Human caused sixth mass extinction underway

[Just AnotherPerson]

Insects Are Dying En Masse, Risking ‘Catastrophic’ Collapse Of Earth’s Ecosystems

See more at this link https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0f9e1b17f097d

There have been warning signs for years about plummeting insect populations worldwide, but the extent of the potentially “catastrophic” crisis had not been well-understood — until now.

The first global scientific review of insect population decline was published this week in the journal Biological Conservation and the findings are “shocking,” its authors said.

More than 40 percent of insect species are dwindling globally and a third of species are endangered, concluded the peer-reviewed study, which analyzed 73 historical reports on insect population declines.

Chillingly, the total mass of insects is falling by 2.5 percent annually, the review’s authors said. If the decline continues at this rate, insects could be wiped off the face of the Earth within a century.

“It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none,” study co-author Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, an environmental biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, told The Guardian.

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” Sánchez-Bayo added.

Scientists have warned that a human-caused sixth mass extinction is now underway on Earth. Vertebrate species, both on land and under the sea, are threatened at a global scale because of human activities.

[Captdon]

True enough. If they go, we go.

[MisterVeritis]

Insects Are Dying En Masse, Risking ‘Catastrophic’ Collapse Of Earth’s Ecosystems

See more at this link https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0f9e1b17f097d

There have been warning signs for years about plummeting insect populations worldwide, but the extent of the potentially “catastrophic” crisis had not been well-understood — until now.

The first global scientific review of insect population decline was published this week in the journal Biological Conservation and the findings are “shocking,” its authors said.

More than 40 percent of insect species are dwindling globally and a third of species are endangered, concluded the peer-reviewed study, which analyzed 73 historical reports on insect population declines.

Chillingly, the total mass of insects is falling by 2.5 percent annually, the review’s authors said. If the decline continues at this rate, insects could be wiped off the face of the Earth within a century.

“It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none,” study co-author Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, an environmental biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, told The Guardian.

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” Sánchez-Bayo added.

Scientists have warned that a human-caused sixth mass extinction is now underway on Earth. Vertebrate species, both on land and under the sea, are threatened at a global scale because of human activities.

I predict we will see alarms raised from now on. It really does work wonders for the gullible.

[Max Rockatansky]

Insects Are Dying En Masse, Risking ‘Catastrophic’ Collapse Of Earth’s Ecosystems

See more at this link https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0f9e1b17f097d

There have been warning signs for years about plummeting insect populations worldwide, but the extent of the potentially “catastrophic” crisis had not been well-understood — until now.

The first global scientific review of insect population decline was published this week in the journal Biological Conservation and the findings are “shocking,” its authors said.

More than 40 percent of insect species are dwindling globally and a third of species are endangered, concluded the peer-reviewed study, which analyzed 73 historical reports on insect population declines.

Chillingly, the total mass of insects is falling by 2.5 percent annually, the review’s authors said. If the decline continues at this rate, insects could be wiped off the face of the Earth within a century.

“It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none,” study co-author Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, an environmental biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, told The Guardian.

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” Sánchez-Bayo added.

Scientists have warned that a human-caused sixth mass extinction is now underway on Earth. Vertebrate species, both on land and under the sea, are threatened at a global scale because of human activities.

Humans will die out before all of the insects do.

[Chris]

Is the Insect Apocalypse Really Upon Us?

...First, some good news: The claim that insects will all be annihilated within the century is absurd. Almost everyone I spoke with says that it’s not even plausible, let alone probable. “Not going to happen,” says Elsa Youngsteadt from North Carolina State University. “They’re the most diverse group of organisms on the planet. Some of them will make it.” Indeed, insects of some sort are likely to be the last ones standing. Any event sufficiently catastrophic to scour the world of insects would also render it inhospitable to other animal life. “If it happened, humans would no longer be on the planet,” says Corrie Moreau from Cornell University.

...Few researchers have kept running tallies on insect populations, aside from a smattering of species that are charismatic (monarch butterflies), commercially important (domesticated honeybees), or medically relevant (some mosquitoes). Society still has a lingering aversion toward creepy crawlies, and entomological research has long been underfunded. Where funds exist, they’ve been disproportionately channeled toward ways of controlling agricultural pests. The basic business of documenting insect diversity has been comparatively neglected, a situation made worse by the decline of taxonomists—species-spotting scientists who, ironically, have undergone their own mass extinction.

When scientists have collected long-term data on insects, they’ve usually done so in a piecemeal way. The 2017 German study, for example, collated data from traps that had been laid in different parts of the country over time, rather than from concerted attempts to systematically sample the same sites. Haphazard though such studies might be, many of them point in the same dispiriting direction. In their review, Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys found 73 studies showing insect declines.

But that’s what they went looking for! They searched a database using the keywords insect and decline, and so wouldn’t have considered research showing stability or increases. The studies they found aren’t representative either: Most were done in Europe and North America, and the majority of insects live in the tropics. This spotty geographical spread makes it hard to know if insects are disappearing from some areas but recovering or surging in others. And without “good baselines for population sizes,” says Jessica Ware from Rutgers University, “when we see declines, it’s hard to know if this is something that happens all the time.”

...For those reasons, it’s hard to take the widely quoted numbers from Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys’s review as gospel. They say that 41 percent of insect species are declining and that global numbers are falling by 2.5 percent a year, but “they’re trying to quantify things that we really can’t quantify at this point,” says Michelle Trautwein from the California Academy of Sciences. “I understand the desire to put numbers to these things to facilitate the conversation, but I would say all of those are built on mountains of unknown facts.”