Insect Apocalypse Reporting Is Catastrophically Wrong Minded

The insect problem is real and we must have the correct focus on its cause if we are to save them

Pointing fingers of blame at the lesser usual suspects while ignoring the primary cause is a deadly prescription for great short-term click bait and advertising revenues, tragically that insures certain environmental doom.

Perhaps the prime suspect is too pretty to mess with.

Again in the major media the crisis of the insect apocalypse is causing great alarm. In the latest report just published in the Journal Biological Conservation (Feb 2019) insects are shown to be declining by a staggering 2.5% a year, a rate that insures widespread extinctions before the end of this century. While the report, in its ‘political science’ posture, suggests that the cause of this decline is human agriculture this very conclusion is called into question by the widespread nature of the study that saw massive insect declines outside of regions impacted by agriculture.

Ontogeny vs. Phylogeny – The problem insects face is to their ontogeny, their individual nature and ability to adapt. It is being overwhelmed by the trillion tonnes of yesterday’s CO2, our fossil fuel/fool age emissions from 100 years. The insects phylogeny, their ability and need to evolve and adapt, to the profound change in their air becoming 44% more loaded with CO2 will be their demise. Evolution is far to slow to save them, evolution takes countless millenia to produce safety via adaptation. Click to read more.

Last year a major report showing evidence of even worse insect decline took place inside of nature preserves in Europe proving without a doubt that something other than the usual suspects of ‘bad’ farmers and ‘pesticides’ must be a major cause of insect decline. But mainstream and social media today is driven to create popular headlines and storylines that will be great click bait, and there is no better bait than the pointing fingers of blame at the ‘usual suspects.’

Do not be fooled into choosing the lesser of two weevils!

It is true that we humans are the blame for the demise of the insects upon which our very existence is highly dependant. But it is vitally important that we identify and choose how to assign the blame so as to enable us to mitigate that causative blame and save the insects. The primary source of harm to insects worldwide both in areas impacted by human agriculture and the vastly larger regions where such impact is not present is our high and rising CO2.

The report, co-authored by scientists from the universities of Sydney and Queensland and the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences, looked at dozens of existing reports on insect apocalypse published over the past three decades, and examined the reasons behind the falling numbers to produce the alarming global picture. Its lead author, Francisco Sanchez-Bayo, of the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, called the study the first truly global examination of the issue.

The consequence of insect extinction would be “catastrophic to say the least,” according to the report, as insects have been at “the structural and functional base of many of the world’s ecosystems since their rise … almost 400 million years ago.”

Why is identifying the primary cause important.

Birds, like the whippoorwill, that feed on insects are rapidly disappearing. If they were canaries and we were in coal mines, the alarms would be ringing, and we’d be running for our very lives. Click to read more

A friend recently replied to me when I was going on about the folly of blaming pesticides and agriculture as the primary cause of insect Armageddon by saying, “well there is nothing wrong with blaming the pesticides and calling for less of them to be used.”

NO NO NO I said, if we identify that as the primary cause of this global calamity we will be distracted from the real cause. It’s all too convenient to ‘blame the usual suspects’ and in doing so we insure that the real culprits will not be dealt with. While it is true there is too much pesticide use and agriculture is diminishing insect habitat the far more major impact that is forcing insects into extinction is not the relatively few of us, humanity, that farm and use pesticides. The real monsters who are EXTERMINATING the insects are all of us.

When hundreds of millions of moms do the laundry and run the clothes dryers or drives the kids to school it is her/our CO2 emissions that is exterminating the insects to a far greater degree than the farmers and pesticides. But of course no one wants to identify mothers as being out to exterminate life on this blue planet. For one thing there will be no click throughs on the story adverts for fashion products that accompany the insect apocalypse stories if women and Daleks are made one and the same.

Oxygen is the deadliest of all insecticides

Here’s a primer on how CO2 is killing our beloved bugs. Insects evolved to regulate the amount of breathing they do not to bring the most oxygen possible into their tiny bodies but rather to greatly regulate and reduce the oxygen entering their bodies. Oxygen is the deadliest of all poisons at the cellular level. That deadly nature of oxygen is why we humans are so well versed in our anti-oxidants, and the need to keep our oxidative stress under control. Insect biology monitors CO2 in their cells and in the air as CO2 is a waste product that like us they must do gas exchange with the air to get rid of.

In a scientific paper in the Journal Nature scientists reported on the hypersensitivity of insects to oxygen. Typically maintain oxygen in their respiratory systems, 4-5 times lower than the normal oxygen concentration in the atmosphere. The insect breathes only long enough to allow this low level of oxygen to accumulate all the while breathing out a similarly small amount of CO2. It then closes its respiratory system, blocking off more intake of oxygen. Insects use the CO2 level to regulate their O2 levels. In today’s high CO2 air insect respiration is tricked into thinking that it has too much CO2 in its body driving it to breathe more and thus become poisoned by oxygen.

A majority of insecticides indeed chemically exploit the vulnerability of insects to CO2 and oxidative stress and the mechanism of the insecticides is to interfere with the insect CO2 respiratory process. The pesticide tricks the insect in a manner that is very close to what insects are experiencing in today’s high CO2 world. It is not our pesticides that is eradicating insects… we are the pesticide by virtue of our planes trains and automobiles and perhaps heavy breathing in endless debates about what to do about ‘climate change’ while we actually do next to nothing.

Want to help? Start by reposting and linking to this story on the plight of the insects.

And tell mother to stop being such a Dalek.