1B Missing Snow Crabs. Canary in the Coal mine?

[Samson's Wig 3192]

Has anyone reached out to the poultry industry?  I suspect some surreptitious chicken-neck dumping may be afoot.

[Bozo_Casanova 26472]

Very Serious People: shifting subsidies away from fossil fuel to invest in new technology will cripple the economy. Oh, and fuck your fishing industry.

[Brisketexan 105147]

42 minutes ago, Bevo said:

I also see more whitewing dove in Austin than there used to be. When I went to school here, I don't remember seeing any. I just chalked it up to immigration.

Whitewing dove are just hardworking birds eating the sunflower seeds that lazy mourning dove aren't willing to eat!

Pisses me off that they mostly stay in the city, though.  At my house?  95% whitewing.  At my hunting lease, 20 miles from my house?  99% mourning dove.  

Back to the crabs.....the blue crab situation in Texas is interesting (and discouraging as well).  My now-adult son still loves to crab when we're down at the coast, but the past couple of years, catching enough keeper-sized to make it worthwhile has been difficult.  We can catch crabs, but not as many, and they're mostly undersized.

Quote

Texas blue crab populations have declined significantly in the last few years. In fact, last year's harvests were the lowest ever recorded. Only 3.1 million pounds were landed, an amount well below the historic average of 6.3 million and nowhere near the 11.9 million pounds landed in 1987. 

I'm having a hard time finding numbers that show long-term population trends, but declining population seems to be a thing.

Edited October 14, 2022 by Brisketexan

[Incredulity 11675]

56 minutes ago, Bevo said:

They could have left. They've had plenty of warming.

[Deej 76797]

1 hour ago, Bevo said:

I also see more whitewing dove in Austin than there used to be. When I went to school here, I don't remember seeing any. I just chalked it up to immigration.

I blame Stevie Nicks. 

[Cornpop 230]

1 hour ago, YGIFS said:

No, I am not related to Tom Perrotta.  I don't think he's a cannibal either, but who knows where these artsy types get their inspiration? 

Never a fan of crab legs, but won't turn 'em down if I see 'em at a party.  But I always think of Jim Gaffigan's bit when he orders it at a seafood restaurant, "Oh you'd like the snow crab, sir?  Let me get you some tools." 

Bottom line, no climate change angle here...this is just fucked up all the way around.  I think a lot of this may have to do with all the plastics in the ocean.  Even the most ardent deniers I know, who are fishermen like me, take a look at those photographs and satellite images of those flotillas of shit out in the ocean and think, "Yeah, that's the size of Texas...I bet the marine life don't like that too well." Once you start swimming under it and attempt to surface...you can't...for 500 miles.  That can't be good for morale down there.  

Who is denying that there is a bunch of trash in the ocean?

[Nice Guy Eddie 13512]

When I was a kid in the 70s and I rode with my parents between Houston and Austin, the windshield and front of the car would be encrusted with dead bugs.  Now I have a decent chance of having a spotless car on that same trip. Maybe 1-3 bugs on it.

I'm not necessarily a fan of those bugs but I presume they were an important part of the ecosystem.

[YGIFS 19450]

15 minutes ago, Cornpop said:

Who is denying that there is a bunch of trash in the ocean?

When I said "deniers", I was referring to folks who were denying changes werre happening to the ocean in terms of temp, levels, etc.  Not the shit  we dump in it, my bad.  Should have clarified.  

[Bevo 13577]

23 minutes ago, Cornpop said:

Who is denying that there is a bunch of trash in the ocean?

Dentists

[PRONG HORN 3146]

4 hours ago, crash_davis said:

The kids know we are fucking up the planet. Sad thing is our and the boomer generation don't give a fuck

 

That’s why they’re all going to be voting lib.  But even the lib tards don’t really care.  Helping the environment costs too much.  Our money should go to illegal aliens and homeless people.

[Cornpop 230]

31 minutes ago, PRONG HORN said:

 

That’s why they’re all going to be voting lib.  But even the lib tards don’t really care.  Helping the environment costs too much.  Our money should go to illegal aliens and homeless people.

All of that is straight politics, period

[Chewbacca 7780]

It's almost like climate change is real or something...

[Superhero 8830]

12 hours ago, crash_davis said:

I told my wife this years ago. Fishing the flats, especially mid-coast water clarify, you can see crabs. There were a ton more when I started kayak flats fishing in 2006. Now, they are few and far between and small as shit. Drought, water salinity, over harvesting, pollution, probably all of it.

