The Insect Armageddon (or, The Final War against Nature)

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This is the fifth of five blogs-slash-essays on how the breakdown of ecosystems around the planet will likely impact global civilization’s ability to feed all the many billions of people in the coming decades.

Of all the incontrovertible evidence detailing our assault on the biosphere, of ecosystems destroyed and creatures killed, the vanishing of insects may be the eeriest. It may also be the most definitive sign of the biosphere’s unraveling. Although the loss of the more charismatic big mammals like the tigers and rhinos has captured public attention for decades, it has been only recently that even the scientists have become aware that insects, too, have been disappearing. And like the mammals (and for that matter, all the other vertebrates, the birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish), it is the precipitous decline in invertebrate abundance at least as much as the loss of variety that is so troubling. Insect numbers and therefore their total biomass have plummeted in the past few decades.[i] And it is not just the pollinating bees or all those winsome butterflies that are disappearing. It’s the whole lot of them—ants, moths, wasps, beetles, dragonflies, damselflies, crickets, grasshoppers, katydids, leafhoppers, planthoppers, seed bugs, mosquitoes, as well as the avatars of our childhood summers, the bees, the butterflies, and lightning bugs.[ii]  

This startling development has been referred to as the Insect Armageddon or Insect Apocalypse, and, less theatrically, as the windshield phenomenon, because, as anyone who owned a car forty years ago will remember, windshield wipers and fluid were primarily used to clean the dead insects splattered across the glass, and the grill was always a gruesome collage of the local winged fauna. For motorcyclists it was worse. The joke was: how could one recognize a happy cyclist? By the bugs in his teeth, ha ha. That punchline would no longer make any comic sense. No matter where you are driving today, grills, windshields, and teeth remain free of crushed bug bodies. For the insects have quietly disappeared. Indeed, naturalists have noted the muted volume of their chatter (as well as of the birds, frogs, and all the other animals) in the forests and grasslands and all the human landscapes, coming to us like the soft roll of distant thunder and heralding a far deadlier Silent Spring than Rachel Carson ever imagined some sixty years ago.[iii]  

The empirical data support the general perception. Researchers have been monitoring insect assemblages and abundance for decades (if not centuries in some European countries), using various kinds of insect traps, beating sheets, and visual surveys. Around the world, insect declines are averaging one to two percent a year.[iv] It tends to be higher in Europe.[v] Whether the geographic differences are real or an artifact of Europe’s long history of cataloguing and studying insects is not yet known. However, studies in the rainforests of Puerto Rico and Costa Rica have also suggested significantly higher vanishing rates than the global averages.[vi]

The strange disappearance of insects is an astonishing geological event. Insects have been around for a very long time (some 475 million years), coming onto the scene about the same time as the land plants.[vii] They have since survived the last four of Earth’s great mass extinction events (that delineate the end of the Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous periods) and therefore prevailed through the other ten-or-so mass extinction events during that time, as well.[viii] The class Insecta now encompasses the greatest variety, number, and biomass of animals on the planet.[ix] Almost a million species have been classified (making up about three-quarters of all animal species described), and it is believed that millions more have yet to be discovered.[x] There are an estimated ten quintillion (ten to the nineteenth power, or 1019) of these little critters on the planet, occupying most every niche that exists, from the Antarctic glacial deserts to the Saharan dunes to the urban jungles, indicating a most profound ability to adapt to environmental circumstances. That these exceptionally hardy creatures are suddenly disappearing (downright instantaneous in geological terms) is perhaps the most conspicuous evidence that some unprecedented planetary event is underway.

