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After driving from Quebec to Montreal then from Montreal to Quebec this summer, not a single fly in the windshield! Where are the mosquitoes?
The scientists and the team of your dear newsletter have already asked themselves the question. There may be a well-publicized resurgence of bedbugs in Paris (and Montreal!), but signs of insect decline are mounting around the world, and we’re not escaping them.
It is not only large animals that are considered “endangered”. Last summer, Alexis Riopel told us about the nine-spotted ladybug, which swarmed in the wild in Quebec before the 1970s. The last reported sighting of this insect dates back to the 2010s, near Mont Saint-Hilaire.
Insects are very vulnerable because of their very biology, noted for example Jacques Brodeur, biologist at the University of Montreal, when an international consortium of 70 scientists was worried about them. Unable to regulate their body temperature, they are among the first to be affected by climatic upheavals.
This summer, an insect trapping project was launched in national parks in eastern Canada to verify whether there is indeed a widespread decline in insect populations.
The previous year, data from entomologist Christian Hébert, a scientist at the Laurentides Forestry Center, indicated a drop of around 60% in the number of flying beetles in the space of 20 years.
The windshield effect observed by our reader therefore has scientific foundations, even if the existence of a generalized collapse is not supported by all entomologists. Anders Pape Møller, a Danish biologist, measured for 20 years, between 1997 and 2017, the number of insects crushed on car windshields on two roads. He concluded that the traces of struck insects had diminished.
However, entomologists do not agree on this method, even if it has the advantage of alerting ordinary people to the phenomenon of insect decline.
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