40 points bryanrasmussen 3 days ago 1 comments

phendrenad2 43 minutes ago | parent

Timely. There's been a lot of people saying things like "as a child, my backyard was full of butterflies, but now, there are no more butterflies, it's sad what we've done to the environment". But me, I see the exact same number of butterflies (or fireflies, or gnats, or whatever the person remembers). In fact I'm sure that soon there will be several such comments here, too. So this paper, which meta-analyzes the actual scientific measurement of the number of bugs in an area, is hopefully going to kick off some more rigorous research so we can get to a conclusion.