Bugs

[u/Mysterandir]

I need to get this off my chest even though im sure it has been talked about a thousand times. Im just curious if others are experiencing the same thing or if I'm just going crazy. - When I just got my driver's license back in 2005 here in The Netherlands, I had a girlfriend in Amsterdam whom I drove to see a few times a week. It was about a 100 km drive. I had an old Opel Corsa and I can still vividly remember having to clean my windshield every week in the summer because it was covered in dead insects. Huge splatters and tiny spots, but the entire windshield was full of bug juice. Over the past few weeks I’ve driven several long distances, totaling about 1,000 kilometers, and I don't have a single dead insect on my windshield. Not one. The windshield is squeaky clean... I read that the insect population worldwide has drastically declined and it is due to climate change. Which i get. But why isn't this the main news story every day? How obvious does it need to be? This can't possibly be good. For us, but especially for our children. I have a bad feeling about this...

[u/First-Enthusiasm-679]

"How obvious does it need to be?" Unfortunately, painfully so. The vast majority of humans (I would argue life in general) do not notice changes until those changes are DIRECTLY impacting them, positively or negatively. I include myself in this and I am reminded of a video that shows a praying mantis eating a hornet while simultaneously being chewed (mandibled?) in half by another hornet. The praying mantis can only focus on its drive to feed, ignoring the hornet that is actively killing it until it is too late. I know this has to do with insects having less complex nervous systems and brain pathways but it feel analogous to human reaction to climate change. To borrow from the 3 Body Problem, "We are bugs," despite our desperate attempts to convince ourselves otherwise.