feel ill right now. My stomach feels turned and my heart feels heavy. My brain has slowed down to a halt.

All the loss so far is deeply depressing, and the future is existential on every level. It seems that we are just fucked.

"Fuk dem bugs" - some idiot, while spraying round up