Smack! Entomologists were bugged by the data errors, data-gathering methods, and editorializing tone in the paper:
To a trio of UK-based biologists at the University of York and Cardiff University, this doesn’t pass the smell test. “Trying to extrapolate from population or biomass declines over several decades, or from threatened species lists, in ‘developed’ temperate zone countries to, say, 100 year
species level extinctions of undescribed endemics confined to the precipitous eastern flanks of the Andes does not wash,” these critics wrote in Global Change Biology earlier this month.Finnish biologists at the University of Jyväskylä, writing in Rethinking Ecology this week, called out other issues, including the fact that local extinctions reported in some of the studies aren’t easily extrapolated to a broader
scale, and at least one instance in which insects with the conservation designation “data deficient” were lumped in with those designated “vulnerable” and thus assumed to be declining when we can’t be sure.Maddie Stone, “Bug Scientists Squash ‘Insect Apocalypse’ Paper” at Gizmodo
The strongest point was made by the ecologist who said, ““We don’t know anything about most insect species on Earth.”(Maddie Stone, Gizmodo)
The temptation for some seems to be to resort to apocalypse voodoo to demonstrate a crisis, at the expense of the methods that make scientists worth listening to, as an alternative to supermarket tabloids. File this one with: The real reasons people don’t “trust science” with a special note: Ways we could start to trust science again, for example, when we start to see crackpot prophets of doom called out.
= Just because he’s wearing a lab coat instead of a hair shirt…
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See also: Insects In Decline? Science Writer Says It’s Myth
and
Alfred Russel Wallace’s Giant Bee Turns Out Not To Be Extinct