On 05/21/2017 06:24 PM, grarpamp wrote:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insects-gone
[ ... ] the Krefeld
Entomological Society, has seen the yearly insect catches fluctuate, as expected. But in 2013 they spotted something alarming. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by nearly 80%. Perhaps it was a particularly bad year, they thought, so they set up the traps again in 2014. The numbers were just as low. Through more direct comparisons, the group -- which had preserved thousands of samples over 3 decades -- found dramatic declines across more than a dozen other sites. Such losses reverberate up the food chain. "If you're an insect-eating bird living in that area, four-fifths of your food is gone in the last quarter-century, which is staggering," says Dave Goulson, an ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, who is working with the Krefeld group to analyze and publish some of the data. "One almost hopes that it's not representative -- that it's some strange artifact."
https://phys.org/news/2017-05-seas-coastal.html https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-01362-7
It is representative, a not-strange artifact of the proliferation of modern "bird and mammal friendly" super-insecticides used in agriculture and landscape applications. Collapsing bird populations reflect an entire food chain under chemical attack. http://www.tfsp.info/ http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v511/n7509/full/nature13642.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/popular-pesticides-linked-drops... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-songbirds-are-bei... Four years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/apr/29/bee-harming-pesticides-b... https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/victory-for-bees-as-europea... I have seen claims that Europe's bird populations are already rising in the hardest hit areas, but four years is /very/ early to look for results. It took 40 years for the North American brown pelican to recover from the impact of DDT exposure. Suppression of insect food resources by toxin-intensive factory farming is an obvious explanation of collapsing bird populations. But as far as I know, nobody is even looking at the impact of endocrine disruptors and carcinogens (like glyhphosate) on wild birds populations. :o/