[photoguy112]

Back when I was a kid, after a heavy downpour the roads would be crowded with earthworms. You really had to watch where you step to avoid stepping on one of those suckers. Fast forward today and I RARELY see a single worm out on the road after a similar downpour.

[ALittleLight]

This reminds me of a passage in the book Sapiens, where the author muses that there may have been prehistoric tribes where grandparents told tales of when mammoths were so plentiful hunters would take them every month, and the grandchildren would smile and nod. The grandchildren would in turn grow up and tell their grandchildren that there were once beasts called mammoths, and these grandchildren too would smile and nod...

[CalRobert]

The shifting baselines problem comes up a lot; it related to fish catches

It's described more here - https://oceana.org/blog/daniel-pauly-and-george-monbiot-conv... and aptly illustrated here - https://oceana.org/sites/default/files/285468/catch_of_the_d...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline

[gnat]

Daniel Pauly is amazing. We hosted him for a conference here in NZ a few years ago. Such a mind!

What is your connection to shifting baselines and fishing policy? My father (former commercial fisherman) is part of a recreational fishing group arguing that the goal of fish policy should be abundance not short-term profit. http://legasea.co.nz

[CalRobert]

I don't have a strong connection to it, I just know that it's an apt illustration and we have photos for it - I doubt fishers today would turn away giant groupers. It's also discussed in a book I just read, Whittled Away, about Ireland's horrendous wildlife and fishery management (while pretty, virtually the whole island has been stripped of its wildlife to turn it in to livestock grazing). In short, there used to be a hell of a lot more fish, of different species, and the stocks we want to return to are levels from an already diminished time. Though it's got a lot to do with the EU's common fisheries policy, which was similarly awful, but has been improved somewhat since, with at least a ban on deep sea trawling.

[powercf]

Excellent article.

I especially like "We have to get rid of this notion that the past is a provider of anecdotes and the present is a provider of knowledge". This way of thinking is pervasive everywhere, including on HN. But we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the accounts of our ancestors because they seem exagerated when we compare them to our experiences today.

[varjag]

Same happens with climate change. Obligatory apt XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/1321/

[benj111]

This is interesting, thanks for the links, but.....

It isn't science its basically relying on peoples unreliable memory. Should I believe my uncle Bob, when he tells me he used to catch fish bigger than he was using a homemade hook, and some twine?

So at the moment I'm struggling with what this is. History? Probably. A tool for deciding public policy? Probably not.

I'm not denying the phenomena, just that as it stands theres a severe lack of facts in the linked articles.

[nosuchthing]

https://sites.uw.edu/bevanseries/2018/02/28/data-is-in-the-e...

"Dr. McClenachan used photographs taken between 1956 and 1985 to document the loss of the large trophy fish in the Florida Keys, and compared them with photographs that she took in 2007. She found a major shift in species composition across reef communities through time, with larger predatory fish being fished first, followed by a steep decline in the sizes and weights of fish caught more recently. Historically, catches were dominated by large sharks and goliath groupers, but today, the catches are almost exclusively small snappers. Interestingly, Dr. McClenachan found that the cost of fishing trips did not decrease, meaning customers paid approximately the same price for a ~20 kg trophy fish as they do for a ~2 kg trophy fish now, some 50 years later."

[benj111]

Thanks. I still have issues though.

We don't know how representative those picture were. The 1950s pictures have survived over a half century, they were taken at a time when photography was harder work than today. I could go fishing, photograph my meagre catch, and put it on instagram for the world to see easily.

Plus these seem to be tourist photos? Maybe its a symptom of (inexperienced) amateurs going to Florida Keys spending big bucks for the experience, whereas in the 50s it was actual fishermen going out to catch big fish, and the very best would take photos of their catch.

Again I'm not denying the phenomenon, just how much we can actually rely on it to tell us something useful. You can't from this array of photos definitively state that populations of x,y and z have dropped i%.

[NeedMoreTea]

Isn't that conclusion 100% the wrong way round?

