Biological Collapse

[Steve Kinney]

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-bird-population-180951971/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-songbirds-are-being-wiped-out-by-banned-pesticides-804547.html

Four years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/apr/29/bee-harming-pesticides-banned-europe
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/victory-for-bees-as-european-union-bans-neonicotinoid-pesticides-blamed-for-destroying-bee-8595408.html

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/









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