The Insect Crisis E-Book

Oliver Milman

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

***A Waterstones Best Books of 2022 pick*** A New Scientist Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing 'Fascinating... There is something wondrous in Milman's revelation of our fragile dependency on insect life as well as its beauty and strangeness.' Guardian 'Gripping and especially unnerving.' David Wallace-Wells When is the last time you were stung by a wasp? Or were followed by a cloud of midges? Or saw a butterfly? All these normal occurrences are becoming much rarer. A groundswell of research suggests insect numbers are in serious decline all over the world - in some places by over 90%. The Insect Crisis explores this hidden emergency, arguing that its consequences could even rival climate change. We rely on insect pollination for the bulk of our agriculture, they are a prime food source for birds and fish, and they are a key strut holding up life on Earth, especially our own. In a compelling and entertaining investigation spanning the globe, Milman speaks to the scientists and entomologists studying this catastrophe and asks why these extraordinary creatures are disappearing. Part warning, part celebration of the incredible variety of insects, this book highlights why we need to wake up to this impending environmental disaster.

Leseprobe

Oliver Milman has been a Guardian journalist for almost a decade, firstly in Australia and now in the US as their environment correspondent. He was raised in Bedfordshire and this is his first book.

This edition published by arrangement with W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York.

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Oliver Milman, 2022

The moral right of Oliver Milman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 117 7

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 435 2

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 118 4

Printed in Great Britain

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To Lyndal, Albie, June and other wonders of our natural world

CONTENTS

Prologue

  1   An Intricate Dance

  2   Winners and Losers

  3   “Zero Insect Days”

  4   The Peak of the Pesticide

  5   In the Teeth of the Climate Emergency

  6   The Labor of Honeybees

  7   A Monarch’s Journey

  8   The Inaction Plan

  9   A Human Emergency

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

The Insect Crisis

Prologue

The first inkling of the cataclysm was the deathly stillness. The countryside, suburban gardens, and urban parks, their soundtracks now muffled, became lifeless imitations of themselves. No more rumbling buzzsaw of a passing bee, no metronomic chirping of a cricket, no nagging whine of a famished mosquito.

Landscapes suddenly felt as flat as the oil paintings they inspired, perhaps even less vivid given the riot of colors that had been wrenched from the ecological palette once the iridescent butterflies and flamboyant beetles were gone.

The world’s insects had vanished, but the lag of human inertia meant that the first howl of horror, oddly, came not from us but rather from birds. The skies and forests were the settings for increasingly frantic bluebirds, nighthawks, woodpeckers, and sparrows as they searched for aphids, moths, and other meals no longer there. The deficit was huge—around 200,000 insects had to be served up to raise a single swallow chick to adulthood. Now there were none. In all, half of the roughly 10,000 species of birds on Earth starved to extinction, their withered corpses strewn on the ground and within barren nests.

An array of dead bodies—birds, squirrels, hedgehogs, humans, in fact anything that set foot on land and was mortal—began to build up across valleys, hills, parks, and neglected city apartments. Blowflies, which laid maggots able to consume 60 percent of a human corpse within a week, were now absent, as were the moths, dermestid beetles, and the rest of the cavalcade of insects that previously arrived to break down the deceased. Bacteria and fungi were still there to do the job, but at a far slower pace. It wasn’t enough. The rotting carcasses and putrid smell triggered public revulsion, until that, too, became normal.

As if the world around us was conspiring to turn our stomachs, the lingering flesh and bone was compounded by a tsunami of feces, seemingly everywhere, left wherever it fell. Farmers in Australia had previously endured a painful lesson on the importance of the right sort of dung beetle being present after cattle were first introduced by European settlers. Now, the continent was awash with vast areas of useless land caked in livestock manure that the native beetles, more used to marsupial dung, weren’t able to break down. With 8,000 species of dung beetle—a group that had been doing a thankless cleanup job for the planet for at least 65 million years—wiped out globally, this disaster now repeated itself on a far grander scale, with feces from wildlife and livestock pockmarking the planet unchecked like a foul plague. Millions of acres of land were laid to waste. Felled trees and leaves also started to accumulate, stubbornly refusing to disintegrate back into the earth.

Disgust and then alarm began to take hold around the world. Environmental groups mobilized, holding rallies featuring people dressed as bees, while politicians huddled in emergency meetings and issued hasty promises of action. It felt like something could be done.

Then the food supply disintegrated. More than a third of global food crop production was dependent on pollination from thousands of bee species as well as other creatures, such as butterflies, flies, moths, wasps, and beetles. With pollinators gone, a global conveyor belt of food production shuddered to a halt, with sprawling fields of fruit and vegetables left to wither away. Farmers no longer needed to spray pesticides to vanquish pests but lamented that the invaders would have little to destroy anyway.

