[RhetoricThug]

Warning of 'ecological Armageddon' after dramatic plunge in insect numbers

Three-quarters of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in 25 years, with serious implications for all life on Earth, scientists say

The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists.

Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon," with profound impacts on human society.

The new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany but has implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture, the researchers said.

The cause of the huge decline is as yet unclear, although the destruction of wild areas and widespread use of pesticides are the most likely factors and climate change may play a role. The scientists were able to rule out weather and changes to landscape in the reserves as causes, but data on pesticide levels has not been collected.

“The fact that the number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” said Hans de Kroon, at Radboud University in the Netherlands and who led the new research.

“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”

The research, published in the journal Plos One, is based on the work of dozens of amateur entomologists across Germany who began using strictly standardised ways of collecting insects in 1989. Special tents called malaise traps were used to capture more than 1,500 samples of all flying insects at 63 different nature reserves.

When the total weight of the insects in each sample was measured a startling decline was revealed. The annual average fell by 76% over the 27 year period, but the fall was even higher – 82% – in summer, when insect numbers reach their peak.

Previous reports of insect declines have been limited to particular insects, such European grassland butterflies, which have fallen by 50% in recent decades. But the new research captured all flying insects, including wasps and flies which are rarely studied, making it a much stronger indicator of decline.

The fact that the samples were taken in protected areas makes the findings even more worrying, said Caspar Hallmann at Radboud University, also part of the research team: “All these areas are protected and most of them are well-managed nature reserves. Yet, this dramatic decline has occurred.”

The amateur entomologists also collected detailed weather measurements and recorded changes to the landscape or plant species in the reserves, but this could not explain the loss of the insects. “The weather might explain many of the fluctuations within the season and between the years, but it doesn’t explain the rapid downward trend,” said Martin Sorg from the Krefeld Entomological Society in Germany, who led the amateur entomologists.

Goulson said a likely explanation could be that the flying insects perish when they leave the nature reserves. “Farmland has very little to offer for any wild creature,” he said. “But exactly what is causing their death is open to debate. It could be simply that there is no food for them or it could be, more specifically, exposure to chemical pesticides, or a combination of the two.”

In September, a chief scientific adviser to the UK government warned that regulators around the world have falsely assumed that it is safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes and that the “effects of dosing whole landscapes with chemicals have been largely ignored”.

The scientists said further work is urgently needed to corroborate the new findings in other regions and to explore the issue in more detail. While most insects do fly, it may be that those that don’t, leave nature reserves less often and are faring better. It is also possible that smaller and larger insects are affected differently, and the German samples have all been preserved and will be further analysed.

In the meantime, said De Kroon: “We need to do less of the things that we know have a negative impact, such as the use of pesticides and the disappearance of farmland borders full of flowers.”

Lynn Dicks at the University of East Anglia, UK, and not involved in the new research said the work was convincing. “It provides important new evidence for an alarming decline that many entomologists have suspected is occurring for some time.”

“If total flying insect biomass is genuinely declining at this rate – about 6% per year – it is extremely concerning,” she said. “Flying insects have really important ecological functions, for which their numbers matter a lot. They pollinate flowers: flies, moths and butterflies are as important as bees for many flowering plants, including some crops. They provide food for many animals – birds, bats, some mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Flies, beetles and wasps are also predators and decomposers, controlling pests and cleaning up the place generally.”

Another way of sampling insects – car windscreens – has often been anecdotally used to suggest a major decline, with people remembering many more bugs squashed on their windscreens in the past.

“I think that is real,” said Goulson. “I drove right across France and back this summer – just when you’d expect your windscreen to be splattered all over – and I literally never had to stop to clean the windscreen.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ct-numbers

Also, this article seems appropriate...

New study finds widespread presence of pesticide in honey

Neonicotinoids were found in 75 per cent of honey samples collected in global study

A new study shows neonicotinoids — a commonly used pesticide that many scientists say is harmful to honeybees — are widely found in honey samples from around the world.

The study, published in the journal Science, found neonicotinoids in 75 per cent of honey samples collected between 2012 and 2016 at levels known to be neuroactive in bees, meaning they can affect the insects' cognitive function.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c ... -1.4344976

Lastly,

Global pollution kills 9m a year and threatens 'survival of human societies'

Landmark study finds toxic air, water, soils and workplaces kill at least 9m people and cost trillions of dollars every year

Pollution kills at least nine million people and costs trillions of dollars every year, according to the most comprehensive global analysis to date, which warns the crisis “threatens the continuing survival of human societies”.

Toxic air, water, soils and workplaces are responsible for the diseases that kill one in every six people around the world, the landmark report found, and the true total could be millions higher because the impact of many pollutants are poorly understood. The deaths attributed to pollution are triple those from Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

The vast majority of the pollution deaths occur in poorer nations and in some, such as India, Chad and Madagascar, pollution causes a quarter of all deaths. The international researchers said this burden is a hugely expensive drag on developing economies.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -societies

Thoughts?

[mikema63]

We need a new agricultural revolution.

