Press Gallery
Das dramatische globale Insektensterben hat gefährliche Auswirkungen auf alle anderen Spezies, inklusive uns Menschen.
Comment from the English-speaking world
One of the classic moments in the Simpsons comes when the venal TV anchorman Kent Brockman sees on his screen an ant crawling across a lens and assumes at once that this is ... a giant alien descending from space that will become one of “our new insect overlords”... The joke hinges on the idea that in real life ants are inconsequential compared with human beings. The world, we feel, could get on perfectly well without them...
...Insects form the greatest part of animal life on Earth, and almost every other kind of animal depends on them — directly or indirectly. They pollinate plants and nourish animals, especially birds. In turn, everything that relies on these plants or animals depends on the insects. And the whole intricate web of interdependent exploitation is collapsing, and has been for decades. We ourselves are part of this web, in the long run quite as much dependent as exploitative.
On the island of Puerto Rico, a rainforest ... shows a terrifying drop in the abundance and variety of insects . ... The same trend is apparent in German nature reserves, where the number of insects appears to have dropped by about 75%; and these are ... places deliberately preserved ... from human intervention. The collapse of insect life is obvious to anyone who looks in Britain... Car windscreens and headlights are no longer thickly speckled after any long journey.
The causes of this global decline seem to vary with latitude . ... In the temperate regions insect populations are more adaptable to fluctuations in temperature, but insects must contend with the mass use of pesticides across the bleak monocultures of industrial agriculture, as well as the generalised pollution of the air and water. In the rainforest, where the pattern of losses across species and over time shows that there must be some single vast factor acting on the whole ecosystem, it appears that the main driver is simply the climate catastrophe . ...
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