Items such as apples, honey, and coffee faded away from supermarkets and became expensive luxuries. The disappearance of cecidomyiid and ceratopogonid midges, the unheralded pollinators of the cacao tree, cut off the supply of chocolate. People openly wailed in the streets at this loss; rates of depression and anxiety soared.

The loss of bees stripped the world of readily available items such as strawberries, plums, peaches, melons, and broccoli, with the remaining fruit and vegetables oddly shaped and pathetically shriveled. Mercifully, an apocalyptic starvation event was averted thanks to our reliance on staples such as wheat, rice, and maize, which are pollinated via the wind.

Still, meals became blander and less nutritious, even in wealthy countries. Without access to fruit, vegetables, nuts, or seeds, millions of people eked out a grim diet based around oats and rice. Any thought of consuming a mango or almond became a decadent fantasy, before the experience faded from collective memory entirely. With no chilies, cardamoms, coriander, or cumin, curries became a historical dish. Restaurants of various hues, struggling to even source tomatoes or onions, closed en masse. Cows, once fed a diet of now-scarce alfalfa, dwindled. Fewer cows meant shortages of milk and dairy, which in turn meant no cheese, yogurt, or ice cream.

Governments started to assemble armies of workers to hand-pollinate crops, although this proved wildly more expensive and far less efficient than the 100-million-year-old codependency that had evolved between insect pollinators and plants. A rash of new companies launched swarms of drones and robotic bees in an attempt to replicate the real thing. These efforts proved insufficient.

As with most calamities, the poor and vulnerable fared worst. More than 800 million people globally were malnourished before the insects vanished, and many of them were pushed over the edge into starvation once the nutrients from pollinated crops receded. Cases of childhood blindness jumped as vitamin A, derived largely from fruit and vegetables in the developing world, was eliminated from diets. The curses of malaria and West Nile virus were removed from the planet along with the hated mosquitoes, although a lack of citrus ushered in the return of scurvy. As hunger killed humans slowly, other maladies progressed.

Insects formed the basis of alternative medicine in various parts of the world, including India, Brazil, China, and swaths of Africa. Honey was used as an antioxidant and antimicrobial substance, deployed in the treatment of heart disease. Wasp venom was found to kill cancer cells. With the rise of antibiotic resistance, insects were once seen by researchers as a crucial source of new, widespread medicines. Perhaps they would even help beat back the next pandemic—after all, the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine was developed in altered cells of the fall armyworm moth. The catastrophe snuffed out such hopes.

Before long, the struts holding aloft most life on Earth were yanked away. Nearly 90 percent of wild flowering plants relied on pollination to prosper. Shorn of this service, and lacking the nutrients that insects recycle back into the soil, the plants died. Gardens became lumpen deserts. Wild meadows vanished, followed eventually by tropical rainforest trees. More than half the human diet globally came directly from those formerly flowering plants, multiplying the starvation rates. Entire ecosystems collapsed, accelerating climate change. Cascades of extinctions rippled through our denuded planet. For those of us left, the misery was finally complete.

1

An Intricate Dance

The question of how long human civilization would withstand the loss of insects is both hideous and unfathomable. Hideous because the collapse of arable farming and ecosystems could wipe us out within just a few squalid months, the biologist E. O. Wilson has predicted. Most of the fishes, mammals, birds, and amphibians would plunge into oblivion before us, followed by flowering plants. Fungi, after an initial explosion from the death and rot, would also die off. “Within a few decades the world would return to the state of a billion years ago, composed primarily of bacteria, algae and a few very simple multicellular plants,” Wilson wrote.

And yet, unfathomable. Such a dire scenario can barely be comprehended given the stubborn survival of insects through the five mass extinctions that have roiled Earth in the past 400 million years. Humans have never existed without them, so have never had to properly consider their absence or even diminishment.

But a torrent of recent findings have pointed to major declines in the abundance and species diversity of insects in places around the world. Seemingly without cause they are crashing, their numbers thinning out at astonishing rates at different research sites—in some places by half, others by three-quarters, and in one, in the seemingly benign countryside of Denmark, as cataclysmic as 97 percent. The mounting evidence of plummeting insect populations forces us, for the first time in our history, to grasp the wretched consequences of their decline. This book will explore the unfolding crisis in the insect world, what’s causing it, and what can be done to stem the loss of the miniature empires that hold life aloft on our raucous, plastic-strewn, beautiful planet.