Why insects are disappearing is really not such a mystery. Given our hostile takeover of the planet, which has involved—among many other things—the transmogrification of two continents’ worth of diverse wildlands into the homogeneity of farmlands and human settlements, it would be a surprise if, like the big wild animals that we can more easily observe and document as they dwindle into extinction, insect numbers were not also declining. Indeed, as the botanist Peter Raven and entomologist David Wagner noted, “it would be miraculous”.[xi] “To imagine,” they added, “… that an extra 6 billion people could find places to live and feed themselves without causing decreases in biodiversity defies reason.”[xii] And again not surprisingly, the pace of their demise began accelerating around 1950, the beginning of both the Great Acceleration and the Green Revolution, when humans pressed their footprint into overdrive.[xiii]

Agriculture, particularly industrial agriculture, has been the main driver of the insect Apocalypse.[xiv] Agriculture’s assault begins with the destruction of natural habitats, where it is not just about clearing the trees and draining the marshes, but in the process also exterminating most all the life forms that are integral to those forest and wetland ecosystems. More than two billion hectares of naturally biodiverse forests, wetlands, and grasslands have been destroyed for human purposes in the past century.[xv] Particularly alarming to naturalists has been the destruction of tropical forests, as these ecosystems are home to a disproportionate share of life’s diversity, including more than seventy percent of the insect species. Since 1950, we have eliminated about a fourth of all the planet’s tropical forests, mainly for crop and pasture, and by 2100 little if any is expected to exist.[xvi]

As the natural habitats were razed, how could the numbers and variety of wild animals not have also been destroyed? Where would they have run off to? In the Australian bushfires of 2019-2020—a megafire that, over the course of several months, burned at least twelve million hectares of forests and bush across the continent—more than a billion mammals, reptiles, and birds were killed, and another two billion faced starvation and predation.[xvii] How many of the smaller creatures perished in this disaster will never be known, but surely there were trillions of insects among them. That horrific event was but one small episode in what has amounted to the de facto genocide of our fellow creatures. 

Not all insect species have suffered from the human takeover of the planet. Some have fared quite well, of course. Locusts swarm the East African countryside, cockroaches overrun many of the world’s cities, and an array of pests feast on the buffet that we lay out for them in our farm fields. Each crop pest tends to occupy its own specific niche: the rice water weevil feeds on the roots and leaves of rice plants; from the inside, saw fly larvae devour the stems of wheat; spider mites suck the sap of the corn plant, while leaf beetles chew on the edges and tips of its leaves; and there are some four thousand kinds of aphids that collectively attack just about every plant grown on our farms and in our gardens. Although most insect species are either beneficial to us or innocuous, the small fraction that are pests scarf up an outsized portion—as much as fifteen percent—of human food crops that could have otherwise helped to feed the billions of hungry and malnourished people in the world.[xviii] To combat their fecundity and massive appetites, we have waged a brutal campaign of chemical warfare (as described in chapter seven). And, as in any war, the collateral damage has been obscene.[xix]

In the early 1990s, the pace of insect declines began quickening. Either there was a new enemy afoot, or perhaps we had crossed some biologic threshold.[xx] The evidence is presently with the former. The most likely culprits are the neonicotinoids, a class of neurotoxic insecticides first introduced in 1990 and considered to be among the most toxic pesticides ever synthesized.[xxi] Being water soluble, neonicotinoids lend themselves to various straight-forward delivery methods. They can be sprayed onto plants, poured on the soil near tree roots (called soil-drenching), injected directly into the trunk of a tree, or—most commonly—coated onto the seeds before planting.[xxii] In each case, the plants’ vascular system then transports the relatively small molecules throughout its tissues—roots, stems, leaves, flowers, pollen, and nectar. The insecticide is even in the water that exudes from the leaves’ pores, the stoma, in a process called guttation.[xxiii] Having quickly become the most commonly used insecticide in the world, the neonicotinoids are now regularly applied to hundreds of millions of hectares of croplands, lawns, golf courses, and forest stands in over 120 countries.[xxiv] Because only a tiny percent of the insecticide actually enters the desired crop (1.6 to 20 percent in the case of seed coating), and because they are water soluble and they persist for years, most of these synthetic chemicals accumulate in the soils, streams, lakes, and groundwater of the regions in which they are applied.[xxv]

