When people around here mentioned there are no more insects on the wind screens of car a local biologists checked the number of insects - and it was more or less the same (~5% less)
But what he found out was pretty interesting: Nowadays insects avoid streets. Evolution seems to have breed an inherent fear of streets into insects.
You would believe it if you saw the mosquito swarms in my garden. The quite busy street basically is a biological desert. One meter off road in my garden I have a HUGE swarm of mosquitoes every evening. Not just one or two, more like 100, all in one big flock, within 1-2m³. And as soon as I leave the house they are all over me. Only way to get rid of them: Walk to the street or get back into the house. Dusk-Time is Mosquito Time in my garden. No humans allowed.
Edit, what I call mosquitos are two different insects around here. The very tiny ones of 3-5mm and sting like hell and the huge ones at 50-150mm (Not joking, some are larger than my hand) which are utterly harmless but also disgusting. I guess nobody expected Monster Mosquitos in Bavaria. But then we also have snakes who can spray like skunks. And LOTS of them.
When I moved to Los Angeles a huge selling point was no mosquitos. There are now invasive mosquitos, but most people don’t mind enough to do anything about it. I might move again.
damn you awoke a deep memory. roads used to be blanketed in bugs come summer back then. now it’s rare to even get a single bug stuck on the screen in a cross state drive.
I haven’t seen any change in cat aerodynamics. Their trick is actually in their center of gravity, as it results in them being able to quickly right themselves when in free fall.
I see this meme a lot but is there any actual truth to it? I just drove to see the eclipse (April, not the warmest month) and my car was covered in bug splats.
It kinda is. I used to constantly get bug splats all over my car, but as of the last year or two I don’t have nearly as many. I’ve noticed that I spend less time when washing compared to then. What makes it even more worrying is I drive a lot more now.
Denmark: A 20-year study measured the number of dead insects on car windshields on two stretches of road in Denmark from 1997 until 2017. Adjusted for variables such as time of day, date, temperature, and wind speed, the research found an 80% decline in insects. A parallel study using sweep nets and sticky plates in the same area positively correlated with the reduction of insects killed by cars
United Kingdom: In 2004 the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) asked 40,000 motorists in the United Kingdom to attach a sticky PVC film to their number plate. One insect collided with the plate for every 8 kilometres (5 mi) driven.[2][3][4][8][11] No historical data was available for comparison in the UK.[12] A follow-up study by Kent Wildlife Trust in 2019 used the same methodology as the RSPB survey and resulted in 50% fewer impacts. The research also found that modern cars, with a more aerodynamic body shape, killed more insects than boxier vintage cars.[13] Another survey was conducted in 2021 by Kent Wildlife Trust and nature conservation charity Buglife, which showed the number of insects sampled on vehicle number plates in Kent decreased by 72% compared to the 2004 results.
Yes, there is a well documented mass extinction occuring as a result of human activity. It’s commonly referred to as the Holocene extinction or the Anthropocene extinction. It’s affecting many species of animals, not only insects.
What’s bizarre is that your focus snapped to the body language and emotions of this sketched character instead of the main idea of the comic. I don’t mean to be judgmental at all, it’s just an observation and an interest of mine. Can you tell me a bit more about your flow of consciousness when you first looked at the image?
First thing I see is face and then unhappy and happy states?, feel it kinda though not exactly. I look at the smile and I somewhat feel it too.
When I look at a picture of a smile I get a brief glimpse of my happy moments in life. I can feel the green grass and trees and family for a split second. Then this happy conflicts with the realisation of the message of the image which gives it surreal quality of being happy and horrible at the same time.
Which is accentuated further by the happy being not just some usual happy human but an idealised character from cartoon in a way that I associate with positivity and pureness.
Then I try to frame this guy in a bad light semi subconsciously. He voted for Trump
Neat. It’s like your mind sees a lot of emotional subtext when that meaning is not necessarily there, at least in a comic. I’m sure you look at things in life in the same way, except your point of view is much more useful and practical there, given that subtext is king in reality.
There should be some type of new art form or art genre that seeks to replicate this juxtaposition of happiness and environment, which creates feelings of the surreal.
I sometimes wonder how pure and positive cartoon characters would react to our world. What would be their daily routine?
I see what you mean about framing given the context. Mental health is too important to waste it worrying about things mostly out of our control. Maybe comic guy is just trying to take a day off from frowning? Haha
Little side excerpt here: I’ve been meeting a lot more people like you lately. People that connect highly emotionally with media content (you), and also react highly emotionally with other people (in the case of the people I know). This is in stark contrast to myself and other people I know who are jaded to this type of experience and only seem to “feel” stuff in an indirect way, or a culturally coded way in order to protect their mind from potential trauma. I believe that’s called an avoidant personality or something. Reading your original comment just helps me to open my mind to new ways of being and experiencing when all I’m used to is what I’ve already encoded in my behavior from others. Anyway, thanks for the insight!
Hmm, psychedelics are truly mysterious. I find that they can lead to some permanent “more abstract thinking” than usual. I read this article once that attempted to answer the question of why early psychedelic proponents and researchers were so “weird” as the article put it. Have you read it? I’m glad you feel different. I feel like I’m in a transition phase (hopefully).
Where in the PNW? I still see them on trails north of King county in the suburbs. Not disagreeing with the message behind the original post but those slugs surprised me when I moved here from the Midwest and they’re still around.
Western Washington. I used to go to a number of parks along the sound and see tons of slugs all the time. I know they aren’t completely gone, but I can’t even remember the last time I’ve seen one now.
Def this. I remember the pesticide trucks would come through the neighborhood and spray everything down. Which I’m sure is a big part of why this shits like this now.
On a hike with my kid and actually said, “Oh look! A bee! Stop, let’s watch it! When I was a kid these were everywhere. They pollinated all the flowers… and we thought the world would end if they went away… And they did… … And here are all these flowers… Hmmm”
Come to Mexico, I swear my windshield was crystal clear throughout all my road trip from McAllen to Austin, but once when I headed home, Mexico, I started to see the bugs all over the windshield, and even a dude in a gas station appeared from somewhere to clean it without even asking for (this is some of those douchebags who get mad because you don’t want to give them coins for the service you did not ask for lol) and when I continued driving the windshield was almost in the same dirty status pretty quickly.
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