Newspapers have written a lot about tremendous drops in insect populations and their imminent extinction. With the climate changing before our eyes, mountain ecosystems moving to higher altitudes, the Arctic losing its ice cover, this was very clearly part of a vast and immediate problem. Or so I thought until I saw a headline which said: Insects are declining in India and we don’t even have data. Umm, if we don’t have data, how do we know? It was time to do a web search. The results were not exactly reassuring, but not harbingers of doom either.
Insect populations are definitely declining worldwide, and extremely rapidly in some places. But, as an article in The Atlantic said “The claim that insects will all be annihilated within the century is absurd … Indeed, insects of some sort are likely to be the last ones standing.” Last year the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity put together a special issue on the topic of rapid decline of insects, where many of the articles pointed out that declines have been seen in several insect species, but increase was clear in others. Climate change and direct human intervention upsets all kinds of balances in nature. An article (pay walled, unfortunately) set out a further program for study, opening with the sentences “Many insect species are under threat from the anthropogenic drivers of global change. There have been numerous well‐documented examples of insect population declines and extinctions in the scientific literature, but recent weaker studies making extreme claims of a global crisis have drawn widespread media coverage and brought unprecedented public attention. This spotlight might be a double‐edged sword if the veracity of alarmist insect decline statements do not stand up to close scrutiny.“
So I am reassured that I can continue to worry about the numbers of green jewel bugs (Chrysocorix stolii) as I photograph them.