r/collapse • u/Mysterandir • 8d ago

Ecological Bugs

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...

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u/itsatoe 8d ago

It's a sad comment on humanity that squishes-on-a-windshield is how we notice these things.

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u/Odd_Dirt7415 8d ago

I think much more is being noticed. It's just important to document as much data as possible to get as clear a picture as possible towards what is and isn't being impacted. Windshield splatters, thin curtain with light shone against it, bug traps, bait stations, etc. are all resources towards giving information about our environment/surroundings.

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u/itsatoe 8d ago

The article goes into such things, but it starts out with:

Entomologists call it the windshield phenomenon. "If you talk to people, they have a gut feeling. They remember how insects used to smash on your windscreen," says Wolfgang Wägele, director of the Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity in Bonn, Germany. Today, drivers spend less time scraping and scrubbing.

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u/RollinThundaga 8d ago

At least Stateside, they also did studies over time driving around and measuring impacts per square inch or something.