The apocalypse of insects are here

The apocalypse of insects are here

Sune Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his younger son, enjoying the sun at an angle over the fields and woods near his home north of Copenhagen, when suddenly it occurred to him that something was wrong about this experience. Specifically, something was missing. It was summer. He was inside the country, moving quickly. But, oddly, he was not eating any insect.

For a moment, Riis was transported to his childhood on the Danish island of Lolland, no Baltic Sea. At that time, biking in the summer meant that he had to close his mouth to cross thick clouds of insects while riding, but, inevitably, he swallowed a bit anyway. When his parents took him for a drive, he remembered, car windshield was often spotted with so many carcasses of insects that was hardly possible to see through it. But all that seemed far away. He could not remember the last time I had to clean the bugs from the windshield; he even imagined, vaguely, if car manufacturers had invented a new coating to ward off insects. But this absence, now he realized with some alarm, He looked around him. Where have all these insects? And when? And why he had not noticed before?

Riis noted his son, running through the beautiful day, and was impressed by the melancholy thought that the childhood of his son would not have this particular experience of "eating" insects. Was, he assured me, a strange thing to feel nostalgic. But he could not shake the sense of loss. "I think it's very human to think that everything was better when you were a child", he said. "Maybe I did not like when I was cycling and had just eating all those bugs, but looking back, I think that is something that everyone should try. "

I met Riis, a teacher of Science and Mathematics High School, on a hot day in June. He was anxious for not having written his speech to the school's graduation ceremony would happen that night, but first he had a job to do. Your garage, he picked up a large network of insects, It was even a next intersection and stopped to secure the network at the car roof. Made of white mesh, the network ran the length of his car and was supported by a tent pole in front, next to a small removable pouch ago. Drivers who passed zigzagging twisted his neck to look. Riis looked at the parking spot nervously as he adjusted the straps of the contraption. "That is not 100% legal”, he said, "but I think, because science, it's all right."

Riis could not stop thinking about the missing insects. The more he learned, over their nostalgia gave way to concern. Insects are vital pollinators and recyclers of ecosystems and the base of food webs everywhere. Riis was not the only one to realize its decline. We US, Scientists have recently discovered that the population of monarch butterflies-fell 90% We last 20 years, a loss of 900 millions of individuals; the rusty bee (Bombus affinis), He was found at 28 state, down 87% in the same period. With other species less studied insects, a researcher told me butterflies: "All we can do is to wave our arms and say: 'There is more here!’”. Even so, the most disturbing thing was not the disappearance of certain species of insects; but the deeper concern, shared by Riis and many others, that a whole world of insects could be disappearing silently, loss of abundance that could change the planet unknown forms. "We noticed the losses", diz David Wagner, entomologist at the University of Connecticut, "It is the decrease we do not see", the firm.

As insects are discrete and difficult to track, the fear that there may be far fewer animals than before was more sense than documented. People noticed roaming channels, in their backyards or under the street lights at night - familiar places that have become vaguely empty. The feeling was so common that entomologists have developed a shorthand for it, named by how many people have begun to realize that they did not see many insects. They called phenomenon windshield.

To test what had been primarily a suspicion unfounded, Riis e 200 other Danes were spending the month of June wandering the back roads of his country in their cars equipped with makeshift system. They were part of a study conducted by the Natural History Museum of Denmark, a joint effort of the University of Copenhagen, the University of Aarhus and the State University of North Carolina. The networks replaced the windshield while Riis and the other volunteers roamed various habitats - urban areas, forests, agricultural areas, open terrain uncultivated and bathed - hoping to quantify the disorienting feeling that, as a set of study designers, "Thing of the past is missing in this".

When researchers began planning the study 2016, they were not sure if anyone would sign up to participate. But, when networks were ready, one paper from an obscure German Entomological Society had put the decline in focus on insects. The German study found that, measured simply by the weight, the overall abundance of flying insects in the German nature reserves decreased by 75% in only 27 years. If you notice the population summer peaks, It is a series of 82%.

Riis found out about the study by a group of his students in one of his class projects. They must have made some kind of mistake in your quote, he thought. But they did not. The study would quickly become, according to the site Altmetric, the sixth most discussed scientific article 2017. Headlines around the world warned of a "Armageddon insects".

