Years ago when I lived in suburban Texas with a typical suburban house with a back yard that had open space behind it I had a terrible insect problem. Exposed skin would get a mosquito bite-per-minute, the dogs were coming inside covered in fleas, etc. So I went to Home Depot and bought this yard spray that promised to kill mosquitos, fleas, ticks, etc. and I hosed down the back yard in a desperate attempt to reclaim it for our families use.
What struck me as soon as I was done spraying the yard was how quiet it was. It was eerie. It then occurred to me that I hadn't just killed the pests, I had killed everything.
These sorts of products are in every hardware store. How many other people just casually eliminate all insects in their yard, and perhaps do so frequently? What do those chemicals do when they wash away into the watershed? Same question for all the chemicals used in agriculture - it can't be good, right?
In a way it boggles the mind that this is an acceptable product, which is socially acceptable to use. I certainly regret it, but I seem to be in the minority.
edit: bat boxes, water-fish traps and having birds around will certainly reduce mosquito population ... but there will be still lots of them around. A laser can take them (allmost) all out ...
Oh and about the water: if you just have open water around with no fish in it ... then the mosquitos will love that, btw.. So taking care, that there is no open water around, when it is hot, helps also a lot ... but I still want my laser turret.
I noticed in South East Asia it was common to keep a water feature in the yard with one or more fish in it.
Mosquitos land on the water to lay eggs and are immediately eaten by the fish.
The water feature could be quite small. Sometimes just a large vase in a shady location with no aeration pump or filter (the water needs to be stagnant) and a few goldfish.
Not bad ... but the fans do make noise. Which is OK for a party with music anyway, but for something more romantic - not so much. At least not for me ...
I just moved from California to Tennessee and only recently got to experience fireflies for the first time in my life. They're incredible :) I don't see them in the city, but that doesnt surprise me... there are tons once you leave downtown, though.
I went to Pennsylvania for the first time in my mid twenties. When I saw fireflies, it affected me in a way writing about it can only hint at. A sense of surprise and wonder that I haven’t experienced since childhood - maybe not even then. I haven’t experienced anything like it again, and I suspect I never will.
Intellectually, I knew they were ‘a real thing’, but that in no way prepared me for the reality.
Since then, it’s always been reassuring to look back and know that such wonder can still be felt by a grown adult.
We called them "lightning bugs" in rural Texas. We used to have ice cream after dark in the back yard with the parents and grandparents and neighbors, amidst a swarm of moving stars. It seems magical now, as though I'd dreamt it. But back then, it was just a typical Saturday night.
We called them "lightning bugs" when I was living in Pennsylvania (as I recall), but since then I've lived in North Carolina and Virginia and now think of them as "fire flies".
There was an article posted here recently about fireflies disappearing. The conclusion was more that they have a rather limited range, and prefer certain (damp, wooded) environments, and it is these environments which are disappearing.
My skepticism is rooted in having fireflies where I lived 20 years ago in a neighborhood that wasn't new. Now, there are no fireflies there. Unless the die-off is very slow, my experience clashes with your report that their limited range / terraforming are to blame.
If the article is merely stating that terraforming has MORE of an impact than pesticides... well, that could be true merely because we build more than we spray.
To your point, I think a lot of folks forget how much "terraforming" we're doing all of the time. Entire expanses of grasslands and forests are growing and being re-leveled.
A look at Google maps satellite demonstrates changes of color (dark green to light green and vice versa) across parts of several continents, changes that ebb and flow in big ways over just decades. I think this would very much affect insect (and animal and plant) populations.
Drought has been the major issue for Texas over the years. They really like damp environments, and most of the state has been incredibly dry for the past couple of decades. They're starting to rebound a bit, with the reasonable amounts of rain we've had for several years in a row now.
I never saw them growing up in Texas, but now I live in a house with a creek right behind it, and they're active all summer. I still get really excited about seeing them!
My friends who grew up in Houston find it completely unremarkable, though, due to how wet it is down there. Apparently a very common occurrence.
We do know how to control insects in ways that only target the insects we actually want to get rid of, and leave everything else alone, but we aren't willing to put in the effort.
There are two major categories of ways to kill an insect.
1. Attack it with chemicals that interfere with its biologically processes in such a way that it dies.
2. Physically attack its body causing sufficient damage to kill it, such as by crushing it, or shredding it.
(I'll include things like burning it with fire or acid as physical attacks rather than chemical attacks because they kill by destroying the body. I'll count drowning as a physical attack, too).
Within each of these categories there are simple methods that are effective and cheap, but are also not very discriminatory. In the chemical category, that would be pesticides that attack some widespread biological process that is shared by many insects, or in many cases all animals or even all cellular life.
