Loss of intensity and diversity of noises in ecosystems reflects an alarming decline in healthy biodiversity, say sound ecologists
Sounds of the natural world are rapidly falling silent and will become “acoustic fossils” without urgent action to halt environmental destruction, international experts have warned.
As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species. Disappearing or losing volume along with them are many familiar sounds: the morning calls of birds, rustle of mammals through undergrowth and summer hum of insects.
Today, tuning into some ecosystems reveals a “deathly silence”, said Prof Steve Simpson from the University of Bristol. “It is that race against time – we’ve only just discovered that they make such sounds, and yet we hear the sound disappearing.”
“The changes are profound. And they are happening everywhere,” said US soundscape recordist Bernie Krause, who has taken more than 5,000 hours of recordings from seven continents over the past 55 years. He estimates that 70% of his archive is from habitats that no longer exist.
Out here every night we have more bugs than you can count hanging around the front and back doors. I sometimes stand there and thump them off the screen as the land on it. Having woodlands across the road probably keeps that going
Oh, nice. Going the way of Silent Spring.
Incidentally, as the rodent and bird and bat population implodes, the number of disease-carrying insects is exploding.
Houston’s adorable woollybear population basically have no natural predators left. And the mosquito season is going to be outright hellish as storms and heat turn the city into a giant sauna pit.
Society never fails to disappoint me when it comes to impending disaster. The Silent Spring is one of those developments that once again shocked me that nobody of consequence seems concerned about.
Pretty rough reality.
People in cities often don’t know or understand the first thing about nature and are content imagining it as some pristine “other” place outside of the cities they never leave.
Rural people who have access to nature tend to vote for the “put every chemical in the environment as fast as possible” parties.
The poor who live near natural beauty without industry have no clout or means to change anything outside their immediate village (even then its not likely)
The rich people who actually enjoy nature, live near it, and want to protect it - often only want to protect it for themselves. At best their environmental efforts are offset 1000x by their lifestyle.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of rural/urban hunters, environmentalist, nature/outdoor lovers. But it’s a relatively small group with little social crossover. And aside from the cottage are probably spending their entire outdoor experience on public walking paths and aren’t aware of the extent of habitat loss, pollution, and mass die offs taking place.
We’re completely fucked.
No mention of Rachel Carson? I realize she was writing about DDT, but she came up with the whole idea of the silence of nature as wildlife disappears due to human actions in 1962 and it applies even if DDT is not the cause.
If I try to make the argument that the earth is overpopulated i’ll quickly get downvoted to oblivion in the typical thread.
There’s too many humans. The only hope of life surviving long term is the fall of humankind. The writing is on the wall in terms of heading towards an extinction event anyway so it’s not like we’ll need to do anything for it to happen.
We can probably manage at our population level with better habits. Most of this loss is linked to pesticide use and our impact on the climate imo.
Our population levels amplify this but it would be fine if we weren’t spitting out poison.
Space stations. Space is full of space, so much so its named after the stuff. We need to get off planet
Getting people into space is very resource intensive though. I’d rather go towards ultra dense cities or even underground ones if it’s feasible.
It is, but once we’re set up, its getting back onto Planets that will be resource intensive and not the other way around. Ultra Dense cities would be a good temporary solution until we can set up a stable society in space, but we’ll never escape having a population cap or having to think of the nock on effects of any new piece of technology or infrastructure project until we’re off this planet
With 8 billion humans it’s too hard to centralize control or do anything to realistically get people to follow the rules. Things being technically possible is one thing, but human nature means it’ll never actually happen. Humans are awful.
We’re so obsessed with rules that nobody actually follows and covering up how things actually work. Whistleblowers have their lives ruined and these giant multibillion dollar conglomerates get a slap on the wrist. This is the world we live in and the systems we push for actively dissuade it from getting better.
All we have to do is get off oil and find a better solution than pesticides. 8 billion humans aren’t individually fracking their backyard.
I think the problems go much, much deeper than oil and fracking. American QOL is not sustainable for 8 billion people, and it only exists for a couple hundred million really anyway.
I’m all for making big sweeping changes but I am not one of the rich stakeholders who control how things work in this world.
so what‘s your point?
Too many humans
and also that we should accept fate. So that‘s strange. You don’t want something to be done against our demise? I mean, I can at least provide you with some relief, cause the number of humans will decrease soon, and that is without catastrophe.
Famine?
No.