A few days after announcing the insect collection project, the Natural History Museum of Denmark was refusing dozens of eager volunteers. It seemed that there were people like Riis everywhere, people who had noticed a change, but they did not know what to do with it. How something as fundamental as the insects in the sky just disappear? And what would the world be without them?

Anyone who has returned to a childhood place to find that everything somehow got smaller, You know that humans are not good at remembering the past accurately. This is especially true when it comes to changes in the natural world. It is impossible to maintain a fixed perspective, as Heraclitus noted there 2500 years: It is not the same river, but we are not the same people.

A study 1995, Peter H. Kahn e Batya Friedman, about how some children in Houston experienced pollution summarized our blindness: "In each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes this amount as standard. In fishing photos decades holding his achievements in Florida Keys, marine biologist Loren McClenachan found a perfect illustration of this phenomenon, which is often called "baseline shift". The fish became increasingly smaller, to the point where the prize catch was overshadowed by fish which in the past were stacked and ignored. But the smiles on the faces of the fishermen were the same size. The world never feels diminished, because we have become accustomed with the fall.

On the one hand, insects are the wildlife we ​​know more deeply, animals non-domesticated whose lives intersect more closely with our: spiders in the shower, ants at the picnic, ticks buried in the skin. Sometimes we feel we know them too well. In another sense, however, they are one of the greatest mysteries of our planet, a reminder of how little we know about what is happening in the world around us.

We named and described a million insect species, an incredible variety of thrips (order Thysanoptera), earwigs, armies of ants lion, Trichoptera and Cercopoideas and other huge families of insects that most of us do not know name. (Technically, the word "insect" applies only to the order Hemiptera, also known as true bugs, species have tubular piercing and sucking mouth to - and there are even 80.000 varieties named them). Even those we think we know well, we are wrong: exist 12 thousand kinds of ants, almost 20 thousand varieties of bees and an average of 400 thousand species of beetles, so that the geneticist JBS Haldane reportedly joked that God must have an excessive affection for them. A little healthy soil, thirty square centimeters wide and five centimeters deep, It can easily be home to 200 unique species of mites, each one, presumably, with a subtly different work. nevertheless, Entomologists estimate that all this amazing variety, absurd and little studied is perhaps only 20% the real diversity of insects on our planet - there are millions and millions of species that are totally unknown to science.

With such abundance, It is very likely to have never occurred to most of the past entomologists their numerous subjects could decrease. As they devoted themselves to the study of life cycles and taxonomy of the species that fascinated, few thought to measure or register something as boring as their number. Besides, controlling the amount is slow work, tedious and unglamorous: You set and check traps, wait years or decades for your data is meaningful, dealing with basic issues damning rather than more sophisticated questions. And who would pay for it? Most of the academic funding is short term, but when you are interested in is an invisible generational shift, says Dave Goulson, a Sussex University entomologist, "A three year monitoring program is not good for anyone". This is especially true for insect populations, which are naturally variable, with large and obscure trends that fluctuate from one year to the other.

When entomologists have begun to realize and investigate the decline of insects, they lamented the absence of solid information from the past to substantiate your gift experience. "We see a hundred and something we think we are good", says Wagner, "But what if there was 100 thousand two generations ago?". Rob Dunn, ecologist at the State University of North Carolina who helped design the network experiment in Denmark, recently surveyed studies showing the effect of pesticide spraying on the amount of insects that live in the nearby forests. He was surprised to find that there were no such studies. "We do not know really basic questions", he said. "It seems that, somehow, gigantically we fail collectively ".

If entomologists had no data, they had were some very troubling clues. Along the impression that they were seeing fewer insects in their own bottles and networks while doing outdoor experiments - a specific windshield phenomenon for the types of people who had bottles and insect nets - had decreased studies in chain well studied insects, including various types of bees, moths, butterflies and beetles. In Britain, from 30% a 60% species found in decreasing ranges. major trends were more difficult to define, although a review of 2014 the published science attempt to quantify these declines summarizing the findings of existing studies and found that most of the monitored species was declining, average, 45%.

