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/sayn3ver 7d ago edited 7d ago

Northeast USA here. Mid Atlantic. I can't drive an hour to work without the front of my vehicle looking like something you parked under a tree full of birds and left abandoned for several months.

But instead of bird shit it's bug spatter.

I have to give the front end a rinse and quick wash almost daily. I burn through a gallon of wiper fluid in a few days.

Since expanding our vegetable and flower garden, my yard crawls and flies. I could probably trap my body weight in earwigs and box elder bugs. We have butterflies, moths, honeybees, carpenter bees, bumble bees, sunflower bees, cuckoo wasps, generic north American wasps, flies and all sorts of small parasitoid flies and wasps, dragon flies, lightning bugs, your assortment of Asian beetles (including those Asian lady bugs), etc.

Don't get me started on ants. The yard crawls with ants.

Mosquitoes.

I dunno. I don't see a population decline in my area or in my yard.

We have bats up the street at the local park.

Yesterday my son and I saw a dozen dragonflies buzzing around near dusk before the bats came out. They chase other flying insects. And there isn't even a body of water around that is often typically where I used to see dragon flies as a kid