In a bewilderingly rapid reimagining of our world, what was once infinite now seems jarringly vulnerable. Without insects, the world’s wealthy could perhaps deploy the resources required to indefinitely stretch out a semblance of the status quo. But for the majority of humanity, the loss of insects would be an agonizing ordeal eclipsing any war and even rivaling the looming ravages of climate breakdown. “Most of life on Earth would disappear if we didn’t have insects, and if there were any humans left they wouldn’t be having much fun,” says Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex. “I think it is stretching it a bit to suppose that all humans would be dead in a few months, but there is no doubt that millions of us would be starving.”

Insects have been involved in an intricate dance with almost every aspect of the terrestrial environment for millions of years, forming an underappreciated foundation for human civilization itself. They multiply our food, act as food themselves for the other living creatures around us, rid us of the foulest waste, eliminate unwanted pests, and, crucially, nourish the soil, the 15-centimeter (6-inch) patina wrapped around our globe that sustains all of humanity. Rachel Warren, a professor of environmental biology at the University of East Anglia, compares our deeply woven reliance on insects to the internet. “In an ecosystem everything is connected by this net of interactions,” she says. “Every time you lose a species you’re cutting some of those links in this network. The more links you cut in the network the less of this internet there is left, until eventually it doesn’t work anymore.”

Without a pollinator, a plant dies and isn’t replaced. The birds that feasted on the plant’s fruits or the deer that browsed on its buds start to dwindle, followed by the animals that feed upon them. “The whole food web just disintegrates,” Warren says. “I don’t think humans could survive in that world at all.”

The weight of this dependence has failed to spark much devotion for insects. Three out of every four known animal species on Earth are insects and yet, within their massed ranks, only butterflies are considered with anything close to affection. Wasps are a baleful summertime menace, ants an invading army fought with toxic sprays in the kitchen, and mosquitoes everything from irritating nuisance to lethal threat. Most of the other 1 million species of identified insects are considered by many people, if they are ever considered at all, to be either quirkily obscure or pointless.

There are around 7,530 types of assassin fly, a creature that spends its short life spearing other insects with a sturdy proboscis in order to paralyze them and liquefy their internal organs. This horde alone comprises more species than mustered by the entire world of mammals—apes, elephants, dogs, cats, domestic cattle, whales, the lot. A botfly called Cephalopina titillator matures in the nostrils of infested camels, just one specialist among 150 species of botflies, while there are at least half a million species of parasitoid wasp, creatures so detested by Charles Darwin that he wrote in a letter, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God” would’ve created them. What would really be lost if these abhorred wasps and flies, maybe all flies in general, just vanished?

“You get rid of flies? You get rid of chocolate,” says Erica McAlister, a senior curator at the Natural History Museum, London, and an avowed defender of flies who once took part in an entomologist gokart event dressed as one. Appropriately, she successfully chased down a colleague who was dressed as feces. “Flies are really important pollinators when it comes to carrots, peppers, onions, mangoes and a lot of fruit trees. And chocolate. They work longer hours than bees and don’t mind the cold as much. We’re beginning to finally take notice of all this.” There are approximately 160,000 species of Diptera—an order more commonly called true flies or two-winged flies—which includes houseflies, midges, mosquitoes, and fruit flies. The number of fly species is at least four times larger than all the different types of fish found in the world’s oceans. This diverse group perhaps deserves to be viewed as a collection of finely tuned environmental engineers rather than as annoying pests that circle overhead or speckle browning bananas in fruit bowls.

Tiny midges, each the size of a pinhead, crawl into the tiny flowers of cacao plants across Africa and South America and keep the world’s $100 billion chocolate industry from collapse. Thousands of different blowflies, flesh flies, and soldier flies dispose of dead animals, rotting leaves, and feces—for free. Scientists have harnessed maggots for the treatment of gangrenous wounds without antibiotics, while oil has been extracted from the larvae of black soldier flies and turned into a form of biodiesel to run cars and trucks. “They’re doing such wonderful jobs, all sorts of things that we just don’t realize,” says McAlister. “Can you imagine if they didn’t? You’d be swimming along in a quagmire of feces with Uncle Jeremy floating past you.”

Flies are recondite yet prodigious pollinators. Volucella zonaria, a hefty hoverfly with bumblebee-like black and yellow hoops on its abdomen, is “basically a flying tank,” according to McAlister. It is capable of buzz pollination, which means it can grip onto petals and violently vibrate, releasing pollen that is stubbornly lodged in the anthers of a plant. Few bees are able to do this, meaning without flies there would be no cornucopia of tomatoes and blueberries available for us to feast upon.

