Earlier this year, a research article triggered a media frenzy by predicting that as a result of an ongoing rapid decline, nearly half of the world’s insects will be no more pretty soon
Pensoft Publishers
Amidst worldwide publicity and talks about ‘Insectageddon’: the extinction of 40% of the world’s insects, as estimated in a recent scientific review, a critical response was published in the open-access journal Rethinking Ecology.
Query- and geographically-biased summaries; mismatch between objectives and cited literature; and misuse of existing conservation data have all been identified in the alarming study, according to Drs Atte Komonen, Panu Halme and Janne Kotiaho of the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). Despite the claims of the review paper’s authors that their work serves as a wake-up call for the wider community, the Finnish team explain that it could rather compromise the credibility of conservation science.
The first problem about the paper, titled “Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers” and published in the journal Biological Conservation, is that its authors have queried the Web of Science database specifically using the keywords “insect”, “decline” and “survey”.
“If you search for declines, you will find declines. We are not questioning the conclusion that insects are declining,” Komonen and his team point out, “but we do question the rate and extent of declines.”
The Finnish research team also note that there are mismatches between methods and literature, and misuse of IUCN Red List categories. The review is criticised for grouping together species, whose conservation status according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is Data Deficient with those deemed Vulnerable. By definition, there are no data for Data Deficient species to assess their declines.
In addition, the review paper is seen to use “unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper,” as the Finnish researchers quote a recent news story published in The Guardian. Having given the words dramatic, compelling, extensive, shocking, drastic, dreadful, devastating as examples, they add that that such strong intensifiers “should not be acceptable” in research articles.
“As actively popularising conservation scientists, we are concerned that such development is eroding the importance of the biodiversity crisis, making the work of conservationists harder, and undermining the credibility of conservation science,” the researchers explain the motivation behind their response.
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Original source:
Komonen A, Halme P, Kotiaho JS (2019) Alarmist by bad design: Strongly popularized unsubstantiated claims undermine credibility of conservation science. Rethinking Ecology 4: 17-19. https://doi.org/10.3897/rethinkingecology.4.34440
Public Release: 19-Mar-2019
But I thought they wanted us to eat the things?
What will we do for sustenance now?
After all, cannibalism can only get you so far. Not a sustainable food source in even the medium term.
This incident reveals that CliSci is not the only field infected with Activism disguised as Science.
There will hopefully be a broader movement in Biology to have the original paper retracted.
Insect ecology must be one of the most difficult in the realm of ecosystem (entomofauna?) studies. Besides, I thought we worried about ants taking over the world since they are the perfect socialist societies. Well, there are crazy, fire, and other such expletives used for them. I think we also learned that insecticides weren’t all that great given insect adaptability.
I will be more impressed after they study the effect of Harvey on aquatics, like mosquito larvae, and worried when more species learn how to invade the ocean. Also there is still increasing interest in training scientists in policy and communication. We have already been there in wildlife and fisheries management.
I think the insectagendonists need to learn two things.
If you trap and kill insects using big canopy nets in one spot year after year, there will be a decline in insects in that immediate area.
And, the new LED lights now being used for residential lighting do not attract insects like the old lighting that emitted more UV. Anyone claiming anecdotes of personally witnessing declines of insects clearly need to get out more.
Spotted Owls
“If the spotted owl hadn’t existed, they would have had to invent it.”
Listing an animal as an endangered species has more to do with environmental activism than with the status of a species. This explains why a representative of the Sierra Club said, “If the spotted owl hadn’t existed, they would have had to invent it.” In other words, the debate was not about survival of the owl; it was about land management. It’s unclear just how endangered the spotted owl was, yet getting it listed achieved the environmentalists’ end—less logging on national forests.
https://www.hoover.org/research/americas-forest-fire-problem
The Science Police
On highly charged issues, such as climate change and endangered species, peer review literature and public discourse are aggressively patrolled by self-appointed sheriffs in the scientific community.
Snip
To a certain degree, the rift is also a power struggle. The ecologists who founded conservation biology in the 1980s have served as influential advocates for the preservation of endangered species and biodiversity. They were instrumental in elevating the issue to the top of the global environmental agenda. These well-known scientists, such as E. O. Wilson, Michael Soulé, and Stuart Pimm, have strong feelings about the best way to achieve what they believe should be a nature-centric goal. They are protective of the successful cause they launched and, unsurprisingly, dubious of new “human-friendly” approaches to conservation that Kareiva and Marvier, among others, have proposed in recent years.
If conservation science is in service to an agenda, which it is regardless of the approach, then it seems inevitable that research would at times be viewed through a political or ideological prism. The Nature reviewer’s politically minded comments provide a case in point. When I talked to Vellend about this, he shared a haunting concern. “The thing that’s worrisome to me, as a scientist, is that here’s one person [the reviewer] who actually, to their credit, wrote down exactly what they were thinking,” he said. “So how many times has someone spun their reviews a little to the negative, with those sentiments exactly in mind, without actually stating it?”
http://issues.org/33-4/the-science-police/
We hillbillies have known for centuries that insects is best.
I live in Hanover NH. Here’s a personal observation: last year I saw two Japanese beetles, where previously I had to set traps. I did not see one yellow jacket wasp all season, where I usually have to fight over the raspberries, and very few honey bees. Thank God for bumble bees. I haven’t seen earwigs or sow bugs where there used to be plenty and I saw very few mosquitos and blackflies. Good, you might say – but it’s not good. No bugs – no birds, no pollination. And I’ve heard other neighbors say the same. So, go figure: maybe I have a toxic back yard, but I haven’t done anything unusual.