The entire system needs to be reworked from top to bottom with an eye towards sustainability and ecology.

Perhaps even nationalizing the entire thing to do it, the negative externalities of agriculture are not being addressed.

It won't happen of course. Realistically best case scenario is investment into agricultural technology, biotechnology, and heavy taxation of externalities. Tied in with international aid to countries that can't afford to reform their agricultural systems on their own and tariffs on countries that refuse. It'll take a massive international effort.

And that's the realistic scenario for reform.

[anarchist23]

I've lived on a five hundred acre farm for over forty years and have witnessed the destruction of the eco systems.
The vast majority of hedges, some over 300 years old have been ripped up.
The farm was a dairy farm till a decade ago and is now a cereal producing "farm", farmed by contractors who's objective is to maximise profits.
Insecticide and nitrate fertilisers are over used.
When I first moved here in the mid seventies the farm was a haven for birds, plants and insects, not so now.

edit
This is my favourite poem..
‘Binsey Poplars’ is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), written in 1879.

The poem was inspired by the felling of a row of poplar trees near the village of Binsey, northwest of Oxford, England, and overlooking Port Meadow on the bank of the River Thame.

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

[RhetoricThug]

We need a new agricultural revolution.

The entire system needs to be reworked from top to bottom with an eye towards sustainability and ecology.

I agree, and I think this will lead us to holistic biology, replacing reductionist biology. We can no longer fragment anything in ecology, it doesn't work. The environment (ground) is in an information loop with the organism (figure) and the organism is in an information loop with the environment. If you change the environment you change the organism and if you change the organism you change the environment. What we have is a crisis of ignorance, as bureaucracies and economies reward quick solutions to a large systemic problem. The moment you introduce a new technology (chemical, abiotic, etc) you must anticipate the biological evolutionary domino effect. Time after time we see reductionist applications toxify/poison a holistic ecological system.

The effect may take a little bit of time to express itself, but that's evolution. The medium truly is the message, Mike. I know correlation doesn't imply causation, but take this case for what it's worth---

Evolution in your back garden—great tits may be adapting their beaks to birdfeeders

Researchers at Oxford University have been studying the Wytham Woods great tit population in Oxfordshire for 70 years and so the team had access to a wealth of historical data which clearly showed that the British great tits' beaks were getting longer over time. They were also able to access data from electronic tags fitted to some of the Wytham Woods birds, which enabled them to track how much time was spent at automated bird feeders.

"Between the 1970s and the present day, beak length has got longer among the British birds. That's a really short time period in which to see this sort of difference emerging," says Professor Jon Slate, of the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield.

"We now know that this increase in beak length, and the difference in beak length between birds in Britain and mainland Europe, is down to genes that have evolved by natural selection."

The team also found that birds with genetic variants for longer beaks were more frequent visitors to the feeders than those birds which did not have that genetic variation.

"In the UK we spend around twice as much on birdseed and birdfeeders than mainland Europe - and, we've been doing this for some time. In fact, at the start of the 20th century, Punch magazine described bird feeding as a British national pastime," says Dr Lewis Spurgin, of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

"Although we can't say definitively that bird feeders are responsible, it seems reasonable to suggest that the longer beaks amongst British great tits may have evolved as a response to this supplementary feeding."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-evolution ... s.html#jCp

All the 'things' we manifest and implement create biological ripple effects in our reality. Like i said, Technological environments interact with an organism's genotype and can impact its phenotype. By intelligently structuring the environment, humans can use convergent evolution to incrementally modify our characteristics. A kind of Morphic Resonance...

NASA's Van Allen Probes Spot Man-Made Barrier Shrouding Earth

Humans have long been shaping Earth’s landscape, but now scientists know we can shape our near-space environment as well. A certain type of communications — very low frequency, or VLF, radio communications — have been found to interact with particles in space, affecting how and where they move. At times, these interactions can create a barrier around Earth against natural high energy particle radiation in space.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/20 ... ding-earth

[anna]

And then there's the continuing degradation of the world's oceans.



Most Sea Salt Contains Plastic Fragments

A staggering amount of plastic is entering the environment as the result of tons of disposable plastic bottles, bags and microfibers from your clothing. Although you likely do not experience the direct effect of garbage from your day to day life, it is quite literally choking our ecosystem. The amount of plastic that enters the environment grows each year as manufacturers continue to produce products in disposable containers and consumers continue to demand a disposable lifestyle.

It is estimated that unless practices change, the amount of plastic entering the ocean by 2025 could be as high as 26 million metric tons per year.

[RhetoricThug]

I said: As we (the unthinking majority) sleep-walk through our evolution, we will castrate our biological reproductive system because post-electric society will depend on intelligent selection and the scientific method for sustainable growth. Colony collapse will be prevented by Technocratic policies. The Technocracy must strip individuals of their biological independence so populations will need a surrogate state for procreation.

New RoboBee flies, dives, swims and explodes out the of water
Hybrid robot could perform search and rescue missions, research studies, environmental monitoring

We’ve seen RoboBees that can fly, stick to walls, and dive into water. Now, get ready for a hybrid RoboBee that can fly, dive into water, swim, propel itself back out of water, and safely land.