Entomologists also know that climate change and the general degradation of the global habitat is bad news for biodiversity in general, and that insects are dealing with the challenges posed by herbicides and pesticides, and the effects of the loss of meadows, forests and even stains the relentless expansion of human spaces. There were studies of other species, best understood, They are suggesting that the insects associated with them could also be slowing. People who have studied fish found that the fish had fewer larvae to eat. Ornithologists continued discovering that birds rely on insects to eat were in trouble: eight out of ten partridges was taken from the French farmland; 50 is 80 percent decline, respectively, for nightingales and turtledoves. Half of all land birds in Europe disappeared in just three decades. At first, many scientists assumed that the family responsible for habitat destruction was in action, but then they began to wonder if the birds could simply be starving. in Denmark, an ornithologist named Anders Tottrup was who had the idea of ​​turning cars trackers insects to study the effect of the windshield after realizing it rollers, little owls, ogéas eaters and bees - all the birds that remain large insects, as beetles and dragonflies - had disappeared abruptly landscape.

The signs were certainly alarming, but they were only signs, not enough to justify major pronouncements on the health of insects as a whole or on what might be causing a general decline among species. "There are no quantitative data on insects, so this is just a hypothesis ", explicou Hans de Kroon, ecologist at the University Radboud, in the Netherlands - not the kind of language that sends people to the trenches.

Then came the German study. Scientists are still cautious about what the results may mean for other regions of the world. But the study produced exactly the kind of longitudinal data they sought, and it was not specific to only one type of insect. The numbers were glaring, indicating a vast impoverishment of an entire universe of insects, even in protected areas where insects should be under less stress. The speed and scale of the drop were shocking even to entomologists who were already anxious about bees or fireflies or cleaning the windshields of cars.

The results were surprising in another way also. The long-term information about the abundance of insects, the kind that no one really thought there, not appeared in a prestigious journal and did not come from scientists affiliated to universities, but in a little society of insect enthusiasts based on the modest German town of Krefeld.

Krefeld is a half hour drive starting from Düsseldorf, near the western shore of Reno. It is a city of brick houses and flower gardens and Stadtwald - a municipal park and forest - where paddle boats floating on a lake, umbrellas shade and a beer garden (I could not help but notice) the afternoon light through the trees illuminate insect swarms dancing.

Near the center of the historic town, a printed notice on paper, not much bigger than a business card, identifies the company's headquarters whose research caused so much commotion. When it was founded, in 1905, the company worked another building, which was destroyed when the British bombed the city during World War II (at the time the bombs fell, members had moved their precious records and insect collections, some of which dated back to the decade of 1860, to an underground bunker). Nowadays, the company uses its over 500 m² of the building of an old school three floors as storage space. Ask a visit to the collections, and you will hear phrases like "This whole room is Lepidoptera", referring to an old stuffed classroom with what I imagined to be shelves of books, but are numerous frames wooden butterflies and moths, in an even larger room, "All bee here was collected before the Second World War, from 1880 a 1930”; is, when opening a drawer full of Halictidae Family bees, "This is a new collection, only has 30 years".

On the shelves that house books, clearly told 31 volumes clearly well used the collection "Beetles of Central Europe". A book of 395 pages cataloged specimens of wasp spider - where they were collected, where they were stored - the Western Palearctic indicating "1948-2008" on the cover. I asked my guide, a member of the company named Martin Sorg, it was one of the main authors of the article, if these dates reflect when the specimens were collected. "Not", said Sorg, "Was the time that the author needed for this job."

Sorrow, winding their own cigarettes, wear glasses John Lennon, whose gray hair passes over his shoulders, It is not a casual kind when it comes to his work with insects. And his work with insects is really all he wants to talk. "We think details about declines of nature and biodiversity are important, no details on entomologists stories of life ", Sorg said after he and Werner Stenmans, a member of the company whose name appeared alongside Sorg in the newspaper 2017, They dismissed my questions about their professions and jobs outside research. Remembering an article that focused on him as a person, Sorg did not want to talk about what attracted him to entomology as a child, or even what it was about certain types of wasps that had made him want to devote so much of his life to study them. "We usually give life stories when someone is dead", he said.

There was a reason for caution. Members of society do not like to see described, repeatedly, in news, as "amateurs". They believe it is a framework that reflects a very narrow understanding of what it means to be an expert or even a scientist - what it is to be a student of the natural world.

