Declining Insect Populations - Spell Doom?

Bug Populations Are In Peril

 We may not like 'em but we can't do without 'em. There's something terribly essential about 'em.
-- apologies to the Muppet Show for the damage to their lyrics.

Bug populations are declining. Of that there's no doubt. Thirty years ago when people started muttering alarm about amphibian population decline, it occurred to me that as a kid decades earlier, I'd used grasshoppers as a fishing bait because fish loved them - and where I fished, there were also frogs. . .

At the time of coming to this realisation, I was again fishing, this time in a seaside beach. One of the places I fished as a kid was also seaside, and also had a freshwater river feeding a handful of small lakes and pools before finally joining the oceans, and this place was similarly at a river mouth with small lakes and entirely similar climate and vegetation. It was however a river that a capital city sat astride. And there was a real paucity of insects. 

I reasoned that where there were freshwater fish there were freshwater frogs, and where there were grasshoppers there were also other insects - and both fish and frogs found a lot of their protein from insects. I reckoned that if you found out what was killing grasshoppers and other bugs, you'd fix the frog decline, and I saw no - zero - discussion about insects anywhere I looked. 

How had these insect populations shrunk so much in twenty years? Was it climate change, or was it because of the city producing city toxins and byproducts? 

Turned out it was both. I headed out farther and farther on either side of the city and found what seemed to be clean environments similar to my childhood idyll, and where once I'd been able to swing a butterfly net and be sure of catching one or more grasshoppers as they startled into the air, now I had to spend ten - fifteen minutes to startle a 'hopper and then hand catch them. 

TBH I went farther afield because I liked the odd feed of fish and the city beaches and rivers were always over-fished - but IF I caught a 'hopper I discovered that I always had success. So I was bot in search of more fish and more insects, and not finding as many insects. And I began to get an inkling of why. . .

Out came the maps and - sure enough - the places that had the least insects had intensive farming upstream of them. Back then, market gardens tended to cluster close to their markets (well duh) and that probably meant that silt and pesticides would be flowing into the waterways, down to the coast - and insects too need water. I had no equipment to test the hypothesis, also I had a day job and family obligations and a social life so I could only plan trips a few times a year and take guesses at the grasshopper population. 

For some reason I tended to think that grasshoppers were a good indicator of insect populations and maybe they were. I swear my interest in them wasn't only for use as bait, I actually fished rarely in those days anyway, and as an adult I could afford proper bait.

I wrote a letter to the editor at some newspaper or other - it's so far back I really can't remember - and it vanished never to be seen again nor even replied to. This was back in the days before the Internet, and most newspapers didn't use BBS netmail, so good old 'stick-a-stamp-on-and-post-it' snail mail was the acme of communications. After wasting 12c on a stamp I was blowed if I was going to waste more money on a trunk call to follow up and ask why. And so one of my first acts of climate activism disappeared down the plughole of editorial apathy. . .

But to me the evidence was beyond reasonable doubt, our activity was poisoning fresh and sea waters, reducing the numbers and average ages of fish populations, drastically reducing the numbers of insects, and I did try to mention the insect issue as often as I could reasonably work it into conversation without being labelled a conspiracy theory style nutcase.

Grashoppers were 'insect hipsters' they vanished before it was cool to.

But Bugs ARE a Vanishing Population

Okay - this article has just rattled my cage again, this time in a 'tolja so!' kind of a way. It talks about how the "...combination of climate change and heavy agriculture..." are taking their toll on insect life. I'm inclined to agree with them but - by making it sound as though agricultural areas and climate change were the only regions affected by and being drivers of the catastrophe, they minimise the problem. 

And that doesn't drive the issue home nearly enough. THIRTY years ago I noticed this. And I'm by no means a scientist nor an exceptionally observant cit-sci (citizen scientist) but it was obvious to me, and it scared the shit out of me back then already. Now I'm frankly terrified. 

But not enough people are even more than dimly aware of these issues, so much so that it's taken (First Dog On The Moon link alert!) scientists glueing themselves to things to draw attention to how terrified these people are, people who KNOW what's happening and are helplessly watching the rest of us ignore everything they've made very public, to the point of now taking such desperate measures as civil disobedience. 

