The vital insect kingdom is suffering “death by a thousand cuts,” said the world’s top insect experts.
Climate change, insecticides, herbicides, light pollution, invasive species and changes in agriculture and land use are causing the Earth to likely lose 1% to 2% of its insects each year, said University of Connecticut entomologist David Wagner , lead author of the special 12 study package in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, written by 56 scientists from around the world.
The problem, sometimes called the insect apocalypse, is like a puzzle. And scientists say they don’t have all the pieces yet, so they have a hard time understanding their enormity and complexity and getting the world to notice and do something.
Wagner said scientists need to find out if the rate of insect loss is higher than with other species. “There are reasons to be more concerned,” he added, “because they are targets of attacks” with insecticides, herbicides and light pollution.
University of Illinois co-author and entomologist May Berenbaum, winner of the National Medal of Science, said: “Insect decline is comparable to climate change 30 years ago because the methods for assessing the extent, the rate (of loss ) were difficult. “
To make matters worse, in many cases, people hate insects, although they pollinate the world’s food, they are crucial to the food chain and eliminate waste, she said.
Insects “are absolutely the fabric out of which Mother Nature and the tree of life are built,” said Wagner.
Two well-known – bees and monarch butterflies – best illustrate the problems and declines of insects, he said. Bees are in dramatic decline due to disease, parasites, insecticides, herbicides and lack of food.
The drier climate driven by climate change in the western United States means less milkweed for butterflies to eat, Wagner said. And changes in American agriculture remove the weeds and flowers they need for nectar.
“We are creating a giant biological desert, except for soybeans and corn in a giant area of the midwest,” he said.
Monday’s scientific articles do not provide new data, but show a large but incomplete picture of a problem that is beginning to draw attention. Scientists have identified 1 million species of insects, while probably another 4 million are yet to be discovered, Berenbaum said.
Doug Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware, who was not part of the studies, said they highlight how the world “spent the past 30 years spending billions of dollars discovering new ways to kill insects and mere cents working to preserve them.”
“The good news is that, with the exception of climate change, individuals can do a lot to reverse the decline of insects,” Tallamy said by email. “This is a global problem with a basic solution.”