Ocean acidity is another culprit. CO2 is absorbed (dissolved?) into the ocean until there is equilibrium with CO2 in the atmosphere. The ocean was/is basic with a Ph > 7.9, but as more CO2 enters the water, the Ph has dropped and affected plant and animal life in shallow waters. Change in the ecosystem can be far reaching and very likely affecting species that depend on life in shallow waters.

I’s listening an audiobook called the Sixth Extinction. It’s pretty depressing how humans are causing plants and animals to die at a rate of tens of thousands above the background extinction rate.

Since the industrial revolution, mankind has released significant amounts of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. That carbon has taken millions of years to form and we using it at a far faster rate than it can be replaced into the earth.

 Climate change is real.

 Consider listening to the audiobook. It’s already a beating listening to it. I’d probably put out form after 2 pages off I tried reading it. The book is really depressing song how humans are causing species to die off. Not at the rate of the last extinction (the K-T extinction being the last one), but fast nonetheless. 

[52-80 19159]

2 hours ago, Superhero said:

The ocean was/is basic

Speak for yourself. My ocean fancy. 

[YGIFS 19450]

8 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

Speak for yourself. My ocean fancy. 

I assure you, the cooler temps are da' way...

[Judge Roybeanbag 11819]

16 hours ago, Bevo said:

I say let the crabs die. War is hell. 2018, 2019, 2020 - They could have left. They've had plenty of warming.

“warning” - Freudian slip correction.   

[52-80 19159]

Snow crabs: taste like crab; talk like people

[Bevo 13577]

31 minutes ago, Judge Roybeanbag said:

“warning” - Freudian slip correction.   

[Smax 3800]

I blame Putin. Also, how do they know it’s a billion? Take role? 

Professional crowd estimator

The other night we went to one of those viet cajun seafood boil places, waitress told us market price for king crab was 79.99 a pound.

[Francisco 2.0 32395]

20 hours ago, smuggs said:

I blame years of unchecked endless snow crab legs at Red Lobster.

 

Lots of stories about this; they only ran the promotion 2 years because it nearly bankrupted the chain, and the President who dreamed this up was fired.  In summary; the president had came from a steakhouse background, so she thought unlimited crab = unlimited steak; they didn't bank on how much crab it would take to fill customers up and they were banking on customers only eating 2 plates of crab; anything over that was a loss.

I'll raise my hand; I did participate in this fiasco each of the two years it was offered.  One eventful trip involved my former boss and his two grandsons (who both played D1 football as offensive linemen).  We sat there for over two hours; and God knows how many crablegs were served at our table.  It looked like a battlezone when we were finished.  I remember at one point they just brought out a tub of crablegs because it was easier than carrying multiple plates.

 

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/red-lobsters-unlimited-crabs-disaster-83e4afeb07dc

 

Spoiler

Edna Morris, then the CEO of Red Lobster, took a ridiculous bet.

She assumed a specialized all-you-can-eat snow-crab-legs buffet for $22.99 would increase total profits.

Through their internal calculations, they determined the price point was just high enough — versus the normal $14.99 all-you-can-eat — to create adequate demand for profit.

The problem? The people who were willing to pay that $22.99 were either big fans of snow crab legs or had a special hatred for snow crabs — and eating them was their way of expressing that hatred.

Buffets attract a “hungry” crowd.

As the promotion rolled out, people rolled into this restaurant, devouring snow crab legs, skipping all other items to save more room in their stomachs.

The special would still be profitable if customers ate two plates of snow crab legs.

The people who showed up were often eating more than double that. Crabmeat isn’t thick. You have to eat lots of those legs to actually fill up.

People got their money’s worth — and then some.

And then operations had problems

Store management realized it was taking customers a strenuously long time to eat the crab legs. People were spending hours at these tables. And consequently, the staff weren’t turning over tables fast enough. The process of cracking open crab legs was too tedious.

Because snow crab is an imported item from a natural habitat, the government regulates it so that we don’t overharvest.

During the promotion, as crab-leg consumption increased, they lowered quotas (less farming allowed), causing the prices to rise. (High demand + low supply = high price.)

Red Lobster had to keep buying up crab legs at exorbitant prices. Combine this with overeating, and the monthly accounting reports began turning red.

