GrrlScientist reviews a book, Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse by David Goulson, and it looks like this is another one I have to add to my pile.

In this book, we learn that insects have already declined recently by as much as 75% — which is probably not news to those of us whose automobile windscreens and grills lack the typical ‘bug spatter’ of yesteryear, particularly after long-distance drives at night. This dearth of insects translates into far fewer insectivorous birds for birders and nature photographers to chase. Yet weirdly, most people — even many birders, who should be aware of and alarmed by this steep decline in birdlife — remain blithely oblivious to these dramatic changes. This is thanks to two errors in human perception: first, shifting baselines, where we mistakenly think that the current state of the world is normal. Second, this is also attributable to a peculiar form of gaslighting where we downplay the extent of the changes that we experience around us. (Self-gaslighting?)

Up until a few years ago, I would have classified myself as a lab rat, a denizen of an environment defined by air conditioning and fluorescent lighting, but then I decided I needed a radical change and started going outdoors (!) and walking around in empty fields and woods (!!) looking at spiders. My first project (which remains unfinished because of the damned pandemic) was justified as an attempt to use measurements of spider populations as a proxy for the larger and more complex populations of insects, so this book is right there in my interests.

Despite being new to this field, and despite only paying attention in the last 5 years, even I am noticing the changes. It used to be that if I were walking home at night, there’d be a cloud of flying insects around every streetlight, and you’d hear the happy clicking of bats flitting around their hunting ground. Now we’ve only got silent dead lights. There is a crabapple tree near the walkway home, and every Fall I’d be annoyed because the rotting fruit would attract swarms of yellowjackets…but this year, nothing. In fact, I used to dread that path home because it was surrounded by trees that blocked the wind, and vast clouds of midges and mosquitos would accumulate there. Not this year, though. I’m still seeing house spiders, though, I would guess that if you’re adapted to human environments, you’re still doing OK, but I’m finding fewer, and smaller, orbweavers outside.

To GrrlScientist’s list of excuses, I’d add that we expect some natural variation. This has been a summer of drought, so maybe it’s just a temporary situation — if we get good rains next year, maybe they’ll bounce back. Maybe it’s also a targeted attack. A few years ago I learned that the university employs a pesticide company, which was specifically called in when those harmless, bumbling grass spiders would dart into university offices, looking for mates (to no avail — the ladies were outside, fellas), and so the shrubbery would get sprayed, to my horror (sorry, fellas, the ladies are all dead). While prowling around buildings looking for spiders, I noticed piles of dead yellowjackets, which tells me what happened to the insects that usually feasted on rotting crabapples. They’ve been murdered.

Will people stop spraying insecticides all over farm country? I doubt it.

Fortunately, the book provides some solutions.

Although our current situation is serious, it can still be reversed, Professor Goulson maintains, because insects reproduce extremely quickly. All we need to do is support them as their populations recover. Some of the actions that we all can take include: reduce the space occupied by lawn and replace it with flowering plants, mow the remaining grass less often and allow a corner of your garden to “grow wild” and “get messy”; incorporate a wide range of native plants that flower throughout the season into your garden, along road verges and in roundabouts to attract beneficial insects; avoid pesticide use whenever possible by giving predatory insects a chance to take care of a problem first; create your own “insect hotels” and clean them periodically to reduce the accumulation of mites and fungi that can harm bees, and reconsider beekeeping as a hobby because of the many threats that domesticated European honeybees, Apis mellifera, pose to native bees. Professor Goulson also proposes a number of actions that farmers, city dwellers, and politicians can take or enact to support the recovery of local insect populations.

Oh, yeah. We’ve got a lawn, and I hate it. It’s not exactly thriving, anyway — the drought has killed big patches of it. My wife has created a couple of native plant patches in the back, and I wouldn’t mind expanding them. We have a sort-of vegetable garden that has been neglected and is overgrown with weeds, and maybe we can pretend that’s intentional. We don’t use pesticides. Of course we encourage predatory spiders to take care of any insect problems, and even transplanted a few spiders from other locales to our home.

Previous owners of our place were much more meticulous in maintaining the traditional American monoculture of boring grass in our lawn. We even have vestiges of an automatic underground watering system, a network of pipes and sprinklers connected to a fancy-ass timer system in our garage. That died a few years after we moved in, when a break in the water mains meant the city brought in a backhoe and dug a trench across the lawn. It might be a good project to finish the job, go in and dig out the PVC pipes in part of the lawn, tear out the grass, and plant prairie grasses and forbs and encourage more wild insects to move in, before they all die off.

They’re bringing back the chinook salmon in Washington state rivers, where the populations have been destroyed by hydroelectric dams, among other things.

