Humanity must save insects to save ourselves, leading scientist warns // 'The future of life on Earth lies in the balance' – a picture essay
“Insects are the glue
in nature and there is no doubt that both the [numbers] and diversity of
insects are declining,” said Prof Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, at the Norwegian
University of Life Sciences. “At some stage the whole fabric unravels and then
we will really see the consequences.”
On Monday, the largest
ever assessment of the health of nature was published and warned starkly that
the annihilation of wildlife is eroding the foundations of human civilisation.
The IPBES
report said: “Insect abundance has declined very rapidly in some places …
but the global extent of such declines is not known.” It said the available
evidence supports a “tentative” estimate that 10% of the 5.5m species of insect
thought to exist are threatened with extinction.
The food and water
humanity relies upon are underpinned by insects but Sverdrup-Thygeson’s new
book, Extraordinary
Insects, spends many of its pages on how wonderful and weird insects are.
“The first stage is to get people to appreciate these little creatures,” said
Sverdrup-Thygeson. Many appear to defy
the normal rules of life. Some fruit flies can be beheaded and live normally
for several days more, thanks to mini-brains in each joint. Then there are the
carpet beetles that can effectively reverse time, by reverting to younger
stages of development when food is scarce.
Others are bizarrely
constructed. Some butterflies have ears in their mouths, one has an eye on its
penis, while houseflies taste with their feet. Insect reproduction is also
exotic. The southern green shield bug can maintain sex for 10 days, while
another type of fruit fly produces sperm that are 20 times longer than its own
body. Some aphids, which can
reproduce without sex, produce babies that already themselves contain babies,
effectively giving birth to their children and grandchildren simultaneously.
There are also a lot of insects - more than a billion, billion individuals
alive today. “If you shared them out, there would be 200m insects for each
human,” said Sverdrup-Thygeson.
But for all their
abundance, insects are in trouble. “Global data suggests that while we humans
have doubled our population in the past 40 years, the number of insects has
been reduced by almost half – these are dramatic figures,” she said. Some researchers
warned in February that falling insect populations threaten a “catastrophic
collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, while recent studies from
Germany and Puerto
Rico have revealed plunging numbers over the last 25 to 35 years...read more:
Almost 600
conservation experts have signed the Call4Nature open letter written by
wildlife charity WWF, which is being published to coincide
with the IPBES report (see letter below).
Overfishing: “We are overfishing our oceans at an alarming
rate and choking them with plastic and other pollutants. If we want to see
healthy seas that will continue to provide us with food, we need to stop this
over-exploitation, protect our incredible marine environments and make
sustainable fishing the norm, as we see here.” Hugh
Fearnley-Whittingstall, chef and vice-president of Fauna and
Flora International.. see more:
