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Why fewer bug guts may be piling up on your car windshield

Why fewer bug guts may be piling up on your car windshield

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Sometimes you’re the windshield; sometimes you’re the bug

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If you’ve ever taken a long road trip, you’ve likely experienced the rite of stopping at a gas station to squeegee bug guts off your windshield. It’s disgusting, but it paints a remarkably vibrant picture of insect life in the region. Over the years, though, you may have also noticed that there are fewer bug splats carpeting your car than there used to be. Enough people have observed a bug splat decline that an informal term has bubbled up out of the anecdotes: the “windshield phenomenon.”

More concerning, some observers have drawn parallels between the “windshield phenomenon” and broader declines in some insect populations around the world. The distinct lack of bugs on modern windshields has even made an appearance as a tangible example of an “insect apocalypse” in many, many articles on the subject.

We wanted to put the windshield phenomenon to the test, so we sent a video crew to Texas with a large car and a route through the backcountry between Austin and Houston. Our mission was to document and catalog as many bug splats as we could find along the way. For the cataloging, we enlisted the help of Mark Hostetler, a professor at the University of Florida. He created an app with his son Jamm to help users identify insects based solely on the splats they leave on windshields. (Hostetler cheekily refers to himself as the world’s only “splatologist.”)

Our experiment was pseudo-scientific at best, but it allowed us to explore the issues surrounding the windshield phenomenon and insect apocalypse. We also talked with Hostetler about how anecdotal evidence stacks up against rigorous science. You can check it out in the video above.

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