the city center on August 9, 2018 in Berlin. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty
The largest ever assessment of long-term insect abundance found that there has been a nearly 25% decrease of land-dwelling bugs like ants, butterflies, and grasshoppers over the past 30 years—a revelation that inspired fresh demands for urgent international action to tackle the decades-long, human-caused “bugpocalypse.”
“Insect populations are like logs of wood that are pushed under water. They want to come up, while we keep pushing them further down. But we can reduce the pressure so they can rise again.”
—Roel van Klink,
lead author
The Guardian reported on the new assessment, published in the journal Science:
The analysis combined 166 long-term surveys from almost 1,700 sites and found that some species were bucking the overall downward trend. In particular, freshwater insects have been increasing by 11% each decade following action to clean up polluted rivers and lakes. However, this group represent only about 10% of insect species and do not pollinate crops.
Researchers said insects remained critically understudied in many regions, with little […]
Our biggest problem here locally is too many ants. We have a few large ones, but thousands of small ones that will not go away. Every day I smack the counter on which we prepare our food to kill them even though we use beach cleaner every day to clean off the counter. Outside we have butterflies and crickets and other insects, as well as Robins and other birds from time to time, but always a lot of Robins who live in our yard every year.