If it were so difficult for photos to survive half a century wouldn't it be hard to show catches tended to bigger? After all the ancient 1950s photos of large catches have been lost through not surviving such unimaginable eons. Sorry for the tone, but seriously, by 1950s photography was not the rare and specialist thing it was in the 1910s. Sure, it might be just the unrepresentative ones that survived into modernity, but...

With millions of photos being taken daily today, shouldn't it be trivial to find some examples of enormous catches among them? Yet we don't find them. Yeah, yeah, I know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Reports of 2m, 100kg cod are from history, today both size and catch has plummeted.

[Cthulhu_]

Aren't there trading / sales logs, like, official records from back then?

[est31]

You will also love this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/drmegafauna/status/1088716741700710401

[mads]

Also did anyone notice that they don’t clean off insects off their car as often as before? Just 10 years ago, when I used to commute 170km every day in my car, I would have to clean the windshield regularly. I think I cleaned it once the last year and I even travel further today...

[manmal]

Yes, insects are also vastly reduced. In my region, there’s an increase in ticks (and tick-borne disease) because there are less insects, leading to less birds, leading to thriving ticks. So, an annoying side effect of reduced insect count is that we have lots of ticks in our gardens.

BTW we have non-organic agricultural fields in 50m distance of our house, so that _might_ be a factor for the dying insects.

Oh, and organic agriculture also uses pesticides. They just use different („natural“) ones.

[Cthulhu_]

You'd think there'd also be an uptick (ha!) in animals that eat ticks, but maybe that takes a lot longer to correct itself. If it wasn't for the prevalence of pesticides, insect populations would restore due to a shift in balance - that is, less insects = less predators eating them, less predators = more insects, etc.

[manmal]

I’m afraid a couple ticks per garden are not enough for any animal to survive..

[m-i-l]

The dramatic reduction in insects on car windscreens could be "explained away" by technological advances in car design (getting windscreens covered in insects could conceivably have been a problem great enough for someone to have invested time and money into resolving with more efficient aerodynamics of windscreens or whatever). Not saying that is actually the cause, just that many people could rationalise it as such.

The earthworms on a path or road is slightly more troubling though. Not something I'd thought about before, but there is a path through a park where I grew up that used to be covered in earthworms after every rain when I was a child, but the odd times I've been back up since in similar conditions I've not noticed any at all. Being a park it wouldn't have been exposed to more intensive farming or anything else. Same park, just a different time.

Chilling thought that there could be significant and detrimental changes underway in nature, happening on generational timescales so slowly that no-one notices, a little like the proverbial frog in boiling water.

[Rotareti]

> The dramatic reduction in insects on car windscreens could be "explained away" by technological advances in car design

I have been driving the same car for 20 years with the same roof-rack. 20 years ago the roof-rack was crusted with insects after each trip on the autobahn. I had to clean them off with a bucket of water and a sponge after each trip. I remember this because it was a standard routine. These days, when I come back from a trip, there is nothing. I haven't cleaned the rack for years.

[wnkrshm]

With the introduction of LED lighting and lighting becoming cheaper with it, the amount of artificial light at night has increased over the last decades and may be contributing to declining insect populations as has been noted in the UK and Germany.

[zizee]

Same car? Could improved aerodynamics play a part?

[NeedMoreTea]

I noticed the effect motorcycling. With an aerodynamically unchanged helmet and headlight, riding mainly naked bikes.

Last time I saw this crop up in a thread another comment claimed they actually were using the same car.

Maybe 50 years of these rivers of metal boxes reliably taking out trillions of insects yearly has played a part too.

[johndough]

I also observe less insects on my windshield, same car as 25 years ago.

[mads]

Might be it.. Ford Mondeo back then and an Opel Meriva today.

[black-tea]

You drive too far. That's insane.

[paulddraper]

Time wise though, it might be a faster commute than in Silicon Valley.

[mads]

Around 1.5 hours today each direction, but I am commuting to a different country and have to cross a bridge.

