Biological Collapse

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 07:18:14PM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

Surely compulsory usage logging, centralised db and public publishing
should be mandatory at this point (i.e. possible to achieve
legislatively) now that glyphosate is out of patent in all countries?

The usual proxy of course is sales, but increasing locality data
accuracy should be high on the agenda for "the greens" if they want
to achieve something useful with the decaying State infrastructure.

Would be quite the feather in the political wanna be's cap... trivial
to implement in this day of tech abundance too.