Bob Wilson - When I was a kid working in gas station, we would wash the windows of cars, while they were filling up. On warm summer nights, we would still be scrubbing the bugs off the windshield, long after the gas had clicked off. Cars would pull in that didn't need gas, and beg to use our windshield cleaning squeegees and sponges.This doesn't happen anymore. Insects are disappearing and no one knows why. This is the windshield phenomenon.National Geographic did an article on disappearing insects. There are insect traps, that have been sitting in remote forests , in the same location for 50 years, miles from anyone, except the university researchers who go to count insects. The number of insects has plummeted drastically. Its a catastrophe. Without insects entire food chains are destroyed. No crops pollinated, no food for birds, amphibians, reptiles, shrews, etc. That means that when the frogs die off, and they are, that they animals that feed on them die off, all the way up the food chain.
This is truly a catastrophe, and no one knows about it, because all attention is focused on global warming.
2 comments:
AS someone who works with toads, it is very scary. I am also noticing fewer bats and swifts which eat flying insects.
John Gear - Not unrelated at all to climate destabilization — one the subtlest effects of climate chaos is disruption of the co-evolved relationship between plants. In some cases, insects are hatching early and not finding any of the foods they evolved to sustain themselves on; in others, the plants are fruiting too early for the insects they were evolved to sustain have progressed through their life cycles to be able to eat them. Throughout the stable climate period we are disrupting, insects and plants have been in synch; now that the thermal spring is coming so much earlier than the photospring, the threat is at the very base of food chains.
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