It would much scarier and less stupid than this one, and much cheaper to make.

Imagine a world in which most of the insects are dying, told from the perspective of the perpetrators, not the victims. The monsters who have murdered all the pesky little bugs wander around their homes, wondering why it’s so quiet, but appreciating the absence of mosquitos. Slowly it dawns on them that they don’t hear any birds, either, and they notice that all their fishing trips to the lake turn up fruitless. The more discerning members of the community are horrified to learn that the spiders are missing.

Maybe we could have a few species that are exempt from the holocaust. They’d probably be ticks. The killers’ pets are infested, large mammals are dying in agony. Crops fail. The protagonists respond by poisoning the environment further, trying to confer safety for their few chosen favored food organisms. Unforeseen consequences arise, worsening the problem.

It would be one of those tense, slow-build movies, where the danger increases and the outcome becomes unavoidably inevitable. All attempts to restore the planet are futile. It would not have a happy ending.

Maybe we could title it Silent Spring. Has that been taken already?

OK, how about Silent Earth?

Damn. I guess we’re fucked.

I wouldn’t mind going there myself. But you know who really loves going to Spain? It’s not the British. It’s the invertebrates.

There is a path through they Pyrenees, the Pass of Bujaruelo, which is where all the insects funnel through on their way to summering in Spain. It’s been known for a long time that this is the place to find swarms of insects flocking south.

The Pyrenean mountain range and the Pass of Bujaruelo. (a) The fieldwork location (red marker) within the Pyrenean mountain range; image taken from Google Maps. (b) The valley that channels the insects over the Pass of Bujaruelo (red arrow) and the surrounding geological formations.

In autumn 1950 David and Elizabeth Lack chanced upon a huge migration of insects and birds flying through the Pyrenean Pass of Bujaruelo, from France into Spain, later describing the spectacle as combining both grandeur and novelty. The intervening years have seen many changes to land use and climate, posing the question as to the current status of this migratory phenomenon. In addition, a lack of quantitative data has prevented insights into the ecological impact of this mass insect migration and the factors that may influence it. To address this, we revisited the site in autumn over a 4 year period and systematically monitored abundance and species composition of diurnal insect migrants. We estimate an annual mean of 17.1 million day-flying insect migrants from five orders (Diptera, Hymenoptera, Hemiptera, Lepidoptera and Odonata) moving south, with observations of southward ‘mass migration’ events associated with warmer temperatures, the presence of a headwind, sunlight, low windspeed and low rainfall. Diptera dominated the migratory assemblage, and annual numbers varied by more than fourfold. Numbers at this single site hint at the likely billions of insects crossing the entire Pyrenean mountain range each year, and we highlight the importance of this route for seasonal insect migrants.

Who is caravaning over the mountains? Everyone. But mostly flies, and mostly pollinators. Lots of midges, gnats, hoverflies, all these small underappreciated flies that do a lot of the work of pollinating (it’s not just bees, you know.)

Classification of the migratory assemblage. Average ratios of insects showing migratory behaviour collected in the intercept trap and butterfly counts over 4 years sorted by (a) order and (b) family. (c) Migratory behaviour of insect groups based on southward scores. ‘High-altitude’ migrant insect groups (red), and ‘Flight Boundary Layer’ migrant insect groups (blue). Missing values indicate fewer than 100 individuals in the sample of head- or tailwinds. Southward scores of 100 indicate all individuals were going south, 0 that the same number were going south as north, and negative values indicate that more were going north than south under a particular wind condition.

We’re talking millions of migrants, probably billions. Of course, they estimate that the total mass of all those insects was about 140kg per season. One or two Cantabrian brown bears ambling across the pass would outweigh all those insects in mass, but would probably have a negligible ecological impact in comparison.

This was a study of one pass with a convenient bottleneck to enable effective counting. Insects are flooding across the length of the Spanish/French border, and further, some of them keep going across the Mediterranean and take tours of Morocco.

Numerous studies have found a consistent south or southwest bias in migratory insect headings across Europe, suggesting insects from a large geographical area are filtered down into the Iberian Peninsula, passing through the Pyrenees each season. This makes insect migration bottlenecks within the Pyrenees important locations for censusing species and monitoring numbers. We estimate that the total number of insects moving across the Pyrenees mountain range reaches into the tens of billions. This number is of comparable size to those from radar studies across a similar-sized area. Insects are known to cross the Pyrenees not only in the centre where the Pass of Bujaruelo is situated, but also along the coasts. Williams et al. observed some southward movement of butterflies in October along the coast at Argelès-sur-Mer, where the Pyrenees descend to the Mediterranean Sea. Similar southward movements occur along the Atlantic seaboard. To accurately quantify the total number of migratory insects crossing the Pyrenees, extensive deployment of monitoring resources and techniques is needed, including the use of vertical-looking radars.