Amateurs have long provide much of barely-tailored knowledge we have about the nature. Those studies of bees and butterflies? Most rely on mass mobilization of volunteers willing to walk through narrow places and counting insects, every two weeks or every year, year after year. The frightening figures on the bird declines were also gathered in this way, although birds can be difficult to identify, volunteers often need to learn to identify them by their sounds. Britain, which has a particularly strong tradition of amateur naturalism, It has the best-studied insects in the world. Although as technologically advanced as we are, the natural world is still a very big place and complex, and the best way to learn about what is happening is that many people spend a lot of time watching him. The Latin root of the word "amateur" is, after all, the word "lover".

Some of these citizen scientists are true beginners, clinging to guides on field visits; others, driven by their own passion and following a long tradition of naturalism "amateur", They are far from novices. Think in Victorian England with their butterfly nets and curio cabinets; de Vladimir Nabokov, whose theories on the development of blue butterfly Polyommatus were ignored until proved correct by DNA testing over 30 years after his death; the young Charles Darwin, finishing their classes in Cambridge earlier to collect beetles in Wicken Fen and once putting a live beetle in his mouth, because his hands were already full of other insects.

Society of Krefeld run by volunteers and many members have other jobs in unrelated fields, but they also have a huge depth of knowledge about insects, accumulated through years of what others may consider obsessive attention. Some study the ecology and evolutionary taxonomy of your favorite species and map their populations or create them to study their life stories. All they improve their identification skills among species to build their own collections of insects carefully marked and labeled, as those that fill the company's storage rooms. Sorg that estimou, of 63 society members, a third is formed at universities in courses such as biology or earth sciences. another third, he said, It is "highly specialized and highly qualified, but never visited the university ", while the remaining third are amateurs who are still in the process of becoming true entomologists: "Some of them may also have a diploma. university, but in our opinion, they are beginners ".

The projects of the members of society often involved creating malaise traps, networks seem tents and flying insects in ethanol bottles. Because of the scientific society standards, members followed certain procedures: always wore identical traps, sewn from a model used for the first time in 1982 (Sorg showed me the original model made of kraft paper with great solemnity). They always put the traps in the same places (before the GPS, this meant a meticulous process of triangulation with surveillance equipment, "Our margin of error should be only a few centimeters", secured Sorg). They save everything that capture, regardless of what the main purpose of the experiment (the company bought so much ethanol that attracted the attention of a narcotics unit in the country).

These insects jars were gathered in thousands of boxes, who are now crammed into that they were in the school office top. When members of society, as entomologists elsewhere, They began to realize that they were seeing fewer insects, They had something against which to measure their concerns.

"We do not throw away anything, we store everything ", he explained Sorg, "This gives us today the possibility of going back in time".

In 2013, entomologists from Krefeld confirmed that the total number of insects captured in a nature reserve was almost 80% lower than in the same place 1989. They had obtained samples from other sites, analyzed old data sets and found similar declines: Where 30 years before, they often needed a liter bottle for a catch of week, is now a half-liter bottle was usually enough. But it would be necessary that even highly trained entomologists years of painstaking work to identify all the insects in bottles. Like this, the company used a standardized method for weighing insects in alcohol, which had a powerful story simply showing how the total mass of insects decreased over time. "A decline of this mixture", these grief, "It is something very different from the decline of only a few species".

"We noticed losses, It is the reduction that we do not see "
The company collaborated with De Kroon and other scientists at Radboud University, In Holland, who made a data trend analysis that provided Krefeld, controlling things like the effects of nearby plants, climate and forest cover on the fluctuations in insect populations. The final study examined 63 nature reserves, representing almost 17 thousand days of sampling, and found consistent declines in all types of habitat they sampled. this suggested, the authors wrote, "That are not only vulnerable species, but the community of flying insects as a whole that has been decimated in recent decades ".

For some scientists, the study has created a moment of evaluation. "Scientists thought these data were very boring", knee Dunn. "But they found beautiful and loved. They were the ones who watched Earth for all of us. "

The current global loss of biodiversity is popularly known as the Sixth Extinction: the sixth time in world history that a large number of species disappeared in an abnormally rapid succession, this time caused not by asteroids or ice ages, but by humans. When we think about losing biodiversity, we tend to think in the last northern white rhinos protected by armed guards and polar bears on ice floes smaller and smaller. Extinction is a visceral tragedy, universally understood: there is no turning back. The guilt of leaving a single species disappear is eternal.

