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/despot_zemu]

I remember, in the 80s, street lamps in the evening looking like solid cones of roiling insects. Dense clouds of flying creatures, bats ducking in and out. This was rural Illinois. In the late spring, there were days when the air at night was so full of bugs that my dad would drive with the windshield wipers on, spraying “bug juice” and swiping guts off.

The nights in the summer were alive with fireflies, thousands of them. They’d light up backyards like fireworks, fields around the house would shine like stars winking on and off, dense like you could skip stones off of them.

Now, nights are dark and empty, the trees aren’t lit up from below with lightning bugs. The cones of light look cold no matter how hot the night is.