Let me preface this by saying I’m wildly speculating to try to find underlying reason to their statement. But I’ve made the mistake before of applying logic to try to figure out an illogical being, it usually leads nowhere. That said, here we go.
I always suspect that the “too many humans” take is the closest opinion someone can express without coming out as a supporter of genocide. In my opinion, and since they won’t elaborate, they are attempting to be edgy.
Thus why they never elaborate, they’re just trying to guide us to the “logical solution” of genocide? It does seem dumb but the internet is full of enough stupid racists for this not to be unexpected.
In regards to a solution, populations drop voluntarily when a certain standard of living is reached. I doubt the people expressing this would advocate taking care of the poor to speed up the process of natural population decline.
Wild speculation concluded.
Birth control, education and empowerment of women, and secularization. Not genocide. We either do that or we continue on thoughtlessly growing our population until we exceed what the earth can support at our given technological level. Then people will starve, thus decreasing the population with maximum suffering.
In regards to a solution, populations drop voluntarily when a certain standard of living is reached. I doubt the people expressing this would advocate taking care of the poor to speed up the process of natural population decline.
I think there are too many humans.
I advocate taking care of the poor, globally, to speed up the process of natural population decline.
I even have a (general) plan. Promote sexual education, make contraceptives free and easily available, eat the rich. The global side is harder; it’s not like dropping a bunch of condoms on India and China will do anything. But it all starts with education and the elimination of the owner class.
I’m very glad to be wrong, thank you for your clarification. Sometimes I can be a bit too much of a doomer, a fault of mine.
Malthusian.
Thankfully the population is increasing at a decreasing rate, and mostly because we are living longer, the fertility rate has already dropped, we just won’t see the benefits (probably benefit) of decreasing population for awhile. Kids as a % of the overall world population has been declining since the 1960s. Steeply. That will play out.
TIL Malthusian.
I’m not looking forward to seeing this play out, I’ve been fortunately and selfishly insulated from most global trauma, but I’m not sure the insulation will hold for this one.
I urge change to the people I know, but they’re mostly convinced the world has reached steady state. Foolish in my view. Appreciate the PoV.
Fuck genocide. I’m not saying I have a solution, i’m just stating the problem.
As a species we are not willing to change the status quo because we’re all too inherently selfish unless it benefits us. The people who have the power to change things all have way too much to lose by taking away from anyone with money power and influence, so it won’t change.
Worldwide net humans will continue to increase until some kind of collapse comes. Human nature will not allow for any substantial change to happen. Maybe at some point some maniac(s) will go the genocide route but it still won’t change the inherent problem: human beings when considered as a whole are inherently selfish when it counts. Genocide is just another example of that selfishness.
I don’t see a selfish solution to the problem though maybe some rich assholes will start a colony on another planet before it ends and they can do it all over again.
Same, there are too many humans and too much development and exploitation of Earth. None of the wealthy want to stop building and stabilize things.
It’s so weird how any time you suggest it, a bunch of people show up and accuse you of being a Eugenicist, and how the earth can support 28bbillion humans or whatever.
Edit: although you kind of lost me with your second paragraph there.
My second paragraph is basically: I have no faith in humanity coming out of all of it. I don’t think humanity as a whole has any chance of changing course because of how humans just are.
Maybe we’ll have runaway greenhouse gas causing catastrophic climate change. Maybe we’ll blow everybody up in what some might call world war 3. Maybe we’ll just have more and more humans be born until Earth can’t support practically any non-human, non-livestock life. Maybe we’ll have a biological outbreak that actually causes extremely high mortality rates. Maybe we’ll have a CME hit and wipe out all electronics on the majority of the developed world. There’s so many things that are more likely to happen than the majority of humanity changing course.
We can’t even stop two pointless wars or fix American politics. There’s no way humans can solve a global problem that requires believing in science and putting business owners second.
Don’t look up.
Oh life will survive on this plant no matter what we do until the sun runs out of fuel. It’s just us and a lot of stuff that might go with us that science gets concerned about.
It’s basically impossible to wipe the earth of every last living species even if we nuke the surface of the earth and cause a nuclear winter some species would survive.
That had always been my assumption, but after looking more closely at the history of previous mass extinctions I’m not convinced that a 100% extinction is unthinkable. It’s not just the number of species in the initial die-off, it’s the cascade of further extinctions caused by ecosystem collapse and the tenuousness of the eventual recoveries. Those recoveries often involve the recolonization of devastated regions from local ecosystems that survived relatively unscathed—but with the global spread of introduced species and the resulting homogenization of ecosystems, there won’t be as many sources of potential recolonization.