But extinction is not the only tragedy that we are living. What talk about the species that still survive, but only as a shadow of what were once? Em The Once and Future World, journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from the past centuries that indicate what has just been lost: "In the North Atlantic, a school of cod prevents the passage of a major in the ocean; Kids Sydney, in Australia, the captain of a ship sails from noon until sunset, passing sperm groups as far as the eye can. ... The pioneers Pacific complain to the authorities that threaten salmon splashing turn their canoes. "There were reports of lions in southern France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that used to take three days to fly over certain place so great, is 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for each one that is there now. "These are not visions of some ancient era of fire and ice", MacKinnon writes. "We're talking about things seen by human eyes, remembered in human memory. "

What we are losing is not only part of the biodiversity of diversity, Besides more bio: life aplenty. As I was writing this article, Scientists have found that the largest colony of king penguins in the world decreased 88% in 35 years and over 97% the bluefin tuna that ever lived in the ocean is gone. Sophie the Giraffe number of toys sold in France in a single year is nine times the number of all the giraffes who still live in Africa.

Find safety in the survival of some symbolic standard-bearers ignores the value of plenty, a natural world that thrives on wealth, complexity and interaction. Tigers still exist, for example, but it does not change the fact that 93% the land where they lived now have tigers. This is important for more than romantic reasons: large animals, especially top predators such as tigers, ecosystems connect to each other and move power and resources between them simply walking, eating, defecating and dying (the ocean depths, sunken carcasses of whales form the basis of entire ecosystems in poor places in nutrients). A result of their loss is what is known as a trophic cascade, the scrolling of an ecosystem as tissue growth and collapse of attached populations and different levels of chain
food that no longer support. These places are more empty, impoverished thousand subtle ways.

Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (unlike the more familiar numerical extinction). functionally extinct animals and plants are still present, but they are not prevalent enough to affect the functioning of an ecosystem. Some put it as the extinction of a species not, but all previous interactions with the environment - an extinction dispersion, predation and pollination of seeds and all other ecological functions that an animal already had, which can be devastating even if some individuals still persists. The more interactions are lost, more disordered the ecosystem becomes. An article 2013 in Nature, that shaped both natural food webs as computer-generated, suggested that a loss of up 30% the abundance of a species can be as destabilizing than other species start to be fully, numerically extinct - in fact, in 80% time was one secondarily affected creature who was the first to disappear. A famous real-world example of this type of cascade comes to sea otters. When they were almost exterminated in the North Pacific, their prey, sea ​​urchins, increased both in number eventually decimate kelp forests, transforming an environment rich in sterile, possibly contributing to numerical extinctions, notably the dugong Steller.

Conservation tend to focus on rare and endangered species, but are the common species, precisely because of its abundance, that feed the living systems of our planet. Most species is not common, but in many groups of animals most people - about 80% them - belong to common species. As the slow change of the arrival of dusk, their declines may be difficult to see. white vultures were almost disappeared from India before there was widespread awareness of its future disappearance. Describing this phenomenon in BioScience magazine, Kevin Gaston, professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote: "Humans seem innately better able to detect the complete loss of an environmental feature of your progressive change".

Apart from extinction (the complete loss of a kind) and stripping (a localized extinction), scientists now speak of defaunation: the loss of individuals, the loss of abundance, the loss of absolute animality of a place. In an article 2014 the magazine Science, researchers have argued that the word should become so familiar and influential as the concept of deforestation. In 2017, another article reported that the highest population losses and reach extended even species considered at low risk of extinction. They predicted "negative consequences cascade in ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustain civilization" and the authors offered another term for the widespread loss of wild fauna of the world: "Biological annihilation".

Estima-se that, since 1970, various wild land animal populations Earth lost, average, 60% of its members. Concentrating on the category with which we relate more, mammals, scientists believe that for every six wild creatures that once ate, They were buried and created their puppies, only one remains. What we have instead is ourselves. One study published this year in the journal Proceedings, the National Academy of Sciences, found out that, if you consider the weight in the world's mammals, 96% this biomass are human beings and cattle, only 4% are wild animals.

We started talking about living in the Anthropocene, a world shaped by human. but E.O. Wilson, the naturalist and prophet of environmental degradation, He suggested another name: a Eremocine, the era of solitude.

