The research showed a lag time between temperatures during summer months and their impact a year later, leading him to believe that warming summers were the strongest factor in insect numbers dropping.
I wasn’t expecting global warming rather than pesticides to be the culprit, but that makes sense if it’s happening in very remote areas as well.
Not pesticides that are active at single-digit nanogram quantities?
Which ones are those? I don’t know much about pesticides, beyond them being bad for bees.
I don’t have examples offhand, but recently did a bit of reading at the behest of a friend whose cats had fleas, and recently developed pesticides were found to be active at levels of just a few nanograms per flea. Many of the newer insecticides are active to this degree, or close to it. Industry started designing pesticides using the principles of Rational Drug Design and quickly came up with a bunch of fantastically lethal (to the target, namely, insects) chemicals which are now being sprayed all over the environment.
Related: if you’ve ever happened to notice that more recently developed medications often require a lower dose, in milligrams, than older ones in the same class - that isn’t by accident. There are a number of principles that can be used to increase the potency of a candidate bio-active chemical, pesticides included.
without direct human interference.
climate change is the likely culprit.
Sure glad we humans didn’t do a climate change or anything.