Some plants are completely dependent on certain flies. One extraordinary creature, Moegistorhynchus longirostris, is found on the west coast of South Africa. It has a nonretractable proboscis that measures up to 7 centimeters (almost 3 inches) long, several times its own body length, making for an awkward flailing appendage when flying. It flits around plants that have developed tubed flowers that perfectly fit the fly’s lengthy probe, further highlighting an evolutionary theory posed by Darwin after he was sent some orchids from Madagascar in 1862 that stored nectar in exceptionally long necks. Darwin suggested that a moth with an absurdly long tongue must have evolved alongside this plant—a species that was only discovered decades after the evolutionary theorist’s death. “If just that fly in South Africa disappeared, eight plant species would die out immediately,” says McAlister. “Flies have got a huge history with pollination that has been wildly ignored.”

Even on their own terms, flies can fascinate—some species present edible gifts to potential mates, while others perform intricate dances. To some people, flies could even be considered beautiful. Michelle Trautwein experienced a pivotal moment as an art student when as part of a studio review she unveiled a vast biological illustration of a stone fly, an order of insects with elongated bodies, long antennae and two pairs of membranous wings. “The art professor hated it,” recalls Trautwein. The professor strongly preferred the work of a student who had smeared wet cat food across a blank white canvas. “I remember just thinking ‘That’s it. I’m out.’ ” Trautwein “just fell into flies” and is now a leading entomologist in her discipline at the California Academy of Sciences.

While stone flies are not typically gushed over as classically photogenic, there are flies that could lay claim to such adulation. The Lecomyia notha soldier fly, from Queensland, Australia, has an iridescent, opal-like exoskeleton, a shimmering blur of purple and blue. Another fly, with a bright, golden abdomen, has been named Plinthina beyonceae, after the singer Beyoncé. “Entomology is a really beautiful, aesthetically pleasing field,” says Trautwein. She was drawn to flies, and insects in general, because they resemble “aliens on Earth.”

“There’s millions and millions and millions of them, we don’t even know how many,” Trautwein says. “Each one is like an alien life form with a detailed life history that often is so bizarre, you couldn’t create it as fiction if you wanted to.” As dizzyingly diverse as insects are, they share a remarkably consistent body design comprising three segments—head, thorax, and abdomen—three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, antenna, and an external skeleton.

This structure provides the platform for feats that would cause widespread awe if performed by larger animals. The dracula ant can snap its mandibles at 322 kilometers (200 miles) per hour, the fastest animal movement on Earth. Their cousins, the African Matabele ants, have been seen carrying injured comrades back to the nest to tend to their wounds like six-legged paramedics. Some caterpillars generate their own antifreeze to ward off the cold. Honeybees understand the concept of zero and can add and subtract numbers. But these creatures—so numerous that they are both unknowable and annoying, so odd looking that they inspire the forms of malevolent beings in horror movies, and so vital that we would perish without them—now appear to be suffering a silent existential crisis.

The alarm over insect declines has been rung intermittently for some time, if not quite as loudly as now. As early as 1936, Edith Patch, the first female president of the Entomological Society of America, gave a speech decrying the expanding use of insecticides on fruit and vegetable crops. “Certainly too little popular emphasis has been given to the service of insects to mankind,” Patch said, adding that “too few do realize our dependence upon them for most of our food and clothing, a significant amount of our industry, and for much of our pleasure.” More presciently, “If [mankind’s] goal is a wholesale destruction of dangerous insects, his brains will provide the equipment for such a campaign in the course of time.”

In the decades since, humanity hasn’t consciously geared its collective brain to decimate all sorts of insects, much as it hasn’t deliberately decided to drown its coastal cities and fuel enormous wildfires through climate change. Nevertheless, that has been the result. Through the destruction of insects’ habitats, the spraying of toxic chemicals, and, increasingly, the heating up of the planet, we have unwittingly crafted a sort of hellscape for many insects, imperiling all we rely upon them for. “We are creating a world that is not only a problem for insects, but even for us, for humans,” says Pedro Cardoso, a biologist at the Finnish Museum of Natural History.

The exact dimensions of the insect crisis have long been obscured by a fog of logistical impossibilities. There are 1 million named insect species, but as insects are small, cryptic, and not extensively tracked, this is only a glimpse of what is undiscovered and unnamed: estimates vary from an eye-watering 30 million species to a more realistic 5.5 million. “Who knows what’s out there?” says Goulson. “Probably all sorts of weird and wonderful beasties.”

Taxonomists, the biologists who name species and work out where they fit into the larger puzzle of living things, face a Sisyphean job just to differentiate between seemingly identical species. To most of us, some ants are black and some cinnamon colored, some flies are big and some are small, but beyond that the distinctions end. Specialists have to spend a lot of their time gazing at insects’ reproductive organs to make their classifications. “We are genitalia fiddlers,” says McAlister, the fly expert. “We like nothing more than cutting open a fly and looking at its goolies.”