Wilson began his career as an entomologist taxonomic, studying ants. Insects - as far as you can get the charismatic megafauna - are not what we usually imagine when we talk about biodiversity. However, are, in the words of Wilson, "The little things that govern the natural world". It literally means. Insects are a case study in the invisible importance of common.

Scientists have tried to calculate the benefits that insects provide simply by living their lives in large numbers. Trillions of bugs flying flower in bloom pollinate about three-quarters of our food crops, a service that is worth about 500 billion dollars a year (Not to mention the 80% of wild plants, the foundation blocks of life everywhere, that depend on insects for pollination). If monetary calculations like this seem odd, Vale considers the Maoxian in China, where shortage of pollinating insects has led farmers to employ human workers, at a cost of up to 19 dollars per worker per day, to replace the bees. Each person covers five to ten trees per day, pollinating apple blossoms hand.

By eating and eaten beings, insects transform the proteins in plants and stimulate the growth of all the countless species - including freshwater fish, and most birds - that depend on them for food, not to mention all the creatures that eat these creatures. We care about saving the bear-gray, says insect ecologist Scott Hoffman Black, but where it would be without the bee pollinates berries eating or flies that feed the salmon? Where, by the way, would we?

Insects are vital to the breakdown that keeps circulating nutrients, healthy soil, the growth of plants and ecosystems functioning. This role is virtually invisible, until suddenly it is not. After entering cattle in Australia at the turn of the century 19, the settlers soon found themselves overwhelmed by the problem of your stool: For some reason, the cow dung heaps took months or even years to decompose. The cows refused to eat near the stench, demanding more and more land for grazing, and so many flies were created in the cells that the country was famous for funny hats that workers used to keep them at bay. It was only in 1951 a visitor entomologist realized what was wrong: local insects, that they have evolved to eat more fibrous residue marsupials, They could not cope with the cow dung. We 25 next years, imports, quarantine and the release of dozens of species of beetles have become a national priority. And that was just a niche not filled (We US, the dung beetles save about 380 million a year for farmers). Just we do not know everything that insects do. Only about 2% invertebrate species have been studied enough to estimate whether they are endangered, regardless of the dangers that can represent the extinction.

When asked to describe what would happen if the insects were to disappear completely, scientists find words like chaos, collapse and Armageddon. Wagner, entomologist at the University of Connecticut, It describes a world without flowers with silent forests, a world of dung and old leaves and rotting carcasses piling up in cities and roads, a world of "collapse or deterioration, erosion and loss that would spread ecosystem "- a spiral that would reach from predators to plants. IT'S THE. Wilson wrote about how it would be a world free of insects, a place where most land plants and animals become extinct; where fungi explode, for a while, thriving with death and decay and where "the human species survives, able to use grain pollinated by the wind and the sea fishing ", despite the famine and resource war. "Clinging to survival in a devastated world and stuck in an age of ecological darkness", he adds, "Survivors would pray for the return of weed and insect herbs".

But the crux of the windshield phenomenon, why the suspicion of change is so scary, It is that the insects would not have to disappear completely so that we felt we lost for reasons beyond the nostalgia. In October, an entomologist sent me an email with the subject line: “Santo [expletivo]!"And an attachment: a new study out of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he called "Krefeld comes to Puerto Rico". The study included data from the years 1970 and early 2010, when a tropical ecologist named Brad Lister returned to the rain forest where he had studied lizards - and, crucially, their prey - 40 years before. Lister put sticky traps and swept the leaves in the same places he had in years 70, but this time he and his co-author, Andres Garcia, took very, much less species: 10 a 60 arthropods times less than before (It is easy to read that number as 60% less, but is 60 times lower: where once he took 473 milligrams of insects, Lister was now picking up just eight milligrams). "It was devastating", Lists me these. But even more frightening were the ways in which the losses already moved in the ecosystem, with serious declines in the number of lizards, birds and frogs. The newspaper reported a "trophic cascade from the bottom up and the consequent collapse of the food chain of the forest". The Lister inbox filled up quickly with other scientists messages, especially people who study soil invertebrates, saying they were seeing equally frightening falls. Even after his terrible discoveries, Lister found the shocking loss: "I did not even know of the worm crisis!"

