From fireflies to dung beetles, insects are Vanishing, says a new report

Blame Climate Change for the decline in Insect Numbers

Insect apocalypse, Credit, New York Times

Recently, reports emerged that the global insect population fell by an unacceptable rate of up to two percent per year, as the planet lost five to ten percent of all insect species in the last one hundred and fifty years.

In another report, more than 40 percent of insect species face a decline, with a third of them endangered, while the total mass of insects fell by an alarming 2.5 percent a year, the rate of extinction eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles.

While the researchers focused on Europe and North America in their studies, events in places like Brazil show the insect decline takes place on a worldwide level, as experts examined 75 projects tracking insects in the South American country, 17 studies showing declines in terrestrial insect abundance and 11 showing declines in diversity, as only three revealed a population increase.

In addition, the disappearance of grasshoppers in southwestern Uganda forced communities to purchase grasshoppers they never used to buy, while researchers saw biomass abundance fall eightfold in sticky traps from 1981 to 2014, and sticky traps catching up to 60-fold fewer insects in the  37 years prior to 2013 at Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest.

As studies reveal declines in terrestrial insect abundance in places like Brazil and Puerto Rico, and researchers arriving at figures suggesting more than 40 percent insect declines in the West, and scholars placing global insect population fall to up to two percent per year, one presupposes the extermination of insect species by the end of the century.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that the last four decades showed successive warmer temperatures than any decade that came before it since 1850, with the 2000s the warmest, while the planet could face even warmer figures, since experts predict global warming  of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius over the next one hundred years.

Along with this, atmospheric carbon dioxide increased in the last 50 years, as its concentration rose dramatically to 416 parts per million (ppm), against the 280 ppm recorded for the industrial period, and likely to double by 2100.

While this took place, a 2018 study discovered that heat waves created under laboratory conditions (five to seven degrees Celsius above optimal temperatures for five days) led to the decimation of the sperm of male flour beetles, meaning their birth circle got affected.

With heat waves decimating the birth circles of insects, climate change may be a factor to their falling numbers, especially as the IPCC estimated increasingly warm years fuelled by the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Apart from the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, climate change fueled incidents such as the 2015-16 El Nino, leading to 64 percent of dung beetles vanishing after a forest fire in Brazil and 20 percent of them disappearing after a drought ensued through the occurrence.

With global concentration of carbon dioxide increasing at the rate of about two ppm per year, climate change could worsen in the near future, affecting the ecology of insects, since even at the low end of population declines of one percent a year more than one third of wild plant species would be lost by 2070.

Climate change creates new ecological niches that affect interactions between insects and other animals, such as the population of songbirds in the United States and Canada experiencing a decline since 1970 of 29 percent, or roughly 2,9 billion, because fewer insects existed for the feeding of  their young.

Due to climate change, insects create the opportunity to spread to new geographic regions in order to stem the fall in their population, but farmers can face intense pest problems arising from this development, because it means the rise in crop pests across physical and political boundaries, threatening food security on a global scale.

With food security threatened on a global scale, wild plants and animals such as songbirds won’t be the only victims in the population declines of insects, as humans would be affected, since insects pollinate 75 percent of global crops, a service valued at up to $577 billion per year.

Therefore, more resources need to be focused on the issue related to the conservation of insects, especially as pollination agents such as bees increasingly suffer extinction, as a report revealed the extinction of 13 bee species in the U.K. and a butterfly population decline of 50 percent since 1976, the rarer ones falling by 77 percent. The conservation of insects means the requirement of long-term funding, or dire consequences could arise for humans, with the planet losing more than one-quarter of its land-dwelling insects in the past 30 years, according to researches with reports painting a disturbing problem in the very near future.

Further Reading: How to Save Insects

Plummeting insect numbers, Credit, The Guardian

Solutions for humanity on how to conserve insects. Read More.

Stopping the Insect Apocalypse: Tips on How You Can Help Save Insects. Read More.

Insect Conservation for the Twenty-First Century. Read here.

Solutions for humanity on how to conserve insects. Read More. 

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Israel vegan food, Credit, Ynetnews