2023-06-02 17:32:22
When you ask a researcher how difficult research actually is, the answer could be that you have to pay attention to a few things: What scientists find out should of course be correct, and others should see or check it can that it’s true. You have to work as hard as you can for that. You should have a very good understanding of what you are researching and also know what other people may have already found out about this topic or a related or neighboring topic.
That’s not all, but it’s enough to understand what a great, but also tricky, job research is. It’s completely clear that not everyone can do it, at least not in a way that results in something that is also important for others.
Nevertheless, it happens again and again that researchers ask everyone to do research and send them what they have found. That sounds questionable at first: is everyone really allowed to take part, including people who may not be particularly well versed or are not that careful? So how can you trust what they’re researching? How can you continue working with it?
Image: FAZ
A very important part of research is describing, measuring, counting. Only when something is accurately described and measured can it be identified and recognized. Only then can you see if there are more of them. And if it changes. For example, a single animal, say, one of those white butterflies you see in summer. If you examine and describe them closely, you can tell whether it is a large or a small cabbage white, which are two different species, or a green-veined white, which also exists. If you measure, and if you have been measuring for many years, you may be able to find out if adult large cabbage whites get bigger over time. Or smaller. Or so.
Always less
Much more important, however, is the question of whether there will be more and more cabbage whites over time or fewer and fewer. One could become a problem for gardens and agriculture, after all, the caterpillars of these butterflies eat cabbage leaves, which we also like to eat. But the other is an even bigger problem. If there are fewer and fewer cabbage whites, or butterflies at all, or insects at all, then fewer plants can be pollinated by them. In addition, there is then less food for many birds, but also for frogs, lizards and some mammals.
And unfortunately this is really happening: there are fewer and fewer insects, there are even worse insects, and this is because a lot of insecticides are used in agriculture and gardens to protect the plants from being eaten or sucked. And because there are fewer and fewer wild meadows where insects can find everything they need: food, hiding places and an opportunity to lay their eggs. Sometimes you see bee meadows or insect hotels to compensate. But that’s probably not enough.
Jungle photos, hamster burrows, mosquito species
There is one in the city of Krefeld Society of Insomologists, who spent years doing something very simple with a very impressive result: The researchers drove to more than 60 nature reserves all over Germany and kept checking how many insects they could catch with a trap there in a certain period of time. They didn’t count them, just measured how much space they took up in the trap’s receptacle. It turned out that this mass has decreased by three quarters in 27 years. So where the insects once took up as much space as, for example, four liter packages of milk or juice, in 2017 it was just one liter package. The researchers were especially in nature reserves, i.e. there where no pesticides may be used. The result frightened a lot of people, not only insect lovers, not only in Germany, because it shows with an example what is a problem everywhere.
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