Anecdotally, while driving along Minnesota's segment of I94 in the '90s, one would have to stop and scrape the bugs off the front window and grill. Today, this is no longer a problem.
This is a common anecdote, and a situation I remember as that's when I started driving.
Also one used in scientific study with seemingly dire results:
>The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.
Everytime this "the insects are dying" thread comes up, people come out of the woodwork with anecdotes like this.
But I am one of them! I remember getting my first car in the late eighties and scrubbing tons of splattered insects off my windshield every time I went to the gas station.
Now I barely even notice them.
Antecdote is not data, but I certainly believe people when they say the insects are dying.
Indeed. I've never seen more insects, birds, toads, and bats in PA than I did this summer. Some nights the katydids were deafeningly loud. The only thing that seemed to decline was spotted lantern flies, thankfully.
I remember in the 90s sitting on my grandmother's porch in rural PA at night. Huge moths everywhere. Luna moths being just about as common as mosquitos. Beetles bangings into the walls. Chubby spiders having so much food they couldn't even eat half of it. The walls were absolutely plastered with insects and you'd have to try to not get covered fireflies while walking through the grass.
Now there are some mosquitoes and crickets. Maybe a few moths sometimes. The walls outside are spotless.
Living in Asia now, I see insects about as much as I saw them back then. I have to wonder if there were even more back in the 90s, or if things are as good as ever here. But it's nice to see life.
Research says no: “The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.” From https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-spla... (Second hand comment from a journalist; actual research results may vary).
Insects getting better at avoiding cars in a much shorter time than we'd expect would certainly be a prediction of Sheldrake's 'morphic resonance' theory.
The comment above yours was not saying what you're saying.
They were saying, IIUC, that it could be that the same amount of bugs are splattered across a larger number of cars, so that if you look at any one car, then it looks like less bugs.
There’s a road in my area (rural MN) where I don’t slow down if there are deer on the side of the road. It’s a curvy road with a ton of deer, and back when I was a teenager the deer would do the normal deer thing of potentially getting spooked and run across the road…or directly in to your stopped car.
15 years later they no longer do that, just on that road in particular. I don’t know if it’s evolved behavior or learned, but they absolutely changed.
that wouldn't be strange. I remember a friend telling me about scientists who visited a remote place twice and seeing fungus-caused dieoffs the second time and he immediately claimed that it was global warming. My first thought was "those bastard scientists brought the fungus in" (I've hiked through remote endemic-plant forests and they tell you to scrub yourself vigorously on your way in to prevent tracking non-native plant seeds)
Fellow biker here, with as small a windshield as I can stand (meaning my helmet stands above the windshield. I still carry a can of Honda Spray Cleaner and Polish in the tank bag for scrubbing the face shield on the helmet, as well as the windshield. I used to go through several cans a year. Now, for the same miles ridden, a can might last over a year. The one variable is the bike, but I've owned a variety of bikes over the decades I've been riding, and only in the last 10 years or so did I have to cut back on my standing order of cleaner.
Huge trucks and SUVs are really popular in the US. The aerodynamics are not going to compare favorably to typical 90's cars, where even the trucks are much smaller.
For me, I noticed the change over one year. I had a job where I commuted the same stretch of highway every day. For the first few years, every May/June the windshield was always badly crusted with bugs. Then suddenly one year, no bugs. Same car.
I mentioned this in a similar discussion on HN a few years ago. I used to own a Nissan Cube (a boxy car), and it would regularly get encrusted with insects every summer, when compared to other family members’ vehicles which did not.
Insects still get hit with aerodynamic cars, but the blows are glancing and less likely to cause a “burst”.
Are they, though? So many trucks, SUVs, and other cars that don't have sloping windshields. Also, I would expect even pastier windshields given that the nationwide speed limit was 65mph until 1995, and it took years for states to nudge it upwards to where it is now (85mph at some places in Texas).
Remember need to scrape off bugs from windshield after each trip thru I5 ~10 years ago. No need to do that anymore.....
On the other hand, in my back yard, I grow a lot veggi, strawberry with worm casting from kitchen scraps. I do still lot of insects. A lot of birds nested around my house. Produce 10-15 young birds. I found a very cool looking giant tomato worm a size of my biggest finger. It ate half of (7 ft height ) tomato plant in 2 days.
The Strawberry, cucumbers, other veggies grow with worm casting taste SO much better than from anything store .
I love creating little sanctuaries and do think they’re useful as pockets of support and diversity. Also, the Tomato Hornworm is an awesome creature and results in a Hummingbird Moth. I try to feed them vegetative branches and keep them separate if I can so that they hang around and we still get tomatoes.
YES. Drove with my parents to the Catskills in upstate NY almost every weekend in the early 2000s. The windshield was covered in bug splatter. Now - nothing.
I drive long distances through Europe every now and then since 2009-ish. That's only 12 years and much of my drive is through farmland and forests, no lights other than the cars for at least 1000km in aggregate. In 2009 the windshield and lights would need a solid scrub every couple hundred km. Now I don't bother cleaning when refuelling.
I recall my dad checking the washer fluid level before road trips because we ran dry on a previous trip and it was clear we wouldn’t make it home without hitting a gas station ASAP.
People aren't as densely packed in most parts of Texas, so it might be explainable that way. A lot of the state is also hay fields instead of food crops that are more intensively controlled for pests.
But I've noticed a big change in Texas in recent years. The last two years I haven't had to use pesticide in my residential vegetable garden. I've had to control for mold/fungal infections, but not for insects. And I live up against a nature preserve and try to keep most of my property as natural as possible.
The speed limit went up to 85 in Texas. It seemed to max out at 75 or 80 in other places. I'm not sure if an extra 5-10mph made the difference, but it could have.
This also stopped being a problem for me in the 90s when I started driving my mom's Dodge Intrepid, which was significantly more aerodynamic than other cars of the era.
