Truth or fiction?
If the rate of decline continues, could all insects really disappear within a century?
Are insects going extinct?
THE EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENON of an impending insect armageddon was first raised by scientists in a 2017 paper highlighting declines of flying insects in German nature reserves of 75 per cent over a 25-year period (Meet the Scientist, September 2018).
Then research published in early 2019 really set alarm bells clanging: “The conclusion is clear,” reported a study in Biological Conservation. “Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.”
But Dave Goulson, one of the UK’s leading insect experts and a vocal campaigner on the impact of agricultural pesticides on invertebrates, says this claim is over the top. “There is no way that every insect species is going extinct, unless we completely fry the planet in a nuclear war,” he says. “Tough, adaptable insects will be with us forever.”
That’s not to say there isn’t a serious problem. According to Goulson, the insects most at risk are the specialised ones that reproduce slowly, such as by only one generation a year: many species of British butterfly are a good example. “We could easily lose some of the most beautiful insects and some of the most useful ones, too,” Goulson says. He doesn’t just mean pollinators – many insects are food for birds, lizards, frogs and fish, while others do an important job feeding on and recycling dead animals.
One of the biggest problems is a lack of information. There are few long-term studies of insect populations, with that from Germany being one of the best-known. The UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, running since 1976, is, Goulson says, probably the best dataset for any insect group in the world.
“In general, it shows that generalist species have declined by about 40 per cent in that time, which is not as rapid as the German study, and more specialist butterflies are down by about 70 per cent.”
Despite the headlines, Dave Goulson doesn’t see any dramatic shifts in land management policy to avert the approaching apocalypse. “We are sleepwalking to catastrophe,” he says.
DAVE GOULSON is professor of biology at the University of Sussex.
There is no way every insect species is going extinct, unless we fry the planet in a nuclear war.