This painstaking work, combined with the fact that taxonomy is increasingly dismissed as a fusty natural history version of stamp collecting by students now more drawn to molecular biology, means that the job of describing all insect life on Earth will probably never have an end date. As McAlister puts it: “We’ve got 50,000 people studying one type of monkey and one person studying 50,000 types of flies.” For every fly successfully identified by its genitalia, science dumps many more potential candidates on the desk of taxonomists. In 2016, Canadian scientists completed a DNA analysis of more than 1 million insect specimens and were shocked to find that the country probably has around 94,000 insect species, nearly double the previous estimate. If Canada has 1 percent of the world’s insects, the researchers mused, the planet has around 10 million insect species.

Even with what is already described, it’s clear we live in an invertebrate’s world. Just 5 percent of all known animal species have a backbone. The globe is filled with not people or sheep or even rats, but beetles—350,000 species and counting. What we do know about overall insect populations doesn’t immediately spur thoughts of shortage, either. The Smithsonian Institution estimates there are around 10 quintillion (that’s a 10 with eighteen zeros following it) insects in the world. A locust swarm can contain 1 billion individuals. The southern portion of England alone hosts 3.5 trillion migrating flying insects a year, a mass of bodies weighing the equivalent of 20,000 flying reindeer.

If you got all the termites in the world and scrunched them into a giant ball, this seething clump, a measure known as biomass, would weigh more than all the birds on the planet. Before people started ballooning in both population and girth in our era of industrialized modernity, all the world’s ants probably weighed more than all the world’s humans, too. “Today’s human population is adrift in a sea of insects,” as a pair of Iowa State University scientists wrote in 2009. “Based solely on numbers and biomass, insects are the most successful animals on Earth.”

Insects are surprisingly hardy and adaptable, too. The Sahara desert ant can survive temperatures of up to 70°C (158°F), while, in the other extreme, the larvae of the Antarctic midge can cope with −15°C (5°F) and as long as a month without oxygen. Tiny ephydrid flies can live and breed in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park that would fry a human. Bumblebees have been found at 5,500 meters (18,000 feet) above sea level, a height just shy of Mount Kilimanjaro’s summit. Dragonflies can steadily hover in fierce winds that would down even the most advanced helicopter. A horned dung beetle is so strong that if it were a human, it would be able to hold aloft six double-decker buses.

You could say that the insect family embraces the bizarre. Insects breathe in and out via holes called spiracles in their exoskeletons and see via intricate compound eyes, allowing creatures such as dragonflies to have a 360-degree field of vision. Stingless bees feed on human sweat and tears, a species of butterfly has an eye on its penis, and some aphids can produce young that already contain their own babies—effectively they give birth to their own grandchildren. Insect populations are normally fairly elastic, too, able to navigate huge spikes and troughs when dealing with changeable conditions. But while insects are legion, that doesn’t mean that they are utterly disposable—they all play some sort of role in pollination, or in decomposition, or in the food chain.

Start yanking enormous numbers of insects out from the environment and the whole web of life, including humanity, is thrown off-kilter. The collapse can fold in on itself, too—around 10 percent of insects are parasites, often of other insects. If certain wasps can’t find caterpillars to act as their slave puppets and egg hosts, or if certain flies can’t hijack an ant’s brain and then decapitate it, they, too, are under threat. This dangerous scenario is now coming into focus as scientists have started to piece together the puzzle of insect life. A warning shot was fired in 2014 with a compendium of available research that found that a third of invertebrate species documented by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) are in decline, with these population decreases amounting to 45 percent globally over the past four decades. The losses were nearly double that of vertebrates.

Almost all of Orthoptera, an order of insects that includes locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets, is on a downward trajectory, as is the majority of species making up the vast order Coleoptera, or beetles. “Such animal declines will cascade onto ecosystem functioning and human well-being,” the study of IUCN data warned, framing this calamity within what’s known as the planet’s sixth mass extinction—the ongoing annihilation of nature, unprecedented since the demise of the dinosaurs, at the hands of the smokestacks and bulldozers of humankind.

This roiling extinction event has some formidable totems—tigers, rhinos, elephants, polar bears. The plight of these animals, often referred to by the unlovely term charismatic megafauna, dominates media discourse and conservation funding. The success or failure of the effort to halt the ransacking of Earth’s biodiversity is regularly seen to hinge on the fate of the handful of large beasts that are endlessly portrayed in movies, advertising, stuffed toys, and sporting team logos.

This “institutional vertebratism,” as the entomologist Simon Leather has put it, is, in a more literary realm, reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” We are drawn, moist eyed, to some species and withdraw with a shrug from others. Insects largely find themselves in the latter category.