Nature is resilient, but we are forcing her to such extremes that will eventually cause the collapse of the system
The weird, says Lister, is that, however disconcerting to be, all declines that it still would be documented basically invisible to the average person who walked through the rainforest Luquillo. On his last visit, the forest still felt "timeless" and "ghostly", with "waterfalls and flower carpets". You'd have to be an expert to realize what was missing. But he expects losses lead to forest to a tipping point, after which "there is a sudden and dramatic loss of rainforests system", and changes will become obvious to anyone. The place he loves will become unrecognizable.

The insects in the forest Lister studied were not dealing with pesticides or habitat loss, the two problems for which the Krefeld article pointed. Instead, Lister declares its decline to climate change, which have increased temperatures Luquillo two degrees Celsius since the first sampling did Lister. Previous research has suggested that tropical insects would be unusually sensitive to temperature changes; in November, scientists who underwent laboratory beetles to a heatwave reported that the rise in temperature made them significantly less fertile. Other scientists wonder if can be a drought-induced climate or possibly invasive rats or simply "lingchi" - a confluence of many types of changes in the places where insects thrive.

Like other species, the insects are responding to what Chris Thomas, an insect ecologist at the University of York, called "changing the world": not just a changing climate, but also the overall conversion, via urbanization, agricultural intensification and so on, natural spaces for humans, with fewer resources "to spare" for non-human creatures live. The resources that remain are often contaminated. Hans de Kroon characterizes the lives of many modern insects trying to survive in a small oasis to another, but as "a desert in the middle, and at worst it is a poisonous desert ". Of particular concern are the neonicotinoids, neurotoxins that were thought to affect only treated crops, but eventually accumulate in the landscape and be consumed by all kinds of insects, not just those who are targeted. People talk about the "loss" of bees to the disorder of colony collapse, and this seems to be the right word: the affected hives are not full of dead bees, but simply mysteriously empty. One of the main theories is that exposure to neurotoxins leaves bees unable to find their way home. Even the hives exposed to low levels of neonicotinoids showed collect less pollen., produce fewer eggs and less queens. Some recent studies have found that bees do better in cities than in the interior supposed.

The diversity of insects means that some will be able to survive in new environments, some thrive (plenty cuts both ways: agricultural monocultures, where only one type of plant grows, allows some pests reach population levels ever would reach in nature ) and some, in search of food and shelter in a world nothing like what was allocated, fail. Although we need more data to better understand the reasons or mechanisms behind the ups and downs, Thomas says that "the average of all species is still a decline".

From the study of Krefeld, researchers began to look for other forgotten repositories of information that can provide windows into the past. Some of the Radboud researchers analyzed long-term data, entomological societies belonging to Dutch, on beetles and moths in certain reserves; they found significant drops (72%, 54%) that mirrored those of Krefeld. Roel van Klink, researcher at the German Center for Integrated Research in Biodiversity, told me that before Krefeld, he, like most entomologists, never before been interested biomass. Now you are looking for historical data - many of which began as studies of agricultural pests, as a study of locusts decades in Kansas - which could help create a more complete picture of what is going on with creatures that are abundant and endangered. So far, he found forgotten data 140 old data sets for 1500 sites that could be remostrados.

We US, one of the few sets of long-term data on the abundance of insects come from Arthur Shapiro work, an entomologist at the University of California, I Davis. In 1972, he started walking in the Central Valley and the hills, counting butterflies. He planned to do a study on how short-term climatic variations affected the butterfly populations. But the longer he experienced, more valuable your data became, providing a signal through the noise of the ups and downs seasonal. "And here I am in year number 46", he said, almost half a century of work five days a week, from late spring until late fall, watching butterflies. At that time, he watched the decline in overall numbers and saw some species that used to be everywhere - even species that "everyone looked to be less important" only a few decades - virtually disappeared. Shapiro believes that the declines in the level of Krefeld are probably going around the world. "But, Sure, I do not stop around the world ", he added. "I cover the highway I-80."

There is also new efforts to establish more kind of insect monitoring schemes that researchers wish they existed decades ago, so that our current level of fall, at least, is parsed. One is a pilot project in Germany similar to the study of Danish cars. To analyze what is flagged, the researchers resorted to volunteer naturalists, amateurs similar to Krefeld, with enough knowledge to be able to understand what they are seeing. "These are not easy species to identify", diz Aletta Bonn, the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, who is overseeing the project (the skills needed for the job "are really extreme", knee Dunn. "These people train for decades with other amateurs to identify beetles based on their genitalia"). Bond would like to pay the volunteers for their experience, she says, but funding has not reached crisis. That did not stop the "amateurs" were willing to help: "They said: 'We're just curious about what's inside, we would like to have samples' ".

