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Goodbye, German Bugs

New study finds staggering falloff in insect population there

arda savasciogullari/Shutterstock

Well, this is not encouraging:

The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists.

Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.

The new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany but has implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture, the researchers said.

Scientists don’t know why this is happening, but they say it has nothing to do with the weather. Pesticides are suspected, but no data are yet available. More:

“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”

The research, published in the journal Plos One, is based on the work of dozens of amateur entomologists across Germany who began using strictly standardised ways of collecting insects in 1989.

Read the whole thing. 

Is this limited to Germany, or are other parts of the world seeing this too? From the scientific paper itself, this speculation that it could be more general, given that the insect traps were set in protected areas, in which insects ought to have thrived:

The widespread insect biomass decline is alarming, ever more so as all traps were placed in protected areas that are meant to preserve ecosystem functions and biodiversity. While the gradual decline of rare insect species has been known for quite some time (e.g. specialized butterflies [966]), our results illustrate an ongoing and rapid decline in total amount of airborne insects active in space and time. Agricultural intensification, including the disappearance of field margins and new crop protection methods has been associated with an overall decline of biodiversity in plants, insects, birds and other species in the current landscape [202767]. The major and hitherto unrecognized loss of insect biomass that we report here for protected areas, adds a new dimension to this discussion, because it must have cascading effects across trophic levels and numerous other ecosystem effects. There is an urgent need to uncover the causes of this decline, its geographical extent, and to understand the ramifications of the decline for ecosystems and ecosystem services.

It’s hardly news by now, but when I was a kid in the 1970s, the windows of our house at night were pockmarked by tree frogs eating the bugs drawn to the indoor light. Seriously, there would be ten or fifteen frogs on each window in our living room. It was so much fun to watch them eat the bugs.

Now, no frogs. There haven’t been tree frogs for a long time. I don’t know about bugs.

 

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