It’s time to take the insect apocalypse more seriously

What are the consequences?

‘There is reason to worry,’ says Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, a researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia, in the report. ‘If we don’t stop it, entire ecosystems will collapse due to starvation.’

Insects serve as the base of the ecological food pyramid, eaten by everything from birds to small mammals to fish. If they decline, it stands to reason everything else will as well.

They also provide several other invaluable and underappreciated services to humanity. About three fourths of all flowering plants are pollinated by insects, as well as the crops that produce over one third of the world’s food supply. Trillions of bugs flitting from flower to flower pollinate some three-quarters of our food crops, a service worth as much as $500 billion every year.

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. No insects equals no food. Which equals no people. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist.

Another service insects provide behind the scenes? Waste disposal and nutrient cycling. Without insects like dung beetles and other decomposers breaking down and removing animal and plant waste, our surroundings would be less than pleasant, to say the least.

Basically, without insects we’d live in a barren world. Ecosystems would collapse, nature overall would wither and decay, and there would be a starvation crisis unlike anything we’ve seen before.

The kicker? Insects don’t even need to go completely extinct for this to occur. Scientists have begun to talk about what’s known as ‘functional extinction’, as opposed to numeric extinction. Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. You can phrase this as the eradication not of a species, but of all its former interactions with its environment – an extinction of pollination and seed dispersal and predation, which can be devastating even if some individuals still persist. The more interactions are lost, the more disordered the ecosystem becomes.

A 2013 paper in the Nature magazine, which modelled both natural and computer-generated food webs, suggested that a loss of even 30% of a species’ abundance can be so destabilising that other species start going fully, numerically extinct. In some areas such an affect is already being felt. In Puerto Rico, for example, upwards of 24 species of frog have gone extinct since 1996 due to a loss in their food supply.

It’s easy to see how this domino effect could lead to a human food crisis sooner rather than later.

What can we do about it?

There are two main causes for this rapid decline in insects: industrialisation, and global warming.

Like every species on earth, insects are reacting to the transformation of a world under climate change. They’re also contending with the widespread conversion, via urbanisation, agricultural intensification and the general conversion of natural spaces into human ones. There are now fewer and fewer resources ‘left over’ for nonhuman creatures to live on, and what resources do remain are often contaminated.

The thing that could ultimately help insect populations more than anything else would be to address climate change. Of course, this is a mammoth task that in an ideal world would be first on every political agenda globally.

Beyond that, conservation and management is crucial. New methods of farming that require less pesticides, or simply the creation of more ecologically friendly and less toxic pesticides, will have a dramatic impact on helping humans and insects coexist.

The fact of the matter is, at present we simply don’t have enough information on the issue. Not enough research has been done as insect degradation isn’t the jazziest talking point for politicians, or even activists, meaning that research is severely underfunded. It’s only when scientific bodies are given the resources to properly analyse and measure the specific ecological influences on various insect species that systems can be put in place. It’s only when we truly understand the nuances of the various impacts that we can start to repair.

It’s certainly not an easy fix. But becoming aware of the issue as future policy makers is surely the first step. If the issue is taken seriously by the next generation of government and business leaders, then a balanced ecosystem may still be within our grasp.

So, if you see a dehydrated bee, give it some sugar water will you?