Pretty much all life on earth is now dependent on a host of other species to survive—even simple plants at the base of the food chain are dependent on microbes to extract nutrients from the soil and pollinators to reproduce. There are some bacteria that could probably survive just about anything, but it took bacteria over a billion years to evolve into anything more complex.
I DARE you to TRY to extinguish life on Earth. Are you kidding me? You arrogant sock puppet. You think this power lies in your pathetic hands, o human? You think yourself so powerful?
You may kill yourself, you may create a whole new ecology, but LIFE WILL SURVIVE. If we lose our magnetosphere, THAT would do it. But you? Pish. Earth cares no a bit about you. Something will rise up and take your place. Although there will probably be crabs again, someday.
Life, uh, finds a way.
Reminds me of that report from a couple years ago that wildlife populations have seen close to a 70% decrease in the last 50 years. Basically over my lifetime 2/3rds of what makes the world wonderful has disappeared.
In the same timeframe, the number of humans has grown by 100%. Basically twice as much of what makes the world terrible.
When you consider who causes the most destruction, it’s actually very few humans that do the most damage.
A small number of humans are commanding the resources to do that damage, but they aren’t the ones creating or even directly using the resources. e.g. People often talk about the damage caused by rich people using private jets - but the rich people didn’t build or pilot the jets. They just tell other people to do those things. So I think its not as simple as just a few people causing destruction. They are only able to cause that damage because the rest of us empower them to do it.
Nobody really cares about climate change, is the sad fact. People want to fly on a plane for a vacation, live in the suburbs, eat meat, and use their time consuming everything.
I think “nobody” is overstating it a bit. But certainly the majority of people don’t care enough.
A lot of people use the reasoning that they don’t need to adjust their livestyle to reduce the kinds of things you mentioned, because some other people are doing much worse. And there is some truth to that. It is definitely true that the decisions of a small number of people make a massively disproportionate impact on the problem. But it isn’t a helpful line of reasoning unless you’re intending to take steps to change those other people.
We have some trees on our property that have died and have some limbs that are looking pretty dead. We don’t have the money to take them down, but the birds love them. Our mockingbirds love the stump in our front yard that’s about 8ft tall, the woodpeckers recently had babies in one of the dead limbs in the back yard.
Sucks that its bipartisan now to just build more roads, buy bigger cars, and drill more oil.
In the U.S., we don’t have a progressive option. We can only choose between conservative and more conservative.
Conservatism is cancer. It is killing us all.
To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the insects, stupid.”
The older you are, the more obvious it is.
What??? You think one of the fastest reproducing protein sources having mass population drops is having some kind of affect up the food chain?
Don’t be ridiculous. There is plenty of beef to go around.
Remember when you would take a road trip and have to clean your windshield because of all the bugs?
Come to Appalachia. My car is bug guts every evening when I get home. We still have the bastards and if you want to come get some I don’t mind.
I joke, but it is scary that we’re killing everything off.
Windshields are significantly more aerodynamic these days, which complicates your implication that fewer bugs get smashed simply because there are fewer bugs
You’re implying windshields weren’t built at an angle until the 2000s? That’s complete bull shit.
You’ve convinced me. I was picturing those old upright trucks from the 50s, but you’re right – it’s not windshields that have changed in the last 30 years.
We are single handedly dooming our planet so a handful of people can be unbelievably wealthy. The vast majority of our resource expenditure is unnecessary. But the moment anyone stops the rat race means starvation, imprisonment, or execution. The human race is pitiful. I just hope we all can emancipate ourselves and bring humanity back in line with the reality of the situation.
there’s at least 15 billion hands. Maybe 15.5.
15.5 billion handedly destroying the planet so that fewer than a few thousand hands can have most of the wealth.
This implies every hand has an equal part in the destruction, which isn’t quite an accurate representation.
No individual cog chooses to make the machine run, or would given the choice, but cogs they are, all.
Capital will not rest until every cog is installed and generating the maximum amount of profit. Until of course, the cogs cease to be profitable. Then they will be discarded.
Are you calling indigenous people, who live as hunter gatherers, cogs in the machine? Or are you just not counting them?
I think there are some groups of people that get a pass when it comes to blame for the destruction of our planet. It’s a very insignificant amount of people in comparison to the total population, but they exist.