I’m reading that and thinking that if I were a spider, I’d want to set up a nice web across the Pass of Bujaruelo. Unfortunately, this study didn’t look at spiders. They weren’t migrating, after all, they were just setting up shop in the pass and taking advantage of all the tourists.

Somebody snuck in and moved our house farther south. According to this informative map of plant hardiness zones, I’m not living in Zone 4a — we’ve moved to the steamy, tropical zone 4b.

In 2012, the USDA classified Morris, Minn., as Zone 4a.
Back then, Morris’ coldest winter temperature was somewhere between -30 and -25 degrees Fahrenheit on average.

In 2023, the USDA reclassified Morris as Zone 4b.
Now, the lowest winter temperature is between -25 and -20 degrees Fahrenheit on average.

That’s because the new average minimum temperature in Morris is 1.6º F warmer than the previous average, from an earlier period.

Fascinating. My wife is the gardener in the family. I’ll have to suggest to her that maybe this is the year to plant mangoes, bananas, and pineapple rather than tomatoes and zucchini.

Your turn. Look up your zone and find out what climate change has done to your location.

Now that spring is actually here — blue skies, balmy weather, all that stuff — and I no longer have classes to worry about, I’m getting back into the habit of going for a daily walk. As you might expect, I take this as an opportunity to look for spiders.

There is no significant spider presence yet.

However, as a portent for the future, look at all the spider food (some might call them mayflies) I spotted clinging to walls around town!

Big deal, you might say, I saw a few bugs. Let’s step back a moment and look at the big picture.

All those speckles and dots? Mayflies. The entire town is covered with mayflies. As I walked along, I could just put my foot on a patch of grass and a cloud of gnats, midges, and flies would rise up.

I’m hoping that this will be a great summer for spiders.

I read this article, “Where seas are rising at alarming speed”, with rising exasperation. Look: the Gulf Coast is slowly drowning at a rate that is now obvious.

It’s great at explaining how the consequences of climate change are harming people right now, and they’re only getting worse, but…WHY is the Gulf Coast in particular experiencing this rapid rise? The article doesn’t say. So I had to look elsewhere, like NASA.

Although the average acceleration of global sea level rise has also increased over the decades, it was mainly due to melting ice in regions like Greenland. For the Gulf Coast, the team used tide-gauge readings and satellite data from NASA missions like GRACE to rule out a few potential causes.

“We checked vertical land motion, for instance, and could relatively quickly say no,” he said. “We looked into the ice-melt component but it couldn’t explain the magnitude of the change that we have seen in that particular area.”

This left them with one other possibility: sterodynamic sea level, or the combination of ocean-water expansion in response to warming, saltiness, and ocean circulation. The team found that beyond Cape Hatteras, this acceleration extended into the North Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea.

But what is the source of this shifting circulation? According to Dangendorf, climate models reveal two factors at play.

“Approximately 40% of the acceleration that we have seen since 2010 can be attributed to man-made climate change, but there’s a residual 60% that we couldn’t explain with climate models,” said Dangendorf.

The remaining percentage was caused by natural wind-driven ocean circulation unique to the Southeast and Gulf Coast, the researchers found.

“It’s a region bounded by the western boundary current, or the Gulf Stream, so that makes it very prone to fluctuations and therefore we can see these massive changes on decadal time-scales,” said Dangendorf.

OK, now I can read the WaPo article without looking for a causal explanation, and truly appreciate how screwed the citizens on our southern coast are. It’s not just that the seas are creeping into their streets and basements, but that there are no practical solutions available — they talk about exorbitantly expensive pumps, but where are they pumping the water to?

Do I need to point out the irony of all those oil refineries on the Gulf Coast that are not being shut down, while proposing to build water pumps (that would probably be driven by coal and oil fired power plants)? That’s not to diminish the tragedy and struggle of all the people who have to deal with these consequences, but to point out that we need to stop thinking about stopgap solutions in the short term.

Here is a typical gathering of UMM students, honoring the god of electricity.

UMN Morris is a clean energy leader and destination. We are carbon neutral in electricity. UMN Morris produces more clean electricity per student of any campus in the United States.
-100% carbon neutral electric status achieved in 2020
-1,000,000 lbs + of organic waste diverted from landfills by campus and community
composting program
-10 Million kWh electricity produced each year by two wind turbines
-Gold STAR rating (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher
Education)