Apocalypse Now!

This article in The New York Times Magazine provides a frightening overview of The Insect Apocalypse that is upon us.  Insects are disappearing at an alarming rate on a global scale.  

"...the most disquieting thing wasn’t the disappearance of certain species of insects; it was the deeper worry... that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing, a loss of abundance that could alter the planet in unknowable ways." 

We don't have good baseline information concerning insect populations.  Yes, we have a clear understanding regarding the visible massive reduction in a charismatic species such as the Monarch butterfly. We even have a grasp of the causes, but the reality is that we a much more limited understanding as to what is happening to other less colorful and visible species of insects.  In fact, we are very likely aware of perhaps only one fifth of total number of species of insects on the planet.  

We’ve named and described a million species of insects... There are 12,000 types of ants, nearly 20,000 varieties of bees, almost 400,000 species of beetles... A bit of healthy soil a foot square and two inches deep might easily be home to 200 unique species of mites, each, presumably, with a subtly different job to do. And yet entomologists estimate that all this amazing, absurd and understudied variety represents perhaps only 20 percent of the actual diversity of insects on our planet — that there are millions and millions of species that are entirely unknown to science.

Long term studies of insect populations are limited, but in virtually every case where a details history exists, the results are the same - massive declines in the both the variety of species and the quantity of insects.  And, it's not just the insects that are impacted.

 ...a tropical ecologist named Brad Lister returned to the rain forest where he had studied lizards — and, crucially, their prey — 40 years earlier... Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams...But even scarier were the ways the losses were already moving through the ecosystem, with serious declines in the numbers of lizards, birds and frogs. The paper reported “a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.” 

This was a study done in an environment where insecticide were not in use and no deforestation had occurred unlike other studies where one or both of those were potential contributors to insect population declines.  In this case, climate change was considered the most likely cause. 

As of yet, we don't even know the rum extent of what is already lost, but we do know that the effects are measurable.  What will happen when we reach some inflection point where the quantity and variety in the insect world decreases to a point where the vital niches filled by the million species of insects are no longer performed?   The outcome is not likely to favor humans.

By eating and being eaten, insects turn plants into protein and power the growth of all the uncountable species — including freshwater fish and a majority of birds — that rely on them for food, not to mention all the creatures that eat those creatures. We worry about saving the grizzly bear, says the insect ecologist Scott Hoffman Black, but where is the grizzly without the bee that pollinates the berries it eats or the flies that sustain baby salmon? Where, for that matter, are we?