it’s so chilling to walk through an area where the houses are surrounded by blank sterile lawns and see a big lilac bush in full bloom without a single bug on it. No bees, no butterflies, not a stir of activity.
The neighborhood association where I work hires a truck to spray the whole subdivision. It trundles up every driveway and sprays every yard with pesticides. The children excitedly tell me about “the bug man” and know which days he comes on. I know when he’s been there, because in the following days I see the beetles, butterflies, bees, and more, all struggling on the pavement, slowly dying. The children do not realize why they are there. They poke at the bugs in fascination. I hate it.
That’s. Horrible. I have no words
Like
Those insecticides are toxic to humans as well, many are proven carcinogens, and their residues stick around for years inside homes
But even if that wasn’t so, insect populations worldwide are plummeting, and the entire food chain depends on them. Most plants and animals could not exist without insects, period
Keeping the insect ecosystem in balance is important for human health and long term flourishing. Not all species are impacted equally by these toxic chemicals, and the elimination of one species can cause an explosion in another.
For example, some of the major predators of ticks are ants, spiders, and beetles
If you kill all your ants, spiders, and beetles, it’ll take a long time for them to re-establish, but ticks can return because of a feral cat walking across your grass
What’s more, scientists have found that excluding animals from an area makes the amount of ticks that can be collected in that area to explode. We’re talking 2-3 times the amount of ticks actively foraging for things to latch onto. It seems like hungrier ticks seek food sources more and bite people more. This leads to the hypothesis that global defaunation is one of the causes of the explosion in tick borne diseases in recent years
Many birds depend on insects for food, bluebirds specifically eat a ton of mosquitoes
If you wipe out most arthropods, the the small mammals and birds that eat the bugs will visit your yard much less. Guess what that means
Current projections predict that the insect declines will be heavily impactful upon bees, butterflies, and moths, but could increase the populations of…flies and cockroaches.
Not to mention that as all the natural predators of agricultural pest insects suffer, more and more pesticides will be needed to get enough crop yields and it becomes a vicious cycle of poisoning the planet and farm laborers more and more severely to avoid collapse of food systems
Your neighborhood association is creating a bleak, sick, hungry future for those kids and everyone else.
Like, think about it:
If you kill and destroy everything in your surroundings that doesn’t benefit you directly, soon the only critters that can live there are the creatures that are parasites on you directly or that compete with you for resources.
And now they don’t have any predators to keep them at bay.
reblogging this again because researching ticks changed my brain around
like I thought “Yeah re-wilding will probably increase the risk of ticks but we just need to make tick safety widespread and common knowledge”
but then I RESEARCHED it
and the research was like “Actually tick diseases have increased DRAMATICALLY over the past 40 years, and tick ranges are expanding hugely and it’s mostly unrelated to climate change so far. And we did experiments and in areas where there aren’t any animals, the number of ticks that catch onto things passing through the area explodes, it’s like 2-3 times the number of ticks. Which is like, wait, weird, I thought animals spread ticks. But we think what’s happening is that when there’s no animals, the ticks engage in more questing behavior to find food.”
and I was like “Wait, but if the decline of animals is making the ticks look for food more, wouldn’t they…wait. Oh no. OH NO. We’re the food!”
and I looked at more research
and the research said “so the main things that kill ticks seems to be spiders, ants, and beetles.”
and I was like “spiders, ants, and beetles? the things that people see as pests and try to kill with chemicals that contaminate the whole ecosystem?—OH FUCK”
Basically it’s like
Expectation: destroying nature= fewer ticks, which means less disease
Reality: destroying nature= hungrier ticks that want to suck your blood way more and less spiders ants and beetles to eat them for you
Went to the river to swim today, and after years of being unable to find any, on a sand bar @bogleech and I found all these tiger beetles running around everywhere! Bronzed tiger beetles, specifically. Sadly didn’t have our phones with us, but they looked like this:
I knew that tiger beetles were the fastest invertebrate (they run so quickly they’re unable to see while running!), but I hadn’t anticipated they were also such agile fliers. Most beetles are extremely awkward in flight, but they zipped around as nimbly as the shore flies.
We also found what looked like an ant at first, but the flexible abdomen gave it away. Surprise!
This is not an ant at all, but a wingless red wasp! (Well, a different wingless red wasp–ants are technically also wasps.) I made the guess that it was the right size to be a parasitoid of the tiger beetles, and it turns out I was right on the money!
(Also pretty pleased with myself that I was the one to spot both first, and I wasn’t even wearing my glasses 😎 )
I just. I just… i have discovered something. And I have laughed too much. I have laughed every time I have tried to explain it to someone. I cannot get through this.
Look. Okay.
There are two things you need to know, here.
First: There’s a style of Greek pottery that was popular during the Hellenic period, for which most of the surviving examples are from southern Italy. We call them ‘fish plates’ because, well, they’re plates, and they’re decorated with fish (and other marine life).
Like this one, currently in the Met:
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Or this one, currently in the Cleveland Museum of Art:
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They’re very cool. We’re not 100% sure what they were for, because most of the surviving ones were found as grave goods, but that’s a different post.
The second thing you need to know is that when we (Classics/archaeology/whatever as a discipline) have a collection of artefacts, like vases, sculptures, paintings, etc. and we do not know the name of the artist, but we’re pretty sure one artist made X, Y and Z artefacts, we come up with a name for that artist. There are a whole bunch of things that could be the source for the name, e.g. where we found most of their work (The Dipylon Master) or the potter with whom they worked (the Amasis Painter), a favourite theme (The Athena Painter), the Museum that ended up with the most famous thing they did (The Berlin Painter) or a notable aspect of their style. Like, say, The Eyebrow Painter.
Guess what kind of pottery the Eyebrow Painter made?
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