This has set the conditions for large-scale and indiscriminate collateral damage. A review paper concluded that both neonicotinoids and fipronil (another potent and widely used neurotoxin, introduced in 1993) were “likely to have large-scale and wide-ranging negative biological and ecological impact on a wide range of non-target invertebrates in terrestrial, aquatic, marine and benthic habitats.”[xxvi] In the end, it is likely that the unintended casualties will far outnumber those of the targeted pests. Trees, for example, can be home to hundreds if not thousands of arthropod species, so that injecting them with a neonicotinoid to combat the hemlock wooly adelgid or the emerald ash borer (pests that destroy hemlocks and ash trees, respectively) will impact many nontargeted creatures.[xxvii] Neonicotinoids have been implicated in the sudden collapse of several bumble bee species across the United States as well as the Colony Collapse Disorder of honeybees first noted in 1999 in Europe, Canada, and the United States.[xxviii]

 Of course, when trying to establish cause-and-effect, terms like the “correlation of toxins and insect declines” and “likely impact” and “implicated in the deaths of” will not meet scientific standards of proof or win in the courtroom, but, when it comes to insects, that is about as certain as it gets. Insects are small, prolific, and hard to track. They fly about and may have large foraging areas, and they often exhibit fluctuations in their natural population cycles—sometimes, large irruptions and collapses—all of which complicate a researcher’s analysis.[xxix] Causality is further complicated when studies are taken out of the laboratory and placed in the field, where controlling for other relevant factors—like additional toxins, pathogens, and insects—is nearly impossible.[xxx] Despite these impediments, field and laboratory experiments have been able to determine that, when exposed to neonicotinoids, many insect orders that include the fireflies, dragonflies, mayflies, midges, bees, moths, and butterflies suffer nasty neurotoxic effects, like neural deformities during development, impaired brain metabolism, loss of smell and taste, memory loss, paralysis, and death.[xxxi]

The impacts reverberate up the food chain. In Japan, neonicotinoids applied in rice paddies are carried by streams to nearby lakes where they kill the crustacean zooplankton and other invertebrates, thereby starving the fish and eel who feed on them. In Lake Shinji, researchers have found that since 1993, when neonicotinoids were first introduced into Japanese watersheds there has been “… an 83% decrease in average zooplankton biomass in spring, causing the smelt harvest to collapse from 240 to 22 tons…”[xxxii] Bird populations have decreased by an average of 3.5 percent annually in areas where neonicotinoids are applied.[xxxiii] One creative study found neonicotinoids in all of the 617 sparrow feathers analyzed from 47 locations across the Swiss lowlands.[xxxiv] Concentrations were highest in birds caught near farmlands using the insecticide, but even the birds living on organic farms had measurable amounts. The authors noted, “Our large-scale survey highlights how ubiquitous neonicotinoid insecticides have become in agricultural habitats…” I would add that it also gives us some insight into how the various neonicotinoid molecules (such as imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, clothianidin) now permeate the entire biospheric web, forming—as a group of entomologists and ornithologists declared in 2009—“an invisible, widespread, toxic haze on land, in water and in the air…” Yet, despite this intercontinental chemical forcefield, pests still take an inordinate share of our pie.[xxxv]

Insecticides aren’t the only exterminators. Even the synthetic chemicals that don’t specifically target insects—such as herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers—are nevertheless lethal to them.[xxxvi] Perhaps the most unintended of consequences have been the effects of herbicides, which, although less toxic to insects than the other synthetic chemicals, are considered more fatal than even insecticides because they kill off their food source and habitats.[xxxvii] More than ninety percent of the corn, wheat, and cotton grown in the United States are genetically engineered to be herbicide-resistant, a trait that tends to encourage farmers to overapply herbicides in their age-old war against weeds.[xxxviii] But a few varieties of ‘superweeds’ quickly became resistant to most herbicides, so, as it turns out, the main casualties have been the weed-eating insects who had been benefiting the farmers.[xxxix]  