Just the fact that such events have been largely ignored by mainstream media and hugely overreacted to by police should give you some idea of how important it is to large corporations and government to suppress these issues. Imagine the effect on economies if we all came to our senses! 

Yeah. It all comes down to money. 

And this isn't 'woke-ism'. It's just commonsense. We've tied our lives to the idea of an abstract thing that has been substituted for real wealth, and yet by its own rules also IS wealth. In fact, real wealth is healthy land, healthy animal, plant, insect, and microbial  populations, and the living they afford us. But with the creep of money and how it's completely divorced from this real wealth, it has come to BE wealth and access to real wealth. 

Can YOU afford a nice plot of land and a house and clean energy to sustain yourself? Most of us couldn't. But only because a handful of people decide on the 'value' of those things and how much 'value' you yourself have.

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I'm always saying it - get involved! Search online for such articles, decide for yourself, write to the Editor, to the Chairman, the CEO, the CFO, the local government Ministers and Senators and Parliamentarians, write to the head f your country. Action is need now, not the protection of corporate earnings and shareholder interests,

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Is Salt Good For Us?

 Salt Intake And You

We're often warned against salt. But how much salt is too much? Is salt even necessary?

Long story short, we do need salt in our diet, but not too much salt. Our bodies use osmotic effect to move nutrients in and out of cells to feed and cleanse them, (look up "osmosis" online if you'd like to understand more) and that's why we need a certain amount of it in our diets. 

Like everything else it's a balance we need. Usually the natural whole foods that formed our diet included the right quantity of salt that we needed for optimal functioning, and that wasn't a lucky fluke - we evolved over the course of hundreds and even thousands of generations to make best use of the amounts of salt in our diet. 

Now we're in the perfect state for that but we've changed our diets, and processing foods adds way more salt that natural whole foods contain. Because we tend to concentrate those foods when we process them to produce nutrient-dense foodstuffs, and/or add salt to preserve the foods from bacterial decomposition, we end up with processed foods that contain multiple times as much salt, sugar, and fats than source food.

Too much salt creates problems with fluids crossing cell walls  and the osmotic pressure can rupture cells in extreme cases. Yes you can die from too much salt, and a slightly lower dose can make you very sick. For instance, drinking soya sauce (a highly salted ferment soybean liquid) has landed people in hospital and killed at least one. (Okay left braindead but that's the same thing as far as I'm concerned. Don't follow fad diets or stupid dares!)

But the main point, also made in this article, is that if we eat more made from scratch meals and avoid processed foods, that brings our salt intake down to levels our bodies can manage. Our ancestors evolved to utilise the salt in a more down to Earth diet, and our descendants will evolve to tolerate and use higher salt levels. But this takes space over hundreds of generations and is no good to us.

What Can We Do?

At its simplest, be aware that a can of soup (for example) has been made from a LOT of fresh ingredients, so instead of eating two carrots, two potatoes, a chunk of meat, half a cup of peas, a stick of celery, and assorted other ingredients (which most of us couldn't manage in a single meal) it's all been condensed so that you're getting all the salt, all the sugar, and all the fats, but in a cupful of soup that's easy to manage. 

So in effect you've eaten two meals in that one cup.

This is one reason why the best health advice is to avoid processed foods and cook from scratch, eat more raw fruits and vegetables, and use less salt in your cooking. Note also that the other thing processed foods have is salt, which is added as a preservative to - burst the cell walls of bacteria and kill then in order to preserve the food from their spoiling effects... 

And let's face it - home cooked food made from scratch always tastes better. If you can, grow some kind of herbs and vegetables wherever you are and use them. It adds flavour so you'll need less salt, has better nutrients than processed foods, and will make you healthier in the long run. 

As I always say at the end of these things - get exercised, get angry that our food system's been allowed to get so broken, sign petitions, write to your MPs and company CEOs. Subscribe to my newsletter, donate a cup of coffee or just Paypal me, join a local action group and get involved. And see you next post!