Insects, along with the mollusks, worms, and other sans backbone creatures that comprise the vast majority of species on the planet, have been relatively overlooked by the world of science and the limelight of celebrity. Entomologists have attempted bursts of showmanship to turn the tide—a newly discovered species of treehopper was named after Lady Gaga due to the “wacky fashion sense” of its horns, a beetle has been named after Arnold Schwarzenegger, a wasp after Pink Floyd—but it is hard for many people to warm to insects.

Small children are fascinated by insects and want to interact with them, according to Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the US conservation group Xerces Society, who does regular outreach in schools. But this attitude changes by the time they are in middle school. “Many actively fear, dislike or are disgusted by insects,” he says. “I believe this is something that is taught by parents, peers and even teachers.” The media’s treatment of insects has played a role, too. In 2020, the United Kingdom’s annual emergence of swarms of flying ants out to find a mate was greeted by the Liverpool Echo headline “Flying Ant Scenes ‘Like a Horror Film’ as Swarms of Insects Plague Merseyside.” Children were reported to have screamed in terror, while one man compared the scenes to a Hitchcock film. We’ve been taught to fear the abundance of nature, when the reverse should be the case.

We didn’t know what we were losing because we didn’t really care or perhaps because we simply didn’t know what was at stake. Neglect and ignorance became confusingly knotted some time ago.

Then, seemingly from nowhere, everything changed. The public’s awakening to the insect crisis has come in waves and is far from complete, but it can plausibly be traced back to an exact date—October 18, 2017.

On that day, PLOS One, an open-access scientific journal headquartered in San Francisco, published a paper authored by a dozen Dutch, British, and German scientists. Its title was workmanlike and to the point: “More Than 75 Percent Decline over 27 Years in Total Flying Insect Biomass in Protected Areas.” The paper itself gave flesh to these bleak bones. A rare long-term study of insect populations in sixty-three protected nature areas across Germany revealed a cataclysm: since 1989, the annual average weight of flying insects caught in traps slumped by 76 percent. The situation at the height of summer, when insect numbers reach their apex, was even worse, with an 82 percent decline.

Changes in weather and land use couldn’t account for the overall drop, according to the paper. Despite being in protected and often actively managed conservation zones, it appears that the insects were harmed by activities on surrounding farmland, such as the use of pesticides and loss of flowering borders, although this theory of a sort of “ecological trap” isn’t conclusive. A more pressing question, however, was if insects are seemingly plunging into oblivion in protected areas in a country like Germany, where on Earth could they possibly be safe?

The tone of the researchers was dark. Hans de Kroon, a Dutch ecologist involved in the study, remarked: “We can barely imagine what would happen if this downward trend continues unabated.” Fellow researcher Goulson gave it a go, regardless: “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life,” he said, adding that future generations are set to inherit a “profoundly impoverished world.”

The findings ricocheted around the globe, prompting not just unprecedented interest in the struggles of flies, moths, bees, and butterflies, but also a wave of biblical language. “Warning of ‘Ecological Armageddon’ after Dramatic Plunge in Insect Numbers,” read The Guardian’s headline. The Hindu went with “Insect Apocalypse: German Bug Watchers Sound Alarm.” The New York Times also invoked “insect Armageddon” before, for good measure, declaring in a magazine piece a year later “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here.” A cover of National Geographic, crawling with pictures of beetles and moths, declared mournfully, “You’ll miss them when they’re gone.”

The public was introduced to the portmanteau “insectageddon,” which quickly took hold across the media. The reaction swelled to a despairing crescendo; in an article for Le Monde entitled “Compassion for the Weevil!” the philosopher Thierry Hoquet intoned that “by chemically attacking insects, it is life that is attacked.”

Much of this attention was heaped onto the unflashy membership of the Krefeld Entomological Society—composed largely of working scientists in various fields (the widely used epithet “amateurs” tends to irk)—that collected the data for the study that was structured by a group of Dutch, German, and British scientists. By the time yet another camera crew showed up, this time from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the society’s insect curator, Martin Sorg, told them that all the commotion had been “problematic.” Sorg admitted, “We never expected to get so many emails and so many questions from around the world.”

Sorg, with his long gray hair, John Lennon glasses, and penchant for rumpled clothing and sandals, has become the unwitting face of both the study and the emergent concern over plunging insect numbers. He is a circumspect man, however, who is mildly bemused over why no one else has really bothered to make long-term standardized surveys of insects until now. “It’s like we are driving a car blind,” he says. “You may be lucky doing that or maybe you aren’t. The less information there is, the more risk. I don’t know why we were the only ones.”

