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Some of us might be familiar with the car care product \u201cBugger Off\u201d – a really useful product that cleans insect splatter off the front of your car with ease.\u00a0 In Australia there still seems to be plenty of insect life around but wildlife experts have been warning about the decline in insects for decades.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure if you\u2019ve noticed any decline in bug splatter on your windscreen over the last decade or so?<\/p>\n
In areas of intensive agriculture, more-so cropping, the use of wide scale insecticides has diminished insect numbers.\u00a0 Vast areas of the Australian Outback doesn\u2019t have this problem, with little cropping present in remote areas.\u00a0 But, where crop farming is intense, the use of insecticides is definitely reducing the total insect population.\u00a0 The fall in insect numbers in Britain has reached troubling numbers that even motorists are noticing that their windscreens are clear of squashed beetles, flies, moths etc.\u00a0 In Britain, a trip in the middle of summer once required the cleaning of the front window regularly, but now the glass is largely clear. \u00a0Richard Acland, of Chepstow, in Monmouthshire, Britain said he believed insecticides on crops were wiping out the world\u2019s insect life, adding: \u201cThis is why cars are not bug-splattered anymore.\u201d\u00a0 Entomologists actually call it \u2018the windscreen phenomenon,\u2019 and statistical surveys reveal that the phenomenon has been noticed across Europe.<\/p>\n
After extrapolating data from a mile of highway in Ontario, a researcher from Laurentian University, Canada calculated that hundreds of billions of pollinating insects were probably being killed by vehicles each year in North America.\u00a0 She suggested that the increase in vehicle numbers is also contributing to the decline in worldwide insect populations.<\/p>\n
Another research institute in Harpenden, England, has monitored insect populations using traps across the UK for more than 50 years and there has been evidence that insect numbers have really declined.\u00a0 Experts mostly blame intensive agriculture and the use of pesticides over the past 50 years being attributed to this occurrence.\u00a0 They did point out, however, that the loss of insects from vehicle windscreens is well-noted but actually demonstrating it is tricky.<\/p>\n
In 2004 motorists were asked to attach a \u2018splatometer\u2019 to the front of their cars – a piece of PVC film to collect insects, to see if they were declining. \u00a0The results showed that there were 324,814 \u2018splats\u2019 recorded, which worked out to be an average of one squashed insect every five miles.\u00a0 It would be beneficial to run another of these experiments to see if numbers have declined further or not.\u00a0 One thing that might throw the data, however, is the increased aerodynamic shapes of new cars travelling the roads.\u00a0 The reality that cars have changed shape over time, and are now far more aerodynamic, would also result in fewer insects actually being hit squarely on the windscreen and causing a splat.<\/p>\n