Are there fewer bugs smashing into car windows these days?

[Mike Johnson]

Well yeah. Just in the last thirty years or so, the conservative estimate says we’ve lost about 50% of insect biomass worldwide. Flying insects in general, the consensus is closer to 75% — the more mobile they are, the more likely they are to encounter insecticide. And in agricultural areas of the US, the numbers you see are often somewhere between 75%-90% reduction in the last thirty years. There was probably a huge reduction in the forty years before that, too, but the data wasn’t so rigorously collected. We didn’t really make counting insects a priority until we saw complete population crashes occurring among key beneficial or charismatic species (like wait, there used to be fireflies here?) It’s not just anecdotes or aerodynamics.

Our planet is toxic yo.