To use this kind of pesticide safely you have to find ways to confine its application to things you are willing to kill, or you have to rely on it taking a lot less of it to kill the "bad" insects than it takes to harm a human and so with some care you can kill the bugs and not make too many people sick.
There are also within each of those categories ways to kill that will only affect one species.
In the chemical category, the key is hormones. An insect is like a little robot that has several built-in behaviors that normally play out in a specific sequence. The timing of when these behaviors happen is controlled by hormones. They are essentially the clock that drives the program.
So let's say you've got some insect that is bothersome. It hatches in the spring, is a pain in the ass all summer, and lays eggs and dies in the fall. If you study it you will find something like the cooling weather in fall triggers a hormone change, and that hormone invokes the "lay eggs and die" behavior.
Congratulations! You now have a way to make a safe pesticide for that insect! You just need to make a pesticide based on that hormone, and apply it sometime between spring and fall before the insect has matured enough to have viable eggs. The hormone will still trigger "lay eggs and die", but the eggs won't be viable. So not only have you killed the insects that summer, you've also decimated the next generation.
The beauty of a hormone approach is that these hormones are already out there in the ecosystem. Every time some predator eats one of the target insects in the fall, that predator is eating the hormone. The hormone is already spread up the food chain, and so things are already adapted to an environment where they are exposed to it. The extra exposure when we start using it in a pesticide will cause little or no harm to other species.
So why don't we do this more? I'll cover that below, after first talking about the physical category of killing insects.
In the physical category, the key is other insects. For a large variety of insects we consider pests, there exists some other insect that either preys upon it or is a fatal parasite to it or that it depends on in some way.
If you know enough about your target insect, you can often bring in one of its predators or parasites, or attack something it depends on, and indirectly control the target that way. This can be especially good when the target is an invasive species.
In many cases insect predators are very specific in their prey, only preying on one specific species. If you pick such a predator to import to attack your target, that is safe because the predator cannot turn to other insects after wiping out the target. Once the target is gone, the predator dies.
So why don't we do this more?
Same reason we don't do the hormone-based pesticides more. Both of these approaches require a much deeper understanding of the insect and its environment than the broad poison approach does.
A lot of this is covered in the excellent book "Life on a Little Known Planet" by Howard Ensign Evans [1]. In the book he mentions an incident where California was suffering large citrus crop losses from some invasive insect. In Florida that insect was kept under control by a particular predator insect. California officials imported that predator--and nothing happened. It turned out that there was another species related to the predator, but it preyed on something other than the species that was invading California. These two predator species were similar enough that no one knew there were two of them. Even though this predator species played a major role in keeping a major agricultural pest at bay, there was only one or two scientists who actually studied them, and they weren't very well funded. There had simply not been enough research put in to notice that they were dealing with two species.
Would something like releasing sterilized males fall into category 1?
For all my insect sympathy and conservation values, I'm absolutely in favor of eradicating the few species of mosquito that bite and carry disease. But every time a pilot springs up to test a method of doing that people get freaked out about releasing "genetically modified mosquitos" into the wild and it never happens. So instead of micro-targeting the pest at the species level we spray toxic chemicals everywhere that 1) don't eliminate the problem and 2) result in a lot of collateral damage.
Also sprayed on your food... sometimes not even to kill insects, but to kill the plant, desiccating it right before harvest so its easier for a machine to pick and sort.
Take the time to read "Silent Spring." People used to kill themselves doing what you did. Never apply liberal quantities of pesticides all over your yard unless you really know what you're doing.
(Some lady gave herself leukemia from spraying down her basement with DDT to kill the spiders. A doctor poisoned himself spraying his rosebushes.)
Nuts to that, I don't want to spend every summer covered in weeping sores from whatever infection the local mosquitos carry. The wife and I look like crackheads half the summer. If I could I would DDT my whole neighbourhood and wouldn't bat an eye.
And then when the food chain collapses or when you find out you've been eating what's been eating the poisoned insects...and now you have all the poisons too? When ecosystems are poisoned, either the bottom gets kicked out or the top of the food chain dies off first. Not smart...
What struck me as soon as I was done spraying the yard was how quiet it was. It was eerie. It then occurred to me that I hadn't just killed the pests, I had killed everything.
These sorts of products are in every hardware store. How many other people just casually eliminate all insects in their yard, and perhaps do so frequently? What do those chemicals do when they wash away into the watershed? Same question for all the chemicals used in agriculture - it can't be good, right?
In a way it boggles the mind that this is an acceptable product, which is socially acceptable to use. I certainly regret it, but I seem to be in the minority.