Climate change, too, is becoming an accelerating threat to many insect species, especially those in the tropics, as has been witnessed in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest, where the biomass of ground-foraging insects dropped ten to sixtyfold in a forty-year period due to rising temperatures.[xl] Just to be clear, that’s a 90 to 98 percent drop in numbers. The authors of this study reported that they also found, “… synchronous declines in the lizards, frogs, and birds that eat arthropods.”[xli] Climate change is an umbrella term for the innumerable ways that a warming planet can impact an ecosystem, from the timing of springtime to the immigration of non-native (invasive) species to unfamiliar extreme weather events like droughts, heatwaves, and hurricanes. All these have been implicated in the insect Apocalypse.[xlii]   

The demise of insects is a case of “death by a thousand cuts.”[xliii] They are being attacked from all directions at once. They are losing their habitats and their food sources; their immune systems have to deal with a cocktail of pesticides, the debilitating effects of rising temperatures, and the assault of invasive pathogens and parasites (viruses, fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and other insects); and there are the many stressors of climate change, of light pollution (a light source in nature usually has specific adaptive significance), and competition from invasive species.[xliv] It is believed that any number of these factors are combining synergistically to overwhelm the (until now) extraordinary resilience of insects.[xlv]

This sudden vanishing of insects is a geologically and biologically astonishing event for another reason, one that really gets to the heart of the matter and makes this event utterly terrifying: insects are profoundly embedded into the entirety of Life’s intricate web. As they go, so goes the neighborhood. Insect diversity exploded about a hundred million years ago with the rise of the angiosperms—the flowering plants that now include most species of plants, trees, and human food crops.[xlvi] Since then, the angiosperms and insects have co-evolved to create the spectacular variety of both, and so their futures are also deeply entwined.[xlvii] Insects are the principal pollinators of wild plants and the major agents for dispersing their seeds. And, because they are the main food source for a myriad of creatures, they are the key ingredient connecting much of the plant and animal kingdoms. By turning plant matter into protein and fat, insects transfer the plant’s magical photosynthetic products to the larger animals that feed on them.[xlviii] And then that matter and energy is moved up the food chain, as most every insect eater (spider, salmon, lizard, another insect) gets eaten by somebody bigger. Furthermore, as the little blue-collar workers of the natural world, insects have become involved in almost every ecosystem service that we and all of life depend upon, from breaking down the forest detritus and recycling nutrients to nourishing the soil and purifying water.[xlix] They are, in E.O. Wilson’s words, “the little things that run the world.”[l]

 So, their sudden vanishing is expected to profoundly impact that world. Significant declines in organisms that depend on them have already been reported. From a study in Britain and the Netherlands, for instance, researchers reported in the journal Science that they found “a causal connection between local extinctions of functionally linked plant and pollinator [insect] species.”[li] At the other end of the food chain, lizards, frogs, bats, and birds who prey on insects have suffered severe declines in their numbers, and it is conjectured that the worldwide crash in many vertebrate species is due in part to declines in insect abundance.[lii] European ornithologists have noted the emptying of the most common insectivorous birds from their countryside, the swallows, starlings, skylarks, meadow pipits, partridges, nightingales, and turtledoves.[liii] Over 600 million birds have disappeared in Europe since 1980.[liv]  In North America, almost three billion birds have disappeared since 1970.[lv] Likely, many of these animals are starving to death. The most vulnerable are the young in their roosts and nests who are awaiting the choosy morsels that their parents never bring them.