Goulson says the European tradition of amateur naturalism may explain why so many of the clues to the decline in insect biodiversity originate there (The Tottrup design for network study of cars in Denmark, for example, It was adapted from a hobbyist invention dedicated to collecting beetles). As much as we know about the status of European insects, we know much less about other parts of the world. "We would not know anything if it was not for them", the so-called amateurs, I said Goulson. "We would be entirely relying on the fact that there are no insects on the windshield".

Thomas believes that this naturalistic tradition is also because Europe is acting much faster than other places - for example, the United States - to address the decline of insects: interest leads to tracking, which leads to awareness, which leads to concern, that leads to action. Since the data came from Krefeld, there were hearings on the insect Biodiversity protection in the German Bundestag and the European Parliament. The EU member states voted in favor of the ban on neonicotinoid pesticides and began to invest in additional studies of how abundance is changing, what is causing these changes and what can be done. When I knocked on the office door of Kroon, Radboud University, the Dutch city of Nijmegen, he was looking at some pictures of another meeting he had that day: Willem Alexander, the king of the Netherlands, He made a tour of the city's efforts to make its river a friendlier habitat for insects.

However, the decline derivatives insects require much more than that. The European Union has already had some measures to help pollinators - including stricter regulation of pesticides than the United States and pay farmers to create insect habitats leaving fields fallow and allowing wild woods stay next to the cultivation - but insect populations have fallen anyway. New reports claim that national governments collaborate; for more creative approaches, as the integration of insect habitats in road design, transmission lines, railways and other infrastructure; is, as always, for further study. The necessary changes, as well as the causes, can be profound. "It's just another indication that we are destroying the life support system of the planet", Lister says about the study of Puerto Rico. "Nature is tough, but we are pushing it to such extremes that eventually cause the collapse of the system. "

Scientists hope that insects have a chance to incorporate this resilience. While the tigers tend to give birth to three or four cubs at a time, a moth-ghost in Australia was putting on record 29.100 eggs at once and she still had 15 thousand in their ovaries. The fruitful abundance that is unique feature of insects should enable them to recover, but only if they are given the space and opportunity to do so.

"It's a debate that we need urgently", says Goulson. "If we lose insects, life on earth will be ... "he stopped, pausing for what seemed a long time.

in Denmark, zigzag Sune Boye Riis with your network drive took apart a little forest, some suburban lawns, some hedges and a Christmas tree farm. The closest thing to a meadow which we passed was a major military property, where the grass had grown tall, golden. Riis had been instructed not to drive too fast, then the traffic receded behind us and some people began to honk. "Good,"Riis these, "Well done to support the science." After three kilometers, he turned and headed back to the beginning. Your windshield remained comically clean.

Riis has four friends who were also participating in the study. They had a bet between them: who would be one that would take the biggest insect? "I'm back", these Riis. "A drone is in the lead." And his biggest catch? "A fly. And not even a big fly ".

At the end of its path, Riis stopped at another roadside point, burst the net and took a small pouch located at the tip. some volunteers, captivated by what the study revealed about the world around you, asked the bags organizers of extra samples, so they could make more samples on their own. Some even asked if they could buy any car apparatus. Riis, However, contented in the mesh peer through, within which it could make a series of tiny black dots.

There was also a single butterfly, white and delicate wings. Riis thought the bet with your friends, for which the meaning of greatness had not been set. He wondered if it could be considered. What gives value to a creature?

"It is the weight?", he asked, looking at the butterfly. In large bag, looked small and sad and lonely. "Or is grace?"

De Brooke Jarvis.
Originally published by The New York Times Magazine:
“The Insect Apocalypse is Here”
02/12/2018

Translated by Amanda Kaster
09/12/2018

See the original article in the New York Times this link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html?action=click&module=Top+Stories&pgtype=Homepage&fbclid=IwAR2Ih1EgAMnjknF2SZtRQPkAU2LmZ-WcJTLgnM-UK2KOIdv_wU_8MF762os