Insects Are in Serious Trouble

Insects Are in Serious Trouble




“We were expecting declines, but the extent of them was tremendous,” says Hans de Kroon, who was involved in analysing the Krefeld data. “If this was in agricultural settings, we wouldn’t be quite so surprised. But it’s especially alarming that it happened in nature reserves.”



This is, to put it mildly, a huge problem.



And. Insects.

“We can’t wait till we know exactly what’s leading to these losses. We have to act.”





But neither line of evidence is clear-cut. The team didn’t look at larger-scale climate events, like prolonged droughts, and they couldn’t measure the effect of habitat fragmentation—cutting up the land available to insects rather than merely reducing it. Indeed, the nature reserves in the German study are small, too distant from each other for insects to travel between, and locked in by agricultural land. Those are “hostile environments” for insects, de Kroon says, so species that thrive in the reserves could drain into the surrounding no man’s land—and be lost.

Ware wonders if some of the vanished insects are simply migrating into other areas. “We know that certain dragonflies, for example, are changing their ranges in response to climate change,” she says. “So are neighboring countries experiencing a similar loss, or are specific species moving northward?”

That’s why researchers need to do similar surveys in other countries, says Crystal Maier, from Chicago’s Field Museum. “We could actually do that. We have similar samples here at the museum, for similar ranges and time periods. You could spend a lot of time identifying species but they just weighed the samples. That’s something we don’t usually do but it’s so simple, and it would be interesting.”

In the meantime, “we should use anything we have to enhance insect populations, like adding flower-rich areas around the margins [of agricultural land],” says Hallmann.

“We don’t want people to get depressed,” says De Kroon. “Ecosystems are very resilient. They’re still functioning quite well despite this loss. Let’s make use of that resilience. We can’t wait till we know exactly what’s leading to these losses. We have to act.”

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