New floating devices allow this multipurpose air-water microrobot to stabilize on the water’s surface before an internal combustion system ignites to propel it back into the air.

This latest-generation RoboBee, which is 1,000 times lighter than any previous aerial-to-aquatic robot, could be used for numerous applications, from search-and-rescue operations to environmental monitoring and biological studies.

The research is described in Science Robotics. It was led by a team of scientists from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

“This is the first microrobot capable of repeatedly moving in and through complex environments,” said Yufeng Chen, who was a graduate student in the Microrobotics Lab at SEAS when the research was conducted and is first author of the paper. “We designed new mechanisms that allow the vehicle to directly transition from water to air, something that is beyond what nature can achieve in the insect world.”

Designing a millimeter-sized robot that moves in and out of water has numerous challenges. First, water is 1,000 times denser than air, so the wing flapping speed must will vary widely between the two mediums. If the flapping frequency is too low, the RoboBee can’t fly. If it’s too high, the wing will snap off in water.

By combining theoretical modeling and experimental data, the researchers found the Goldilocks combination of wing size and flapping rate, scaling the design to allow the bee to operate repeatedly in both air and water. Using this multimodal locomotive strategy, the robot to flaps its wings at 220 to 300 hertz in air and nine to 13 hertz in water.

Another major challenge the team had to address: at the millimeter scale, the water’s surface might as well be a brick wall. Surface tension is more than 10 times the weight of the RoboBee and three times its maximum lift. Previous research demonstrated how impact and sharp edges can break surface tension on a RoboBee’s entry into water but the question remained: How does it get back out again?

To solve that problem, the researchers retrofitted the RoboBee with four buoyant outriggers — essentially robotic floaties — and a central gas collection chamber. Once the RoboBee swims to the surface, an electrolytic plate in the chamber converts water into oxyhydrogen, a combustible gas fuel.

“Because the RoboBee has a limited payload capacity, it cannot carry its own fuel, so we had to come up with a creative solution to exploit resources from the environment,” said Elizabeth Farrell Helbling, graduate student in the Microrobotics Lab and co-author of the paper. “Surface tension is something that we have to overcome to get out of the water, but is also a tool that we can utilize during the gas collection process.”

The gas increases the robot’s buoyancy, pushing the wings out of the water and the floaties stabilize the RoboBee on the water’s surface. From there, a tiny, novel sparker inside the chamber ignites the gas, propelling the RoboBee out of the water. The robot is designed to passively stabilize in air, so that it always lands on its feet.

“By modifying the vehicle design, we are now able to lift more than three times the payload of the previous RoboBee,” said Chen. “This additional payload capacity allowed us to carry the additional devices including the gas chamber, the electrolytic plates, sparker, and buoyant outriggers, bringing the total weight of the hybrid robot to 175 miligrams, about 90mg heavier than previous designs. We hope that our work investigating tradeoffs like weight and surface tension can inspire future multi-functional microrobots – ones that can move on complex terrains and perform a variety of tasks.”

Because of the lack of onboard sensors and limitations in the current motion-tracking system, the RoboBee cannot yet fly immediately upon propulsion out of water but the team hopes to change that in future research.

“The RoboBee represents a platform where forces are different than what we – at human scale – are used to experiencing,” said Robert Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute, and senior author of the paper. “While flying the robot feels as if it is treading water; while swimming it feels like it is surrounded by molasses. The force from surface tension feels like an impenetrable wall. These small robots give us the opportunity to explore these non-intuitive phenomena in a very rich way.”

The Harvard Office of Technology Development has filed a patent application and is exploring commercialization opportunities.

The paper was co-authored by Hongqiang Wang, Noah Jafferis, Raphael Zufferey, Aaron Ong, Kevin Ma, Nicholas Gravish, Pakpong Chirarattananon, and Mirko Kovac. It was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2017/ ... t-of-water

So watch out for the lawsuits folks, nature might sue humanity for copyright infringement... Oh wait, that's right, intellectual property doesn't exist, and we're rip-off artists. Hey Pofo, remember when I said humans can transcend natural selection?

How Humans Are Shaping Our Own Evolution
Like other species, we are the products of millions of years of adaptation. Now we're taking matters into our own hands.

“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” Kurzweil promised. “That is what it means to be human—to extend who we are.”

Clearly Harbisson’s antenna is merely a beginning. But are we on the way to redefining how we evolve? Does evolution now mean not just the slow grind of natural selection spreading desirable genes, but also everything that we can do to amplify our powers and the powers of the things we make—a union of genes, culture, and technology? And if so, where is it taking us?

Near future: Science fiction becomes reality

More than 50 years ago two scientists coined the word “cyborg” for an imaginary organism—part human, part machine. It seemed science fiction, but today around 20,000 people have implants that can unlock doors.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/maga ... gy-cyborg/

The metaphoric matrix is a malleable field of interactive information, and we can intelligently guide our evolution.