The unseen apocalypse: How climate change effects our own backyards

“I can’t remember the last time I caught a firefly,” Maryn White, 20, said. “Or the last time I even saw one.”

White used to keep scores of them in mason jars on the back porch of her parents’ home as a kid. Their steady glow weaving in and out of the patch of woods behind her childhood home is a clear memory in the back of her head. The tickle of insect legs against her soft palms, the cheers of the neighborhood kids every time another bug was shaken into the jars on proud display. 

“When I was in the car driving past the fields on the way back to my house this evening, I was looking for them,” White said. “Sometimes when the weather gets warm again, the urge to look for them just creeps up on me out of nowhere.” 

These days, the woods have been dark when she visits. The mason jars have sat empty under a bathroom sink for years. 

High school sophomore Anjali Gavalas recalled getting bundled to deck her family’s front yard with armies of snowmen as a child in December. A White Christmas in Georgia was a stroke of luck back then, not a miracle. Now, she thinks of snow as gentle flurries that she can watch melt as it hits the pavement in front of her home. Her memory of springtime has changed over the years, too. It’s no longer defined as just April showers and May flowers– it’s taken a staggering shift in what feels “normal.” 

“My memory of spring used to be pretty weather and green. Now it’s green, rain, hot and cold,” Gavalas said. 

It’s not just nostalgia toying with the details of childhood memories. It’s often difficult for people to see these effects of global warming on a short-term scale, or quantify it beyond these memories of “how things used to be.” The effects of climate change are often depicted to the masses in the images of solemn polar bears floating off on broken icebergs or the carcass of a whale with a stomach mutilated with plastic– but the smaller soldiers of these changes are right below people’s noses. Or more accurately, right below their feet, in an increasingly concerning phenomenon that climate and arthropod researchers have coined as the “windshield-effect.”

Dr. Clint Penick, researcher and assistant professor of insect ecology at Auburn University, spent five years in North Carolina’s Duke Forest getting well accustomed with the lives of the itty and bitty, namely: ants and fungus gnats. Over the span of those five years, Penick was involved in a research project that warmed chambers of the forest by five degrees celsius to observe the effect of temperature change on arthropods across all four seasons. 

His research team discovered that the temperature increase impacted populations most detrimentally in months where the ambient temperature was usually cooler: spring and winter. This specific change of five degrees was put in place to replicate a worst case scenario of climate change at the end of the century. 

Penick said Kennesaw Mountain’s environment is incredibly similar to the setting at Duke Forest. Looking at data spanning from 2019 to the first week of March, the first quarter of the year has warmed in regard to the average highs and lows of each day recorded on the mountain. March of last year, in particular, had an unusually harsh heat wave followed by a steep plummet in temperature. 

For insects, Penick says that their short-lived lives are starting earlier in the spring due to the temperature shifts. The bugs are not adapted to deal with the threshold of this heat and as a result, their abundance declines when heat waves overwhelm the population. 

The relevance of Penick’s research comes to the average person now in the midst of an “insect apocalypse” among ongoing research of the lesser known effects of climate change. At the base of the ecological food chain, no one notices the decreased presence of our six-legged friends until they’re wiped. 

Penick refers to this as the “Windshield Effect,” a term that has flooded the research of climate activists since the publication of a 2019 German study that revealed a steep decline in arthropod life in grasslands and forests over a concerningly short span of time. The effect explains the lack of fireflies in White’s backyard. 

“People start thinking ‘Oh, when I was a kid I remember having to clean all the dead bugs off the windshield every time the family took a vacation. And I’m not seeing that anymore,’” Penick said. “So, people kind of felt that there were less insects around, but it was really difficult to actually go back in time and see if it was true.”

What people do begin to notice, though, is the decrease in bird and fish populations that feed off these insects. As the consequences increase in severity, the importance of the faraway lives of fungal gnats become more apparent to the everyday Joe. 

Penick says that this research and incoming data is no reason to take a “doomsday” perspective on climate change. Many effects on the insect population can also be traced to insecticides or urbanization– it’s important to understand the context of the populations being studied. 

“This research is trying to give us a window into the future and say, ‘Hey, look, these things we might be losing,’” Penick said. 

There are still solutions, though. Penick proposes the addition of wildlife corridors to urbanized areas, expecting that native animals will migrate when their ecosystems begin to change due to climate change. In addition, the topic climate change itself has helped raise awareness to the unseen consequences of it: like his research. 

“It is a solvable problem. I think that’s the thing that probably frustrates people most. We know what the problem is,” Penick said. “We’re finding out more and more that we know what kind of impacts it's gonna cause 50 to 100 years from now. And we know the solutions.”