What do windscreen splats tell us about insect decline?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Do you notice fewer insect splats on windscreens than you used to? There’s a study in the UK trying to measure this ‘windscreen phenomenon’, as it’s become known. We hear more about the study and whether we can draw conclusions about insect numbers in general, from reporter Perisha Kudhail, Dr Lawrence Ball from the Kent Wildlife Trust and Professor Lynn Dicks from the University of Cambridge.
Presenter: Ben Carter Reporter/Producer: Perisha Kudhail Series Producer: Jon Bithrey Editor: Richard Vadon Sound Engineer: Graham Puddifoot
(Photo: Dead insects on a windshield Credit: shanecotee / Getty)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and |
| 0:02.0 | Welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:05.0 | I'm Ben Carter. |
| 0:06.0 | We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. |
| 0:10.0 | And we're here to answer those questions that have been bugging you, like this one from loyal listener Janet Watson. |
| 0:17.0 | At the end of a recent long car journey, my husband Andy and I was struck by how few insects the wear splattered on the windscreen compared to a few years ago. |
| 0:27.0 | We've all heard the distressing news of a marked decline in the UK's insect population, |
| 0:32.0 | presumably due to a variety of environmental factors, but I wondered |
| 0:35.8 | how much of the windscreen death factor was down to the actual decline in insects and |
| 0:41.2 | how much was due to there being significantly more cars on the road. |
| 0:45.0 | Thanks Janet for your email. |
| 0:47.0 | For this we need to talk to our correspondent for All Things Creepy, |
| 0:51.0 | Perisha Caudale. |
| 0:52.8 | Hi Ben, our loyal listener isn't the only one who has noticed fewer insect splats on their |
| 0:58.4 | windscreen. |
| 0:59.8 | This observation has become known as the windscreen phenomenon and there is a study in the |
| 1:04.8 | UK currently underway to show us whether this is the case and why exactly it might be |
| 1:10.4 | happening. I'm Dr. Lawrence. I'm the ecological data analyst lead at |
| 1:15.4 | Kemp Wildlife Trust. Dr Lawrence Ball is currently leading something called the |
| 1:19.6 | Bugs Matter Project as a way to measure insect abundance by using data collected from car |
| 1:25.2 | registration plates across the UK. The study was originally conducted by the Royal |
| 1:31.0 | Society for the Protection of Birds or RSPB in 2004 and has been built on by Dr Ball since 2019. |
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