Red Lobster had made another major miscalculation: customers weren’t eating the entire crab legs they took. They were eating only the legs and not the other parts, including the body of the crab.

Reports came in that each store was throwing multiple 50-gallon trash bags full of uneaten crabs each day (we should start fining people for throwing away uneaten plates like this).

And then the scoreboard went official

In one quarter, the company took a $3.3 million loss — which is catastrophic in the cut-throat low-margin restaurant industry.

Then, a bad problem became a terrible problem: Wall Street analysts downgraded the stock due to “strategic mismanagement”. This led to a panicked selloff, erasing $400 million in stock value in one week.

Unfortunately for Red Lobster CEO Edna Morris, sh*t rolls uphill.

She was forced to step down as the chain skipped near the brink of bankruptcy. Their holding company, Darden Restaurants, was only able to absorb the shock because their other restaurant, Olive Garden, made up for the losses.

Edna’s basic marketing premise wasn’t wrong.

She took a high-risk, high-reward bet that could have paid off.

Unfortunately, she learned the hard way that pricing calculations must be ironclad and include externalities, such as price fluctuations and customers not eating efficiently.

As a general rule, it’s dangerous to bet against the hunger of American consumers.

Today, you can still eat yourself sick with snow crab legs at Red Lobster. But it will cost you a lot more than $22.99.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 15, 2022 by Francisco 2.0

[BottleRocket 646]

I read the thread title as “18” and was like, what the fuck man, those crabs must be some important motherfuckers to be considered missing.

[Biff Tannen 45690]

18 hours ago, PRONG HORN said:

 

That’s why they’re all going to be voting lib.  But even the lib tards don’t really care.  Helping the environment costs too much.  Our money should go to illegal aliens and homeless people.

[Samson's Wig 3192]

17 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

When I was a kid in the 70s and I rode with my parents between Houston and Austin, the windshield and front of the car would be encrusted with dead bugs.  Now I have a decent chance of having a spotless car on that same trip. Maybe 1-3 bugs on it.

I'm not necessarily a fan of those bugs but I presume they were an important part of the ecosystem.

That may just be improvements in aerodynamics.  I drove a Gladiator to Houston a couple of weeks ago (with it's near vertical windshield and no aerodynamics whatsoever) and the windshield was an inch thick in dead bugs from top to bottom.

[atomheartbevo 89675]

If I don’t have my reading glasses on, every time I see this thread, I see this and go “what the fuck?”

18 Missing Snow Crabs. Canary in the Coal mine?

[crash_davis 23113]

According to this dude, they ate themselves to death. They ate so much of themselves that there are only 13% of their population remain? Are the 13% the size of VW beetles? 

https://time.com/6222956/alaska-snow-crab-disappearance/

"To understand what really happened in the icy depths of Alaska’s Bering Sea this year means going back to 2017, when fishermen started reporting an unprecedented population explosion of juvenile snow crabs—what is called, in crabber speak, a “recruit.” The population boom continued into 2018 and 2019, creating what Jones says was the largest recruitment event on record. Jones is something of a local piscine historian. He can quote fishery statistics going back 30 years in the same way a Red Sox fan might quote batting averages. At the time the young crabs were too small for a legal harvest—juvenile snow crabs take four to five years to mature—but there were enough of them for seasoned crabbers to start the count-down to huge hauls starting in 2022.

In the meantime, Bering Sea temperatures, which usually hover around freezing, were on the rise, spiking several degrees between 2017-2019. Unlike mammals, who use less energy when temperatures rise, cold-water fish and crustaceans speed up their metabolism. The faster the crabs grow and expend energy, the faster they have to replace it, says Jones. Some of the crabs may have headed north into cooler Russian waters, but most seem to have stayed put. “All of a sudden you had this huge number of little crabs coming up, eating themselves out of house and home,” says Jones. “Then the water warmed, which meant they had to eat more.” It was a double whammy, he says, and the results were inevitable for a hungry, omnivorous species that has run out of its usual food source: “They basically cannibalized each other.”"

[Biff Tannen 45690]

Gnarly 

[High Plains Drifter 11050]

On 10/14/2022 at 2:56 PM, Bevo said:

I also see more whitewing dove in Austin than there used to be. When I went to school here, I don't remember seeing any. I just chalked it up to immigration.