Although, I have to ask, did they really have to bring up the Program Manager’s sexuality in the text? I say that as someone entirely sympathetic with the anadromous lifestyle, and who would be swimming back to the sea myself if I weren’t so darned timid and straight-laced (I’d probably call myself diadromous, actually, I’m open-minded about which way you swing).

In the mid-70s, as a young undergraduate at the University of Washington, I got involved in orca watching. It wasn’t a big deal, I had these identification cards for the J, K, and L pods, and on weekends I’d either go to lookouts on the Puget Sound coast, or on a couple of occasions, took thrilling rides on a university oceanographic vessel. It was long, long ago, and it feels like it. How did I end up in the Midwest, I dunno.

Anyway, this makes me sad. The Puget Sound orcas are not doing great, with their stocks of their favorite food, salmon, diminishing. Who’s responsible for that, I dunno. Now one of the charismatic killer whales, K21 Cappuccino, has died.

K21 Cappuccino was a gregarious, curious, and kindly orca. He liked to engage in play behaviors—breaching, spyhopping, slapping his pectoral fins. And he was generally quite fearless about approaching human boaters who were in his waters. He seemed to always be curious about the crazy monkeys.

The 35-year-old male, sadly, has now joined the procession of endangered Southern Resident killer whales who have been dying at precipitous rates over the past five years, reducing the entire population now to 74 whales. He was last seen a week ago in a badly emaciated state, struggling against the tidal currents on the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island, far behind the rest of his clan; it is presumed that he has since died.

I never even knew this whale — he was born after I’d left the West coast and was living in Utah, of all places. Whole generations of orcas have lived and died (mostly died, it seems) since I abandoned the Pacific shores, and now I’m sad for what never was and will never be.

Nice. I’d guess the temperatures when I was born were a little lower still.

A little arrow that just says “today” is a bit anodyne, don’t you think? Here, instead, this is today: Thousands flee Greek island Evia by boat as ‘horror-movie’ wildfires rage.

Maybe you’d prefer video?

The fires are coming for you, unless we all take action.

Hooray for physics! It keeps the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) churning.

The AMOC is the product of a gigantic, ocean-wide balancing act. It starts in the tropics, where high temperatures not only warm up the seawater but also increase its proportion of salt by boosting evaporation. This warm, salty water flows northeast from the U.S. coastline toward Europe — creating the current we know as the Gulf Stream.

But as the current gains latitude it cools, adding density to waters already laden with salt. By the time it hits Greenland, it is dense enough to sink deep beneath the surface. It pushes other submerged water south toward Antarctica, where it mixes with other ocean currents as part of a global system known as the “thermohaline circulation.”

This circulation is at the heart of Earth’s climate system, playing a critical role in redistributing heat and regulating weather patterns around the world.

As long as the necessary temperature and salinity gradients exist, AMOC is self-sustaining, Boers explained. The predictable physics that make dense water sink and lighter water “upwell” keep the circulation churning in an endless loop.

The AMOC moderates our climate and is also essential for things humans like, like the North Atlantic fisheries and the pleasant beaches of the Atlantic coast of the US. You want the AMOC to keep whirling. Seriously, don’t fuck with the AMOC. The bad news, though, is that we fucked with the AMOC.

Human-caused warming has led to an “almost complete loss of stability” in the system that drives Atlantic Ocean currents, a new study has found — raising the worrying prospect that this critical aquatic “conveyor belt” could be close to collapse.

In recent years, scientists have warned about a weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which transports warm, salty water from the tropics to northern Europe and then sends colder water back south along the ocean floor. Researchers who study ancient climate change have also uncovered evidence that the AMOC can turn off abruptly, causing wild temperature swings and other dramatic shifts in global weather systems.

We know very well the consequences of disrupting the AMOC. The last time it happened was caused by the abrupt draining of Lake Agassiz into the Atlantic

It’s happened before. Studies suggest that toward the end of the last ice age, a massive glacial lake burst through a declining North American ice sheet. The flood of freshwater spilled into the Atlantic, halting the AMOC and plunging much of the Northern Hemisphere — especially Europe — into deep cold. Gas bubbles trapped in polar ice indicate the cold spell lasted 1,000 years. Analyses of plant fossils and ancient artifacts suggest that the climate shift transformed ecosystems and threw human societies into upheaval.

The Polar Vortex was bad, but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

If this critical part of ocean circulation collapses in our lifetime, then can we drag out all the climate-denying Republicans and hang them? It would be more helpful to do it before, but I guess we have to wait until they complete the destruction of human civilization before taking action.

I was looking for spiders, all I found was a wasp.

So apt. So perfect.

“Hope is a story we tell children” also resonates.