Should the insect Armageddon continue at pace (as it probably will, given that there have been no improvements in causal conditions), losses may soon cross critical thresholds. Long before the wholesale extinctions of insects, we will likely suffer blowback from what are called “functional extinctions.” As it turns out, the decline in a species’ abundance often causes greater damage to other species in the food web, often triggering an extinction cascade (killing up the food chain, for example), and destabilizing the entire ecosystem.[lvi] Tipping points for ecosystem failure have been associated with as little as thirty percent declines of a single species.[lvii] It takes only 36 years to reach that thirty percent threshold at a one percent annual loss, and 19 years at two percent. But entomologists are claiming forty-five percent declines in the past four decades not of just one species, but of whole assemblages of species—genera, families, and orders of insects.[lviii] The loss of insects is therefore proceeding at terrifyingly hypersonic speeds, even when compared to previous mass extinction events, providing further evidence that a sixth mass extinction is well underway. And, given the scale of the insect Armageddon, it would not be hyperbolic to suggest that we are facing the imminent unraveling of the entire biosphere.[lix]

So, how will the insect Apocalypse affect humans? That is, putting aside for the moment the nightmare scenario in which the vanishing of insects triggers a biospheric collapse (which would naturally include the extinction of humans), how might we—in an imaginary world otherwise unaffected by their absence—be impacted? Terribly, in a word. Insects are the principal pollinators of at least seventy-five percent of human food crops. Although insect-pollinated crops provide us ‘only’ thirty-five percent of our calories and forty percent of our nutrients, they supply most of our essential micronutrients, such as vitamins A, C, and B9 (folic acid), calcium, and the cancer-fighting antioxidants Lycopene, β-cryptoxanthin and β-tocopherol.[1] Economically, insect pollination has been valued at over $500 billion a year, worldwide, and, given the unrelenting scourge of malnutrition, their role in providing the majority of humanity’s micronutrients is invaluable. Insects are also by far the most important predators of other insects, including the pests that plague our fields worldwide.[lx] It has been estimated that, without insects serving as natural biological controls, global food losses would jump several-fold, as pests’ share of ‘the take’ could reach nearly forty percent.[lxi] By losing these most important natural allies, our (so far unsuccessful) efforts at achieving global food security will surely be further hobbled in the coming century.

Footnote

[1] Proportion provided by: vitamin A (>70%), vitamin C (90%), vitamin B9 (55%), calcium (58%), Lycopene (100%), and almost 100% of β-cryptoxanthin and β-tocopherol (van der Sluijs and Vaage, 2016).

ENDNOTES

[i] Dirzo et al. (2014), Forister et al. (2019), Raven  and Wagner (2021), Wagner et al. (2021).

[ii] Thomas et al. (2004), Schuch, Wesche, and Schaefer (2012), Dirzo et al. (2014), Van Lexmond et al. (2015), van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016) Hallmann et al. (2017), Vogel (2017), Forister et al. (2019), Harris, Rodenhouse, and Holmes (2019), Lewis et al. (2020), van Klink et al. (2020), Raven and Wagner (2021), Wagner et al. (2021).

[iii] See Vidal (2012), Krause (2013, 2020), Morrison et al. (2021).

[iv] Dirzo et al. (2014), Hallmann et al. (2017), Forister et al. (2019), Harris, Rodenhouse, and Holmes (2019), van Klink et al. (2020), Wagner et al. (2021).

[v] Thomas et al. (2004), Dirzo et al. (2014), Hallmann et al. (2017), Seibold et al. (2019).

[vi] Janzen and Hallwachs (2020), Lister and Garcia (2018).

[vii] 475 million—Raven and Wagner (2021).

[viii] Ward and Brownlee (2000:161).

[ix] Wilson (1987), Smithsonian (1996), Stork (2018).

[x] Wilson (1987), Smithsonian (1996), Stork (2018).

[xi] Raven and Wagner (2021).

[xii] Raven and Wagner (2021).

[xiii] Van Lexmond et al. (2015), Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys (2019), Raven and Wagner (2021).

[xiv] Dirzo et al. (2014), Van Lexmond et al. (2015), van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016), Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys (2019), Seibold et al. (2019), Raven and Wagner (2021), Outhweite et al. (2022).  

[xv] Daily (1995), Groombridge and Jenkins (2002), Foley et al. (2005), Schade and Pimentel (2010), Teluguntla et al. (2016), Potapov et al. (2021).

