[MCN] Should we learn to eat insects?

[Lance Olsen]

‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming-study-shows-massive-insect-loss/ <https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming-study-shows-massive-insect-loss/>
Extended excerpts:
Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, and the forest's insect-eating animals have gone missing, too.
In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees decreased by 45 percent. In places where long-term insect data are available, mainly in Europe, insect numbers are plummeting. A study last year showed a 76 percent decrease in flying insects in the past few decades in German nature preserves.
The latest report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [ open access ] <<http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/10/09/1722477115 <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/10/09/1722477115>>>, shows that the problem extends to the Americas. The study's authors implicate climate change in the loss of tropical invertebrates.
Bradford Lister, a biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, has been studying rain forest insects in Puerto Rico since the 1970s."We went down in '76, '77 expressly to measure the resources: the insects and the insectivores in the rain forest, the birds, the frogs, the lizards," Lister said.
He came back nearly 40 years later, with his colleague Andres Garcia, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What the scientists did not see on their return troubled them. "Boy, it was immediately obvious when we went into that forest," Lister said. Fewer birds flitted overhead. The butterflies, once abundant, had all but vanished.
Garcia and Lister once again measured the forest's insects and other invertebrates, a group called arthropods that includes spiders and centipedes. The researchers trapped arthropods on the ground in plates covered in a sticky glue, and raised several more plates about three feet into the canopy. They also swept nets over the brush hundreds of times, collecting the critters that crawled through the vegetation.
Each technique revealed the biomass (the dry weight of all the captured invertebrates) had significantly decreased from 1976 to the present day. The sweep sample biomass decreased to a fourth or an eighth of what it had been. Between January 1977 and January 2013, the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold.
“It’s bewildering, and I’m scared to death that it’s actually death by a thousand cuts,” Wagner said. “One of the scariest parts about it is that we don’t have an obvious smoking gun here.” A particular danger to these arthropods, in his view, was not temperature but droughts and lack of rainfall.

Lister pointed out that, since 1969, pesticide use has fallen more than 80 percent in Puerto Rico. He does not know what else could be to blame. The study authors used a recent analytic method <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03610918.2015.1122048?journalCode=lssp20>, invented by a professor of economics at Fordham University, to assess the role of heat. “It allows you to place a likelihood on variable X causing variable Y,” Lister said. “So we did that and then five out of our six populations we got the strongest possible support for heat causing those decreases in abundance of frogs and insects.”

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“The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.”

Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. 

The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.”

<<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html>>>







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