Since the era of intrepid Victorian insect collectors, scientists have strived to answer compelling questions about insect behavior or uncover intriguing new species. The drudgery of actually trying to count such boundless numbers—going to and from traps, compiling the figures, somehow supporting this work for decades beyond three-year research funding cycles—felt both pointless and dull. “There are so many interesting things to do that it sounds quite boring to do that,” says Vojtech Novotny, a Czech ecologist who spends half his year conducting research among huge stick insects and butterflies in the Papua New Guinea rainforests.

Suddenly, however, Sorg and his colleagues are much like the only people who saw the need to keep score in a football game that everyone else only belatedly realized was important. The life’s work of these assorted insect obsessives has centered on an old school building in Krefeld, a city in northwest Germany once famous for producing silk. A ribbon of the Rhine River cuts through the landscape a few miles to the east, and the Dutch border is not far to the west. The Krefeld Society has been trapping, observing, and recording insects since 1905, its members churning out several thousand publications during this time on the taxonomy and behavior of the animals.

The second floor of the group’s building is given over to specimens suspended in alcohol-filled bottles—Sorg estimates there could be 100 million insects, maybe more—labeled and stored in disused classrooms, heavy curtains blocking out the light. In a separate part of the collection around a million insects have been dried, lanced on needles, and placed in frames. Butterflies, beetles, bees, hoverflies, dragonflies, and more, from the Rhine region and beyond, are here.

Crucially, the researchers have erected identical traps in the same controlled conditions across the countryside for the past four decades to ensure a clean comparison. The contraptions are called Malaise traps, named after the Swedish entomologist René Malaise, who developed the basic design in the 1930s, and resemble hovering tents open at two sides. The structures funnel flying insects up to a well-lit point where they are trapped in alcohol, forming a pile of bodies weighing a few grams (about half a teaspoon) each day.

Year after year, the Krefeld team collected and noted the mass of insects in the same nature reserves, which are meadows full of birds, small mammals, and wildflowers but set in a patchwork of agricultural land across Germany. Then, in 2011 and again 2012, they noticed something was amiss. “There was a place that should have a high number of insects, over 1,000 grams [35 ounces], and it had 300 or 350 grams [12 ounces] for the complete year,” Sorg says. “That was shocking.” The society’s records on insect abundance spans technological ages, running from handwritten notes to documents bashed out on typewriters to saved files on floppy disks. By digging through these records, Sorg and his colleagues could see that numbers were well down compared with 1989, one of the earliest years for the standardized traps.

So they set about, with the help of the outside scientists, piecing together the deteriorating fortunes of the insects. Previously regarded as a group of niche eccentrics, they gathered evidence of the most significant disappearances of creatures since woolly mammoths were cleared from the continent 10,000 years ago, perhaps even since the demise of the dinosaurs. Yet the huge declines documented in Germany weren’t completely revelatory to Sorg. He and other entomologists had muttered to each other about dropping numbers for some time. Even in the dustier tomes stored in the former school, society members had noted decreases before the Second World War. “We just did not suspect it in this dimension,” Sorg admits.

The latent insect crisis was now visible as another sorrowful example of environmental pillage. “Until the Germany study most of the general public were completely unaware that there was any problem at all with insects, and also largely unaware that insects had any value,” says Goulson, who started studying bumblebees in earnest in the 1990s after noticing, to his horror, that many once-common species had evaporated from southern England. “It’s nice to see that it’s not just a few sad entomologists that are concerned now. People are starting to wake up.”

The Krefeld work is notable in that it measures biomass—a handy way to track changes in the bulk of insect life and speedier than the exacting work of identifying and counting each caught bug. But the method also provokes further questions. If the overall weight of trapped insects fell, is this due to a drop in larger individuals, such as bumblebees and the heftier beetles, while everything else is relatively steady? Or are all species nose-diving? Are whole species being lost or just portions of them?

Sorg argues that the focus should be on the “irreversible loss of species” rather than merely biomass, pointing to how the Krefeld region used to have around two dozen bumblebee species, as documented a century ago. This list has since halved.

Extinctions are a cruel blow to our sense of well-being with the environment. They remove irreplaceable threads from the tapestry of life, depriving us of creatures that perform important functions or make the world a more lively, interesting place. Lost insects such as the Perrin’s cave beetle or the Xerces blue butterfly may not garner the fame of other departures, such as the dodo, but they were unique and their exit is irreversible.

The hidden, labyrinthine nature of arthropods—a broad phylum that includes insects, spiders, and centipedes—makes it alarmingly easy to stamp out whole species. Move across a patch of ground and you’ll see seemingly mundane features—a pile of dead leaves, a rock, a tree—but in reality, those are the micro-sized homes of a riot of insect species. Glance from the ground upward, from the soil to the barks of trees to the canopy of a forest, and you are taking in yet additional strata of insect habitats with countless more species.

