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by StanislavPetrov 3598 days ago
>Very low toxicity to mammals.

What is the difference between killing us directly and destroying the food web and ecosystem we depend on to survive?

2 comments

* Most of the food crops we depend on both directly and indirectly are grasses and are wind pollinated (corn, wheat, etc.).

* There is no evidence of neonics disrupting food webs or destroying ecosystems. How do you even "destroy" an ecosystem? that doesn't make any sense, at least with an ecologist's definition of "ecosystem."

There has also been a coevolutonary arms race between plants and insect pests going back millions of years and many plants contains chemicals many times worse than any pesticide used on crops.

> How do you even "destroy" an ecosystem?

Easy. Wiping the key groups, like top predators or pollinators

In any case, destroying is not the right verb here, "changing" the ecosystem would be a better fit. Often for worse.

> There is no evidence of neonics disrupting food webs

There's plenty of evidence. This article is just one more. No wild bees and other pollinators -> no apples, plums, peaches, pears, onions, lattice, pumpkins, carrots, peas, peanuts, caffe, honey... I think that this qualifies as a case of "food web in trouble".

> Most of the food crops we depend on both directly and indirectly are grasses and are wind pollinated (corn, wheat, etc.)

Yes human diet is mostly based in cereals. The problem is that a lot of areas in N of Europe, Russia USA or South America aren't suitable to temperate or tropical cereals like corn or rice, because weather. Thus they need either spend gas for bringing cereals to the population, or rely on potatoes, apples, cabbages and other crops that stand frost and short summers. The 'big' cereals can be also difficult in desertic or high mountain areas, because they need a lot of water and soil is too poor. Legumes and other desertic crops (fruit tree cacti for example) are awesome in this cases. If you use all the water in culturing lattice, the wild organisms suffer obviously.

Destroy is fine,lots of ecosystems collapse if you remove one link in the chain, they don't have time to evolve a solution. They just die.
Can you present any evidence that neonics are destroying the food web? The difference might be "toxicity of legacy pesticides is a real concern, and destruction of the food web from neonics is fictitious."