 

In my area, the collared doves replaced the white wing doves which replaced the mourning doves. I haven't heard a mourning dove call in probably over ten years.

 

On 10/15/2022 at 10:21 AM, Samson's Wig said:

That may just be improvements in aerodynamics.  I drove a Gladiator to Houston a couple of weeks ago (with it's near vertical windshield and no aerodynamics whatsoever) and the windshield was an inch thick in dead bugs from top to bottom.

 

That maybe part of it, but it is not disputed that the biomass of insects and other invertebrates is in serious decline. Recent rains may have temporarily bumped up their populations.

 

 

2 hours ago, crash_davis said:

According to this dude, they ate themselves to death. They ate so much of themselves that there are only 13% of their population remain? Are the 13% the size of VW beetles? 

https://time.com/6222956/alaska-snow-crab-disappearance/

"To understand what really happened in the icy depths of Alaska’s Bering Sea this year means going back to 2017, when fishermen started reporting an unprecedented population explosion of juvenile snow crabs—what is called, in crabber speak, a “recruit.” The population boom continued into 2018 and 2019, creating what Jones says was the largest recruitment event on record. Jones is something of a local piscine historian. He can quote fishery statistics going back 30 years in the same way a Red Sox fan might quote batting averages. At the time the young crabs were too small for a legal harvest—juvenile snow crabs take four to five years to mature—but there were enough of them for seasoned crabbers to start the count-down to huge hauls starting in 2022.

In the meantime, Bering Sea temperatures, which usually hover around freezing, were on the rise, spiking several degrees between 2017-2019. Unlike mammals, who use less energy when temperatures rise, cold-water fish and crustaceans speed up their metabolism. The faster the crabs grow and expend energy, the faster they have to replace it, says Jones. Some of the crabs may have headed north into cooler Russian waters, but most seem to have stayed put. “All of a sudden you had this huge number of little crabs coming up, eating themselves out of house and home,” says Jones. “Then the water warmed, which meant they had to eat more.” It was a double whammy, he says, and the results were inevitable for a hungry, omnivorous species that has run out of its usual food source: “They basically cannibalized each other.”"

 

So, in other words, ultimately, climate change is the culprit.

 

[crash_davis 23113]

3 minutes ago, High Plains Drifter said:

So, in other words, ultimately, climate change is the culprit.

 

Most likely. I don't buy that guy's excuse that they all ate each other to the tune of 87% reduction in their species. No species is ever that fucking stupid. Or at least no species which has somehow survived for 100 thousands/millions of years.

[strangulation! 1716]

9 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

No species is ever that fucking stupid.

counterpoint: they are fucking delicious

[Bateshorn 9927]

8 minutes ago, strangulation! said:

counterpoint: they are fucking delicious

 

[texasdago 7573]

On 10/14/2022 at 12:20 PM, crash_davis said:

I was in Milos, Greece this summer. There aren't many American's there. At one of the beaches/coves, we see a family. Wife and I think, they look like they are from California. Younger boy looks like he's spent a ton of time on top of a surf board. He gets in the water and yells to his parents, "Ewww, micro plastics everywhere." 

Up to then, that shit hadn't crossed my mind. Sure enough I look down in the water and shit was everywhere. That kid was more aware than I was.

The kids know we are fucking up the planet. Sad thing is our and the boomer generation don't give a fuck. As long as we can retire in peace and comfort, fuck the future generations. It's their problem.

There's a cove on the north side of the island that is beautiful... when we went in 2019 I remember that being a problem on the shore... the current and wind on the northern side push all that crap there.  BTW, there used to be pretty much no Americans on Milos when we first went in 2008.  Its getting discovered .  That will trash the island further.  Sarakiniko was packed.

Cove in question... maybe where you were... near Papafragas.  And, yes, Boomer just do not care... Boomers and "the greatest generation"

 

Edited October 20, 2022 by texasdago

[crash_davis 23113]

Just now, texasdago said:

There's a cove on the north side of the island that is beautiful and I remember that being a problem on the shore... the current and wind on the northern side push all that crap there.  BTW, there used to be pretty much no Americans on Milos when we first went in 2009.  Its getting discovered

Cove in question... maybe where you were... near Papafragas.  And, yes, Boomer just do not care... Boomers and "the greatest generation"

 

Yep, it was in Papa, Papa, Papafragus (in Lady Gaga's singing voice). BTW we saw a cool octopus right outside the mouth of this cove just sitting on the sandy bottom camouflaged like a rock. 