They’re not profitable, they will either be made profitable, or they’ll be removed. The lands they inhabit will be repurposed and stripped off all resources.
This is actively already happening. It’s happening right now, while you’re reading this.
The relentless pursuit of capital has no room for those that do not contribute.
But just think of how much profit will be made up until that last moment before the collapse!
The stock market really does feel like an unstoppable basilisk that will outlive us all. Society will collapse in some cataclysm and 200 years from now someone will turn the power back on and under the rubble they’ll find a ticker still imagining value continuing to rise.
Pretty confident the planet will be fine, maybe it’ll take 10 million years but it’ll thrive again, in some form.
What we are dooming is humanity, and honestly at this point it seems like we deserve what’s coming.
Yeah, who cares about all the animals we’re dragging down with us, as long as we’re not technically eliminating life itself it’s all good
Remember the Permian-Triassic extinction? Now THAT seemed like it doomed the planet, right? Two mass extinction events, BLAM-BLAM, back to back!
80% of marine invertebrate species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species WIPED OUT FOREVER.
Too much oxygen sometimes, too little others - that time it rained for 2 million years - the two times volcanoes froze the Earth.
Yet like the Dude, the Earth abides.
Too much oxygen sometimes, too little others - that time it rained for 2 million years - the two times volcanoes froze the Earth.
That’s right. In a meager checks notes 2M years, the native floura and fauna will be back on their feet, maybe, we hope.
Yet like the Dude, the Earth abides.
We’re enjoying a certain degree of selection bias. We exist here because our planet did eventually recover. But this outcome wasn’t predetermined.
Along the way, we may end up destroying things that are ultimately unrecoverable. The eye-sight of the trilobyte was a happy little accident no living species has yet been able to duplicate. Anerobic life has been relegated to the most remote and microscopic corners of the world. Natural longevity has degraded in younger variants and our genetic code is overloaded with failed, silenced adaptations that leave mammals more prone to cancer and other genetic defects that our historical counterparts are less frequently burdened by.
And that’s assuming we aren’t on an unwitting collision course with a real end game disaster - like the hyper-corrosive atmosphere of Venus or the depleted atmosphere of Mars.
What are the odds something as complex and intricate as the human brain will exist before our star goes nova and the planet is consumed in its expansion? It took us 4.5B years to get here. Crazy to toss it all out the window because some business nerds in DC and Detroit hate trains.
There is no native anything. We’re ALL transitional species. OF COURSE things get destroyed that are unrecoverable. We don’t have fish with armor. We don’t have giant sloths with stony skin. Trilobites are ALL OVER the Fossil record. We don’t have a single one today.
Let’s stop trying to preserve this thin slice, this snapshot of evolution as though it were the final destination. It’s not.
I like people; I’m one of them. But humans have only been here a few hundred thousand years. Life wasn’t struggling to produce US. We’re a (in our own minds) happy accident, produced by the opportunities afforded us in one of those earlier extinctions.
We will not be throwing away 4.5B years of evolution. We’ll just be demonstrating that too much intelligence is not a successful evolutionary trait to survive.
There is no native anything.
That’s a sloppy use of the term
Yeah, we are not dooming the planet - we are dooming ourselves.
We should start making vaults and move the rich into them, leave the rest of us outside to enjoy the world.
If you have a garden making it wildlife (particularly insect) friendly is one of the small contributions you can make that can actually end up having a big impact. In addition to providing a small area where populations can recover your also creating a stepping stone that can make it easier for animals to traverse between larger habitats.
Random anecdote, I currently have a bunch of wildflowers, all I see around are houseflies and damselfly looking things.
Recently I’ve found that I often get sad listening to wildlife. I’ve got a sense that a lot of what I’ve seen and heard is very soon to be gone. Not like in 1000 years in some hard to imagine future, but rather maybe within my own lifetime. I’m mourning for a dying world.
I sometimes think about this story about a recording of a now extinct bird; and I remember that there are stacks of other examples of species that have recently gone extinct. Too many for people to even talk about each of them. Just a few nice-sounding high-profile cases capture people’s attention every so often.
I do put in a bit of effort in my own lifestyle to not make things worse. But it seems to me that there will be vast damage to the world already before humanity course corrects appropriately. It’s very depressing.
Yeah, me too. I read articles like this and just cry inside (and maybe a little outside) because we are watching our world’s ruin in slow motion, and it seems like so few care. Certainly not enough people care to make changes happen on the scale we need.
We’ve got a community about animal acoustic communication for anyone interested
