Insect Decline

"In 2019, researchers found that almost a third of US birds – about 3 billion – had disappeared from the skies since the 1970s. The losses, however, were not evenly distributed: those birds that ate insects as their main food had declined by 2.9 billion. Those that didn’t depend on insects had actually gained, increasing by 26 million. More recent research from the US found a decline in three-quarters of nearly 500 bird species studied – with the steepest downward trend in stronghold areas, where they once thrived. In Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest, scientists in 2018 mapped how the loss of insects set other dominoes falling: as bugs declined, so too did the populations of lizards, frogs and birds. Their disappearance, they wrote, had triggered “a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest" I have written about the insect decline in earlier posts,a decline which rises by a few percentage points each year, worldwide. Climate change, pesticides, habitat loss and other factors are catching up to us, which is why I say alarmist things such as humanity will not survive beyond 2100. Insects are not in the forefront of peoples attention, except when buying traps and chemicals to kill them, but they are crucial to the ecosystem. I am old enough to remember Pennsylvania fields filled with thousands of insects and species that simply do not exist anymore. Gone in fifty years. Worldwide. Everywhere. To believe that this can continue without major repercussions is ignorant denial. I have no solution other than to educate and perhaps influence people to move that fly or bee outside rather than kill it.