[texasdago 7573]

4 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

Yep, it was in Papa, Papa, Papafragus (in Lady Gaga's singing voice). BTW we saw a cool octopus right outside the mouth of this cove just sitting on the sandy bottom camouflaged like a rock. 

It's a beautiful location - couldn't get my family to go swimming with me because the cove felt ominous to them. I wanted them to jump through the holes on the other caves.  Usually the wind is a beating there.

One thing I love about Milos is the vast variety of rocks, pebbles etc but you definitely see more trash on the north side.

[crash_davis 23113]

Just now, texasdago said:

One thing I love about Milos is the vast variety of rocks, pebbles etc but you definitely see more trash on the north side.

yea, I did see more Russians up that way.

[texasdago 7573]

2 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

yea, I did see more Russians up that way.

Upside of my 2022 trip to Rimini was a total lack... 

[YGIFS 19450]

1 hour ago, crash_davis said:

Most likely. I don't buy that guy's excuse that they all ate each other to the tune of 87% reduction in their species. No species is ever that fucking stupid. Or at least no species which has somehow survived for 100 thousands/millions of years.

further counterpoint:  Humans are a species.  And we are certainly "ever that fucking stupid"  

100,000 years of questions, reason, logic, facts, education, knowledge, wisdom, and peer-reviewed building blocks of civilization and technology?  Nah, Imma go smear my own feces on that rock over there and do my own research 'cause I gotta good feeling about this other line of thinking, thankyouverymuch! 

[MissingInAction 25082]

I took an aqua dump in the gulf a couple weeks ago. Probably not related.

[YGIFS 19450]

I thought that was a glowing squid or jellyfish in the moonlit tide...turns out...it was your electric butthole.  /nohomo

[Pescado_Rojo 19416]

41 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

I thought that was a glowing squid or jellyfish in the moonlit tide...turns out...it was your electric butthole.  /nohomo

Electric butthole is the working title of my new Bluegrass/Jazz fusion album. 

[YGIFS 19450]

12 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

Electric butthole is the working title of my new Bluegrass/Jazz fusion album. 

Ah yes, inspired from the unreleased sessions of Miles Davis' "Shades of Aqua(dump)"?  

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

Shitting off a kayak

Eyeing the shore with bad intent

Crap running down his leg

Greasy butt cheeks smearing shabby clothes 

Hey, aquadump

[YGIFS 19450]

A lot of people think Deathrow Tull is just the name of a guy in the band 

[Born to Run 6569]

Shitting off a kayak
Eyeing the shore with bad intent
Crap running down his leg
Greasy butt cheeks smearing shabby clothes 
Hey, aquadump

I launched a nice turd upon the tide whilst wading Pass Cavallo area last week. Caught a few nice trout while my Turds drifted out to sea.

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

42 minutes ago, Born to Run said:

3 hours ago, Grade of D as in David said:

Shitting off a kayak
Eyeing the shore with bad intent
Crap running down his leg
Greasy butt cheeks smearing shabby clothes 
Hey, aquadump

I launched a nice turd upon the tide whilst wading Pass Cavallo area last week. Caught a few nice trout while my Turds drifted out to sea.

Can't tell if this is Thoreau or Hemingway.

Edited October 21, 2022 by Grade of D as in David
Definitely Hemingway

[Pescado_Rojo 19416]

4 hours ago, YGIFS said:

A lot of people think Deathrow Tull is just the name of a guy in the band 

His work with Snoop Dog is very underrated 

[Francisco 2.0 32395]

On 10/14/2022 at 4:21 PM, Nice Guy Eddie said:

When I was a kid in the 70s and I rode with my parents between Houston and Austin, the windshield and front of the car would be encrusted with dead bugs.  Now I have a decent chance of having a spotless car on that same trip. Maybe 1-3 bugs on it.

I'm not necessarily a fan of those bugs but I presume they were an important part of the ecosystem.

 

You may be on to something:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/21/dead-bugs-on-windshields/

Quote

After a long drive, the only thing that makes our stomachs churn faster than a windshield smeared with bug guts is a windshield bearing no evidence of insect life whatsoever. It feels like a fundamental pillar of the planet’s ecology has snapped.

