Originally shared by Allen Knutson
This is the scariest article I've read in a really long, scary, time.
"(It’s easy to read that number as 60 percent less, but it’s sixtyfold less: Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams.) “It was, you know, devastating,” Lister told me. But even scarier were the ways the losses were already moving through the ecosystem, with serious declines in the numbers of lizards, birds and frogs. The paper reported “a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.” Lister’s inbox quickly filled with messages from other scientists, especially people who study soil invertebrates, telling him they were seeing similarly frightening declines. Even after his dire findings, Lister found the losses shocking: “I didn’t even know about the earthworm crisis!”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
As we eat grain and fish in dystopia we will yearn for bugs and weeds. Quiet horror. And fish are battling pollution and microplastic.
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