Back then it was 1 hour or so - maybe a little less if traffic was good.

[black-tea]

How can you waste that much of your life? You've spent almost an entire year over the past ten years just moving your body around because other people want you to.

[kasey_junk]

This would be considered a long but not especially noteworthy commute in the US.

1.5 hours each way gets you into the “supercommuter” level but 1 hour each way is fairly common.

[lazyjones]

I guess you eradicated all insects along your commute route.

More seriously, my car is full of dead insects just from a few trips to the airport and I live in a metro area with almost 2 million people.

[BaronMingus]

Possibly a factor. I think it's quite likely insect numbers are declining but some amout of the windscreen affect could be accounted for by good old Darwin - all those insects you scraped off your windscreen found their reproductive success curtailed with extreme prejudice.

[azinman2]

Could the design of cars be the driving factor?

[yingw787]

I think I noticed this too. When I was in elementary school in the early 2000s, the stench of run-over worms was almost unbearable after rains. Worm guts everywhere. There were also bugs flying around me whenever I went outside to play. I hated it and wanted it to go away.

It did.

[r00fus]

Does it concern you? It does me.

[yingw787]

Oh yeah. Be careful with what you wish for. One day us humans might not be just dominant, we will be alone. And in that sense, I don't want us to prevail against Mother Nature; I just want a healthy balance.

[frutiger]

Mother Nature has been around for a very long time. She will not remember us when we are gone.

[acqq]

> Mother Nature (...) will not remember us when we are gone.

She will. Yes, she will outlive us, but with very heavy losses. Due to these losses, it will be very obvious we have existed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

"one of the most significant extinction events in the history of the Earth" ... "is mainly a result of human activity."

"The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates."

And we "just started" (considering the known effects of the human induced global warming).

[garmaine]

I think you missed the point of the comment. If human beings drive ourselves extinct, life will eventually rebound just as it has from other, even larger mass extinctions.

[nikofeyn]

i hate when this sentiment pops up. it is practically meaningless but can even be even be viewed as harmful. most people don’t care about the environment already, so stating it will live on just silently emboldens people to keep on keeping on. many plants and animals are already dead directly due to human influence and others are to quickly follow.

[Meing4im]

She does not have that much time and thus tries at intelligent life left. Gradual brightening of the sun will start making the earth uninhabitable in about 800Ma due to accelerated silicate weathering.

[kian]

Can you provide some links with more details? Googling sub-phrases from your comment finds me nothing but information on the natural weathering cycle of silicates as it relates to CO2.

[wil421]

I still see tons of worms in the US. It’s been raining like crazy in Georgia and I’ve had to dodge a few worms. During the summer my driveway is a worm death trap. I do a lot of gardening in pots and worms always find their way inside.

[optimuspaul]

I noticed some worms this past fall after a downpour, it was just a few and it gave me pause. I do recall as well when I was a kid (30ish years ago) that there were a lot more worms. But I lived in the suburbs then, now I'm in the city, but near a large lake and large wooded area.

[BurningFrog]

Are these the same roads?

If you moved from a farm to Manhattan, we need to talk about the setup of this study :)

[Yetanfou]

They moved here, to our farm in Sweden. I just finished cutting and splitting a dead and partly rotten tree. The core of that tree was filled with a good approximation of soil which again was filled with earthworms. They were also slithering between the bark and the trunk in droves - this tree being partly rotten the bark was loose on the trunk - as if they were getting ready to evolve into treeworms.

When it rains it is crawling with the things. Living in the forest and having an unpaved lot probably helps here.

[duxup]

My driveway gets covered with them.

They love cooking on that black top.

[dorchadas]

Now that you mention this, I've noticed it too. It's getting rarer and rarer to see them on the roads and driveways after a rain.

[markdown]

Where were you a kid?

[twtw]

When were you a kid?

[photoguy112]

Late 80's into 90's.

[kakarot]

How were you a kid?

[hueving]

Most people start out that way.

[lawlessone]

big if true