You don’t even have to go off in the woods! Used to have tree frogs on the porch, catching a free lunch off the bugs coming to the porch light. Now I rarely spray off the lights and there are zero tree frogs.
Used to see Indigo snakes in the bushes now and again. Found a foot-long baby last year, that’s it.
And as to the woods, tromped around our 2.5 acres of swamp this afternoon, way in the boonies. Saw 4 squirrels, that’s it. Not another animal, of any sort, not even much evidence of animals. OK, there’s something tiny popping around under the water, no clue, can’t ever see them.
Yeah on the ecological side I saw a study that found a single intense pulse of stormwater runoff, especially after a dry period where surface/roadway pollutants have built up, can be fatal to young salmon even if normal pollution into those waterways and groundwater is extremely clean and well managed. It is a pattern of awful chaos and shock that echoes and echoes until systems shatter apart and you can’t see it coming if you only look at the changing averages and baselines.
Exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. On one hand, our environment seems far hardier than we thought. On the other, it cannot take these non-stop shocks, year after year after year.
Read my example? Two years is enough to decimate and reconfigure the insects in my tiny area.
Going to read the rest of this thread, damned interesting. But I was just saying today:
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/14400873
Scary what I’ve seen in less than 8 years. Seen the ecology change on my front porch. But most aren’t paying attention to the little shit like I do.
I saw fire ants move in, then armodillos moved north to us, around five years ago I found my first gecko.
The woods smelled and sounded different by then as well. Insect patterns have drastically changed.
The woods just feel different now, in the South.
Anyone who doesn’t see it either doesn’t spend as much time in the woods as they claim or are willfully ignorant.
It’s scary.
You don’t even have to go off in the woods! Used to have tree frogs on the porch, catching a free lunch off the bugs coming to the porch light. Now I rarely spray off the lights and there are zero tree frogs.
Used to see Indigo snakes in the bushes now and again. Found a foot-long baby last year, that’s it.
And as to the woods, tromped around our 2.5 acres of swamp this afternoon, way in the boonies. Saw 4 squirrels, that’s it. Not another animal, of any sort, not even much evidence of animals. OK, there’s something tiny popping around under the water, no clue, can’t ever see them.
As a fellow Southerner, you might like this:
https://old.lemmy.world/post/24174920
Yeah on the ecological side I saw a study that found a single intense pulse of stormwater runoff, especially after a dry period where surface/roadway pollutants have built up, can be fatal to young salmon even if normal pollution into those waterways and groundwater is extremely clean and well managed. It is a pattern of awful chaos and shock that echoes and echoes until systems shatter apart and you can’t see it coming if you only look at the changing averages and baselines.
Exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. On one hand, our environment seems far hardier than we thought. On the other, it cannot take these non-stop shocks, year after year after year.
Read my example? Two years is enough to decimate and reconfigure the insects in my tiny area.