Also from this month’s Byline Times - concerns for the ongoing ‘insect apocalypse’ based on studies done in the past few years.
The first was based on research conducted by a team at Radboud University in the Netherlands and published in 2017. It revealed that the overall biomass of insects caught in its traps in German nature reserves had fallen by three quarters from 1989 to 2014.
The second was published in 2019 and reviewed 73 reports of insect decline from around the world. The summary was equally bleak. Looked at globally, 41% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds, and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, suggesting that they could vanish altogether within a century.
This is important for all sorts of reasons - not least that almost all ‘terrestrial’ food chains require insects in order to function.