Insectologists swat insects-are-doomed paper

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”

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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

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