Insect Apocalypse
November 23, 2024
by William P. Meyers

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Slow Motion Insect Apocalypse is hard for humans to see

I was born in the 1950s on a Marine Corps base. At the age of 6 I was moved to Jacksonville, Florida, after my father retired from the Marines. I have only one memory of insects before the move. There was a bee, apparently dead, lying on the sidewalk. My older brother told me I should pick it up. I did. It stung me. Negative on insects.

In Florida (it is now the 1960s) our first house was in a suburban development built on what had been a swamp, and still surrounded by swampy area. There my knowledge of insects was broadened to mosquitoes. Maybe some other insects, but all I remember is the mosquitoes. A few years later we moved to a somewhat larger house in a somewhat more upscale development. The developer had chosen relatively high ground and had left the native trees in place, as much as possible. However, it was also surrounded by swamps. Here I learned the spectrum of Florida biting insects. Horseflies were the largest, though not that common and you knew when they landed on you, so you sometimes could kill them before their painful bite was inflicted. Next were deer flies, which were quite common, though I never saw deer in the area. About the size of bees, sometimes when we played outside a group of them would form about us, diving in for a quick nip of blood. There were some biting flies about the size of houseflies, but not that common. Again, mosquitoes, of various sizes, from lone individuals that somehow got into our house despite the screens, to swarms that threatened to engulf. At the small end were biting gnats, though again there seemed to be species of gnats that did not bite. Seldom encountered, but worst of all, were chiggers. Technically these were not insects, but Arachnida, in the great phylum of arthropoda. I never saw one, they were tiny, but their multiple bites sometimes tormented me for a week or so.

On the positive side I liked butterflies, so I killed the ones I could catch and mounted them in discarded cardboard boxes. It was a common hobby in our neighborhood. I became familiar with a variety of other insects (and spiders) as well, ranging from ants (including the terrifying mounds of red ants) to dragonflies (my favorite), to the various beetles and bugs.

Fast forward some fifty years and insects, in my domain, have become rare enough that they surprise me. I now live in Seattle, so a direct comparison to Jacksonville is probably not statistically meaningful. When I find a live insect in the house, if it is not a pest like a silverfish, I usually move it outside. Walking about I rarely see a butterfly. Compost bins do seem to generate some flies. The occasional bee visits our outdoor flowers when they are in bloom. One species of ants tries to set up nests in our house, which I sadly discourage. Even when out and about in local parks and nature trails, I see few insects.

I already knew that scientists know that insects are in decline, but recently I read a book on the subject. Silent Earth, Averting the Insect Apocalypse, by Dave Goulson [HarperCollins, New York, 2021] adds to my fear that the Slow Motion Apocalypse has gone too far, that there is no escaping a full apocalypse now. Mr. Goulson, a British professor of biology, is among those studying the decline of insects. He walks us through the data available so far, but admits the data is relatively minimal. No one took a global insect census in 1900, or in 1800. Even today we have only relatively small samples. But, all over the world, people who are old enough have noted the decline.

The causes are clear: the expansion of agriculture and with it the use of insecticides and other pesticides. The draining of swamps and cutting of forests is always bad for most insects, plants, and animals, whether for cities and suburbs or for agriculture. Goulson also does a good job explaining why the insect decline is bad for all life on earth, which I will unfairly compress into one idea: lots of species eat insects, so no insects, no birds, frogs, insectivorous mammals, etc.

Strangely, the very form of industrialized agriculture can create a different type of apocalypse, for humans: the destruction of crops by insects that have become immune to pesticides. As in the domain of mammals, where a wild cat might eat a wild mouse and hence keep mouse numbers in check, we are seeing cases where the natural predators of insect pests are being poisoned out of existence, while the pests themselves are gaining resistance to the insecticides. That combined with the warming global climate, which insects generally like, has led to local disasters like last-year's explosion of leaf hoppers among South American crops [see Leafhopper Swarms Threaten].

Goulson spends much of his book on ideas for averting the decline of insects. Much of it is common sense, like minimizing the use of insecticides. He thinks we should eat less cow so we would need to grow less corn to feed cows, and have more natural area. He only hints that the growth of the human population from about 1 billion people when Charles Darwin was collecting beetles and butterflies as a boy, to over eight billion as I write, is the central problem. [See Wonderful World of One Billion] Most of his ideas are common in the environmental movement. The problem is putting them into effect.

The number of insect species in the world, according to Goulson and other entomologists, may be about 5 million, of which about 1 million have been named. [p. 41] I suspect that while thousands of insect species have already disappeared, and perhaps millions will disappear in the coming apocalypse [as the slow-motion apocalypse pushes the world to the point of near-total ecological break down], insects will come out the other end of the bottleneck in better shape than humans or even mammals.

I will do what I can. Sometimes the world, filled with feedback systems, does not work as predicted. For instance I think President Trump, who tries to deny global warming, may throw the American economy, and world economy, into chaos. That might lead to lower fossil fuel consumption and perhaps a die-off of the sapiens species. Then again I would prefer to set up a Government of Earth that would feature a powerful Environmental Protection Agency of Earth that would quickly reduce fossil fuel production and make sure every woman on earth has access to birth control.