Allie Wilkinson writes:

Imagine a world without insects. You might breathe a sigh of relief at the thought of mosquito-free summers, or you might worry about how agriculture will function without pollinators. What you probably won’t picture is trudging through a landscape littered with feces and rotting corpses — what a world devoid of maggots and dung beetles would look like.

That’s just a snippet of the horrifying picture of an insect-free future that journalist Oliver Milman paints in the beginning of The Insect Crisis. “The loss of insects would be an agonizing ordeal eclipsing any war and even rivaling the looming ravages of climate breakdown,” he writes. And yet, the threat of an impending “insect apocalypse” doesn’t get nearly the same level of attention as climate change.

Researchers have been observing declining insect populations for decades. For instance, a study of nearly 40 years of data from a protected rainforest in Puerto Rico found that insect biomass had decreased by 98 percent on the ground and 80 percent in the canopy since the mid-1970s.

The threats insects face are many: Light pollution, the increasing use of pesticides and climate change are just a few. And it’s not only rare species that are at risk — it’s also species that were once common around the globe. [Continue reading…]