You’ve probably noticed it, too. On long summer road trips, tiny corpses once formed a crust so thick that the reduced visibility posed a legitimate safety risk. Now, many folks we spoke with can’t remember the last time they had to scour the bug gore from their RAV4.

 

Quote

Before we address possible causes of the “windshield phenomenon,” such as more aerodynamic cars, we should make one thing clear: It’s not a mass delusion or faulty collective memory. Windshield splats are valid ecological data, and they don’t bear good news.

One of the first to realize their potential, in 1996, was Anders Pape Moller, a Danish biologist with (a) the iconoclastic streak necessary to even consider using windshields as a bug-measurement device and (b) the stubbornly ferocious work ethic needed to see the scheme through.

 

Quote

Moller, who now works at high-ranked Paris-Saclay University, said he began studying birds — and the insects they eat — in the late 1960s. In the mid-1990s, he got it in his head that counting windshield splatters might help track difficult-to-measure insect populations. He couldn’t persuade a graduate student to take up the observations, so he hit the roads himself.

Every summer, despite serious health issues that have kept him in and out of hospitals for the past decade, he and his assistants return to Denmark to drive battered budget vehicles back and forth, hundreds of times, along the same rural routes studded with farms in the north of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula.

 

Spoiler

They keep their speed consistent. They track temperature and wind conditions. And they count the number of bug splats, large and small. They also track bug populations with more conventional entomological methods, catching them in nets and sticky traps, and counting how many insects local swallows are feeding their chicks.

It’s one of the most idiosyncratic and impressive feats of data collection we’ve seen. And Moller’s windshields establish empirically what we’ve all seen anecdotally.

From 1996 to 2017, insect splatters fell by 80 percent on one of the routes Moller regularly travels. On the other, longer stretch, they plunged 97 percent. Conventional measures show similar trends, and more recent observations have seen even sharper declines, Moller told us.

Experts say the lack of insect innards on our summer windshields is just one symptom of a broader decline in insect populations worldwide. But how much are insects declining? We’re not sure.

Insects are astonishingly widespread and astonishingly weird, and we know comparatively little about them. We’ve only got a few hundred long-term studies of their populations — typically isolated efforts by people like Moller who are sometimes interested in the insects mainly as bird food or crop pests. We know literally nothing about the vast majority of what could be as many as 10 million insect species out there.

Bugs are also just harder to measure than more widely tracked animals. Their numbers swing wildly year to year, season to season, even sometimes day to day. And while the overall trend leads inexorably downward, it’s not uncommon for individual studies to show a local insect population rising.

So, given this uncertainty, isn’t it possible that our spookily clean windshields are caused by factors other than rapidly declining insect populations? After all, we still see bugs everywhere, we just don’t seem to mash them with our cars as much.

Many smart people we spoke with, including entomologists and wheat farmers, speculated that maybe the cars have changed, not the bugs. As vehicles become more aerodynamic, the thinking goes, their increasingly efficient airflow whisks the bugs away from the windshield instead of creating head-on splatters.

But when we called experts in the arcane art of computational fluid dynamics, they sounded skeptical. Yes, today’s sleek sedans can have half the drag of the land boats that ruled the road just a generation or two ago. But that improved airflow won’t do much for a bug.

For starters, many aero improvements happen on the rear of the car rather than the bug-hitting front. Consider the optimally aerodynamic teardrop shape, with its blunt, round front and long, sleek tail. But more importantly, it’s just surprisingly difficult to use air to push a bug out of the way of an onrushing Buick.

If it were possible to design a bug- and debris-proof car, then Kevin Golsch probably would have done it by now. An auto-industry veteran, Golsch has spent decades around wind tunnels, both real and simulated, and is now vice president for strategic fluid design and simulation at Altair, a global tech company that makes simulation and AI software. Altair’s customers include massive automakers that would be thrilled if airflow could protect both windshields and the delicate sensors on self-driving cars.

“From an aerodynamic standpoint, I’ve done a lot of studies on contamination of sensors, especially for autonomous vehicles,” Golsch said. “And I think most everybody’s given up on trying to influence what happens at the vehicle level for dust and particles and rain.”

Consider raindrops. They’re about the size and weight of a larger insect, but nobody thinks fewer raindrops hit our windshields these days. Any forces that cleared our windshield of bugs would presumably do the same for rain and road debris, Golsch said.

