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Pesticide usage in the US has declined by more than 40 percent over the last three decades, and some organisms, including mammals and birds, have benefitted from the reduction in pesticide usage and improvements in product design, according to a study published April 2 in Science. But an increase in pesticide potency has come at the expense of other species’ health.
“Compounds that are particularly toxic to vertebrates have been replaced by compounds with less vertebrate toxicity, and that is indeed a success,” coauthor Ralf Schulz, an ecotoxicologist at the University Koblenz and Landau in Germany, tells The Guardian. “But at the same time, pesticides became more specific, and therefore, unfortunately, also more toxic to ‘non-target organisms’, like pollinators and aquatic invertebrates.”
Schulz and his team combined self-reported US Geological Survey data on farmers’ use of 381 pesticides between 1992 and 2016 with data from the ...