If this plot is flattened to construct a Starbucks or an intensively farmed field of soybeans, plenty of common insects perish—and so do niche habitat specialists. Some of these rarer insects may exist elsewhere; others may not and are removed from our world. The scale of unseen insect life is so broad and deep that it’s difficult to keep track of the extinctions, let alone population fluctuations, unleashed as we blunder obliviously around the planet like some sort of intoxicated moose in a field of precious orchids.

Countless insect species have undoubtedly been extinguished without us even knowing they existed in the first place. These Centinelan extinctions, named after a ridge in Ecuador at the foothills of the Andes where a cornucopia of new species were wiped out before they could be named, have left researchers groping in the dark at the full scale of the insect crisis.

We may well already be within the first or second act of insect extinctions. A paper by twenty-five researchers ominously titled “Scientists’ Warning to Humanity on Insect Extinctions” notes that only around a fifth of the world’s insect species have even been named, mostly from single specimens. But by using a formula based on the extinctions of land snails and on previous work by Claire Régnier, of the French Natural History Museum in Paris, the report states that 5 to 10 percent of insect species have gone extinct since the era of mass industrialization. This range equates to 250,000 to 500,000 lost insect species, meaning that the tiny burst of geologic time since the arrival of the steam engine and incandescent light bulb has been an era of doom for up to half the number of species that have existed during this time and have been named by science. “We are pushing many ecosystems beyond recovery, resulting in insect extinctions,” the paper states. “Insect declines lead to loss of essential, irreplaceable services to humanity. Action to save insect species is urgent, for both ecosystems and human survival.”

We are perhaps better equipped to ascertain potential future losses than past extinctions, although this is of cold comfort. A landmark United Nations finding in 2019 outlined how 1 million species across the animal kingdom are facing extinction in the coming decades. Half of these lost species will be insects. In aggregate, this means that a period bookended by the late nineteenth century and the midpoint of the twenty-first could see the permanent disappearance of a million different kinds of beetles, butterflies, bees, and other insects. This toll, if it plays out, is gargantuan—a loss of species greater than all the variants of fish, birds, and mammals in existence.

But the loss in overall insect numbers matters as well, perhaps as much as the number of species being extirpated. As the warning paper from twenty-five scientists notes, declines are not restricted to rare and endangered species. The ranks of common insects are being thinned out, too, which has profound consequences for the surrounding environment.

Pull different levers and you set in motion a cascade of consequences. Across the broad family of arthropods there are creatures such as wood lice, millipedes, and springtails that perform tasks such as chewing up dead plant matter, grazing on fungi off root surfaces, and releasing nutrients for plant growth. Waste-eating insects such as dung beetles unlock nutrients from feces, rotting plants, and corpses that would otherwise stagnate. Other species like ladybugs and lacewings prey on crop pests such as aphids. The engineering aptitude of termites—their tunneling cracks open hard ground, helping it absorb water and nutrients—can help turn barren land into fertile fields.

If whole species of these specialists are lost, then vital ecosystem functions, such as maintaining soil and plant health, are diminished. But certain animals themselves feed on these insects in huge volumes; a blue tit parent, for example, will need to cram up to a hundred caterpillars a day down the gullet of a single chick. The loss of a few niche species won’t bother most birds if they are able to dine on other insects that boast strong populations. A major crash in overall insect numbers, though, is a different matter. We can marvel at the individual qualities of insects, but their role in the ecosystem is almost always executed in massed numbers. It’s not just about the breadth of the insect universe, it’s the depth, too.

Insects aren’t being persecuted in isolation, of course. The UN report identifying 1 million at-risk species also found that three-quarters of the planet’s land has been radically altered by human activity, that plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, and that the globe has been shorn of a third of its forested areas in the industrialized era. Our presence now hangs so heavy that we are starting to notice that it weighs us down, too. “The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” said Josef Settele, who cochaired the UN assessment. “This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”

This shriveling of biodiversity is an emergency now on a par with, or arguably greater than, the climate crisis that feeds and overlaps it. The recent rush of academic warnings on insects has more than one parallel with how climate change has developed as an issue—a few largely ignored alarm bells eventually followed by a belated critical mass of concern once we near the precipice of disaster. We may now be edging toward this climax of unease. Biologist Pedro Cardoso has long obsessed over spiders and insects—he’s a particular fan of parasitoid wasps: “Their way of living, often controlling the mind of their hosts, is way too cool”—but his past decade of studying insect declines has often been rather lonely. “It can be a bit frustrating when all the attention goes to mammals and birds,” he says. “It’s really the small stuff that drives what’s happening in ecosystems.”