 

To be sure, one element of modern auto design could be reducing bug spatter. Windshields today often have a lower slope than the more-vertical front windows of yesteryear, and while the broader shift to SUVs and trucks with bigger, steeper windshields will negate some of that, it might reduce splats for people who are driving similar vehicles.

“If the windshield was laid back slightly more than another windshield, that bug may have a chance of just skipping off and going up over the windshield rather than hitting the windshield,” Golsch said. “It might be a glancing blow at the last second rather than a splat.”

But we also saw 60 percent declines in insects between 2004 and 2021 in a British study from the Kent Wildlife Trust, which built on a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds effort in which thousands of people used “splatometers” to measure bug splatters on license plates, which aren’t much affected by aerodynamic advances elsewhere.

So, there are fewer dead bugs regardless of aerodynamics. But we couldn’t ignore the multitudes of smart people who told us they believed something had changed with automobiles.

Desperate for answers, we woke up during the Italian workday and called Matteo Aroni at Ansys, which models physics for car and aerospace firms. Aroni, an expert in calculating how air flows around cars, casually mentioned that if there is a finite number of bugs that are roughly evenly distributed, the number of bugs splattered must be a function of the area of the windshield. And suddenly, everything clicked into place.

When you strip away the other variables, what we’re really measuring when we drive through the countryside is a simple fraction: bugs per windshield.

We know the numerator, bugs, has gone down. But what about the denominator?

The number of windshields — or, more accurately, miles traveled by each square foot of windshield, since our driving habits and windshield sizes differ — has soared!

Americans now drive three times as many miles as they did in 1970, and the explosion of trucks and SUVS means many of us do it in cars with much, much larger windshields. Back-of-the-napkin math suggests acreage of windshields out on the American road has tripled. And that’s probably an underestimate in some places: A large majority of our increase in driving has come on a narrow set of major urban roads, according to our analysis of Bureau of Transportation Statistics data. And as Kenny Cornett of design-software giant Autodesk points out, more traffic means more vehicles riding in each other’s bug-free aerodynamic slipstreams.

So in our little thought experiment, which makes the depressingly accurate assumption that bugs are a finite resource, our bugs-per-windshield metric would have been cut by two-thirds even if the number of bugs had remained constant. And it hasn’t! It’s fallen precipitously.

So, simple math hints that the very real ecological disaster of the collapse of insect populations may look even more apocalyptic thanks to the parallel rise of another ecological time bomb: the world’s intensifying love affair with ever more and ever bigger automobiles.

 

 

[JesusSweatDuck 17781]

NM, multiple beat me to it

Edited October 25, 2022 by JesusSweatDuck

[Bobby_Batronic 1994]

On 10/15/2022 at 7:55 AM, 52-80 said:

Snow crabs: taste like crab; talk like people

You’re close, but not a single person has posited the most likely culprit. 

 

 

Crab People.

 

Go to Walmart late at night and tell me that some of those shellbacked monsters perusing the aisles aren’t actually overgrown crustaceans. 

[Braff Zacklin 13577]

On 10/14/2022 at 9:54 AM, crash_davis said:

From my readings this morning, take your pick.

Warming oceans, microplastics, fucked up Ocean currents (due to global warming) which are pivotal to weather and marine life, who the fuck knows.

But we can all agree this is not a good thing. 

I always go back to "what kind of world are we leaving our grandkids?"  I think we all know this answer. Then the question is, what are we doing about it? Answer: not much.

You have given your "alarmists" a bad name. Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment, the pollution of land, sea, and air. In this context, isn't it obvious that "Chicken Little" represents the sane vision and that Homo Sapiens' motto, "Let's go shopping!" is the cry of the true lunatic?

[Brisketexan 105147]

Just now, Braff Zacklin said:

You have given your "alarmists" a bad name. Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment, the pollution of land, sea, and air. In this context, isn't it obvious that "Chicken Little" represents the sane vision and that Homo Sapiens' motto, "Let's go shopping!" is the cry of the true lunatic?

I quibble with the phrase "the planet will not survive."  The planet is a big rock that has been through some pretty catastrophic shit, multiple extinction events, etc., and it's still spinning and orbiting the sun.

The planet will, in the long run, be fine.  We humans, and the current ecosystem that we depend on, may be turbofucked, though.  And as a human, that causes me significant concern.  Because I like our planet.  But I REALLY like that I can live on it.  If that changes, then I'm gonna be fucked, as are my descendants.