Have you noticed how your windscreen is no longer covered in bugs when you go out for a spring drive? Or how leaving your bathroom window open in the height of summer, even with the light on, now results in little more than a solitary moth bumbling in and clinging to the lightbulb?
Once upon a time, before politicians frolicked through fields of wheat, poets would walk through clouds of butterflies while composing their odes to nature. Now the sight of a single cabbage white on a woodland walk has almost become an event. The Common Blue butterfly is anything but, and you’re more likely to see a real dragon than a dragonfly.
Insects. Bugs. Creepy crawlies. They’re not the cuddly animals I want in my home, but for every persistent wasp there are a countless other species that are not only harmless to our karma but vital to our ecosystems.
Our fundamental dependence upon insects was thrown into sharp focus this week with the publication of the first scientific global review of insects. Printed in the journal Biological Conservation , the review presented evidence that insect numbers are plummeting across the world. More than 40% of species are in decline and the total mass of insects is reducing at a rate of 2.5% a year. If this continues unabated, they’ll all be gone in the next century.
It set out its conclusions in pretty forceful terms. “Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades. The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”
The main causes have been identified as urban development, industrial-scale farming and the resulting loss of wild spaces, deforestation and climate change. In Puerto Rico, the study found 98% of ground-level insects had disappeared in an almost untouched area of habitat.
Here in the South West we have populations of rare insects, some of which are not found anywhere else in the UK. But they’re under just as much duress.
In 2009, a study of Cornish hedgerows found 90% of the wildlife that lives in our roadside hedges was being wiped out every time the council, or farmers, wielded their flail. Technology may have made the job quicker and more efficient, but it has also been efficiently wiping out the native insect population.
And national charity Buglife, the only nature conservation society in Europe to focus upon all invertebrates, has pointed to the fact that eight species of bee has been wiped out in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly over the past 50 years.
Andrew Whitehouse, Buglife’s Countries Manager, based in Plymouth, says the global review confirms the long-held suspicions that insects are under threat from all angles. “Insects represent 70% of all species on Earth and they are the driving force behind our ecosystems,” he told me this week.
“They pollinate our crops, they keep our soils healthy, and they’re food for mammals and birds. And at the moment, 40% are facing extinction in the span of just this next decade.”
When faced with challenges on this scale, the temptation is to abdicate individual responsibility in the hope or expectation that governments will pick up the reins. But who says the cavalry is coming?! And we can make a contribution in our own small way. We all have a carbon footprint that changes according to where we go on holiday, whether we walk the kids to school, and where we source our food from. Do we need to buy roses that have been sprayed with pesticides? Can we instead grow our own, or leave a patch of the garden to grow wild or which is full of plants to pollinate?
For years we’ve worried about Giant Pandas, African Elephants, and Siberian Tigers, the charismatic mega-fauna whose measurable numbers are mana for the (entirely justifiable) campaigns dedicated to preserving them.
But how do you make a dung beetle look cute?
It may sound trite, but now that the data has begun to back up what many seasoned and expert observers have been saying for years, these mites and midges need a mammoth marketing campaign of their own to help the world wake up to their plight. It’s already begun with the bumblebee, so now what about a ‘Save our Spider’, ‘Cuddle a Caterpillar’ or ‘Beetlemania’ initiative?
We need to act now, if not for the sake of the insects, then for ourselves. Ultimately, if insects are wiped out, the resulting ecosystem collapse could herald our own extinction. If that is scaremongering, well, so be it. The next time I see an opportunity to ‘Adopt A Dung Beetle’ I’ll be the first to sign up.