Robert's Rants
Robert's Rants
A personal blog on the Canadian pesticide industry and other pet peeves and interests

The Windshield Test, fascinating…but scary as hell

I get the NY Times every Sunday, just to do the cross word and keep my mind fit.  But occasionally I do read something.

In the December 2nd issue I believe, in the Times Magazine, was a fascinating article on how a teacher/professor in northern Europe carried out a simple experiment.

The article started out about his taking camping trips and outings with his son over the summer, and how he noticed he no longer had to stop and clean the bug splatter off his windshield.  Not at all.  For a week at at a time.

No flies, moths, beetles….nothing.

Where were all the insects?

So he expanded on this and essentially attached a huge butterfly net to the roof of his car, and started driving.   And the expanded experiment confirmed the first.

This effort then expanded through various countries and locations in Europe, but also expanded into doing counts of other species.

To everyone’s surprise, or maybe not, some of the insect populations had dropped by 90% over the last few years.

90% reduction in population.

That’s scary.

But you know what, the same thing is happening here.  Driving up north this summer I don’t remember one big juicy splat on the window.

Anyone else?

Then think about the knock on effect.  What eats insects?   Birds, reptiles and amphibians.  In fact the consumption of insects in the food chain is massive.

Is this real, or a fake news panic?   Of course it’s real.

Is it an omen of things to come?  You betcha.

Can we fix it?  I seriously doubt it, unfortunately.  My opinion obviously.

But we are changing the entire planet flora and fauna biome as we continue to swell to from 7 billion people to 10 billion.

I’ll ponder more on this as I drive my SUV home alone this evening, between cell phone calls and flipping off other drivers.