[xvi] Raven and Wagner (2021).

[xvii] Aljazeera (2020, July 28), RMIT ABC (2020, Jan 30).

[xviii] Dirzo et al. (2014).

[xix] Whitehorn et al. (2012), Easton and Goulson, (2013) Roessink et al. (2013), Van Dijk et al. (2013).

[xx] van Lexmond et al. (2015), van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016), Zattara and Aizen (2020).

[xxi] Van Lexmond et al. (2015), Frank and Tooker (2020).

[xxii] Cowles, R.S. (2010), van Lexmond et al. (2015), van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016).

[xxiii] Bonmatin et al. (2015), Van Lexmond et al. (2015), Frank and Tooker (2020).

[xxiv] van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016), Frank and Tooker (2020).

[xxv] van der Sluijs et al. (2013), Hallman et al. (2014), Van Lexmond et al. (2015), Frank and Tooker (2020), Pietrzak et al. (2020), Wagner et al. (2021).

[xxvi] Pisa et al. (2014).

[xxvii] Cowles (2010), Frank and Tooker (2020).

[xxviii] Colla and Packer (2008), Potts et al. (2010), Gill et al. (2012), Henry et al. (2012), Bonmatin et al. (2015), Van Lexmond et al. (2015), van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016), Wessler et al. (2016), Vogel (2017), Graves et al. (2020), Zattara and Aizen (2020).

[xxix] Montgomery et al. (2020).

[xxx] Vogel (2017).

[xxxi] van der Sluijs et al. (2013), Chagnon et al. (2014), Pisa et al. (2014), Van Lexmond et al. (2015), van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016), Wessler et al. (2016), Vogel (2017), Nakanishi et al. (2018), Pietrzak et al. (2020), Barmentlo et al. (2021), Knight et al. (2021).

[xxxii] Yamamuro et al. (2019).

[xxxiii] Hallman et al. (2014).

[xxxiv] Humann-Guilleminot et al. (2019).

[xxxv] Quote from the Appeal of Notre Dame de Londres, cited by Van Lexmond et al. (2015).

[xxxvi] van Lexmond et al. (2015), van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016), Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys (2019), Seibold et al. (2019).

[xxxvii] van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016).

[xxxviii] Benbrook (2012), Hoffman (2013), Seibold et al. (2019).

[xxxix] Superweeds—Brown (2021).

[xl] Dirzo et al. (2014), Lister and Garcia (2018), Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys (2019).

[xli] Dirzo et al. (2014), Lister and Garcia (2018), Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys (2019).

[xlii] Wagner et al. (2021).

[xliii] Wagner et al. (2021).

[xliv] van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016), Outhweite et al. (2022).

[xlv] Dirzo et al. (2014), Bonmatin et al. (2015) van Lexmond et al. (2015), Wagner et al. (2021), Outhweite et al. (2022).

[xlvi] Labandeira et al. (1994), van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016), Bao et al. (2019).

[xlvii] Labandeira et al. (1994).

[xlviii] Wagner et al. (2021).

[xlix] Chagnon et al. (2014), van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016), Jankielsohn, A. (2018), Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys (2019), Wagner et al. (2021).

[l] Wilson (1987).

[li] Biesmeijer et al. (2006).

[lii] Dirzo et al. (2014), Raven and Wagner (2021).

[liii] Van Lexmond et al. (2015), Barkham (2018), Lister and Garcia (2018), Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys (2019).

[liv] Lees et al. (2022).

[lv] Lees et al. (2022).

[lvi] Säterberg et al. (2013).

[lvii] Säterberg et al. (2013).

[lviii] Dirzo et al. (2014), Wagner et al. (2021).

[lix] Wilson (2006).

[lx] Dirzo et al. (2014), van der Sluijs and Vaage (2016), Jankielsohn (2018), Aizen et al. (2019).

[lxi] Oerke (2005).

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