A case for creepy crawlies
Issue 142 - 7 June 2023 (7-min read)
There’s a swarm of gnats hovering over the fruit bowl in our kitchen, a bee hit the window not too long ago and I often find dead flies behind my recipe notebooks in the kitchen. It’s hard to believe if you only look at the number of creepy crawlies in our apartment but the insect population is on the decline and, apparently, that’s bad news.
This week, The Global Tiller hunts for the reasons why we may be finding fewer and fewer insects in our houses and our gardens. Why is this a cause for alarm and is there a way for us to reverse the trend? Let’s dig in.
As much of a pest as they are (pun intended), bugs are an essential element in our natural ecosystem and it is worrying how fast their populations are dying. My parents tell me how easy it was for them to spot fireflies and red velvet mites in the bushes in Karachi especially after a monsoon shower. In the Karachi that I grew up in, I never saw these insects and who knows how many more.
That’s an important caveat to bear in mind when it comes to insects. We simply don’t know how many kinds of insects there are. In terms of diversity, insects are unrivalled, representing two-thirds of the world’s more than 1.5 million documented animal species with millions more bugs likely still undiscovered, scientists say.
So it is quite likely that many species of insects have already gone extinct even before humans had a chance to meet them. Yet, from the ones we know, the decline is alarming. The global insect population is declining at an unprecedented rate of up to 2% per year. In 2019, Biological Conservation reported that 40% of all insects species are declining globally and that a third of them are endangered.
Given how hard it is to monitor insect populations, two organisations in the United Kingdom asked members of the public last year to count the number of insects splatted against their vehicle number plates, and compared this to a similar study from 2004. Their findings revealed that UK’s flying insect population has declined by as much as 60% in the last 20 years.
But it’s not all bad news — not all insects are declining so quickly. Some are even flourishing. And most important, researchers say, there’s hope for keeping our planet buzzing with its most abundant and diverse creatures. According to a University of Connecticut entomologist David Wagner, the gulf fritillary, generally found in southern portions of the US, Mexico, and Central America, is now flourishing in California because people there cultivate its host, the passion vine, a popular ornamental plant. Even the monarch butterfly, whose extinction was cause for panic a few years ago, has done better than expected.
Nevertheless, these tiny critters are impacted by human action — deforestation, pesticide use, artificial light pollution and climate change. Even if humans are driving them away, it is us humans who need them the most.
Environmental writer Oliver Milman says human beings would be in big trouble without insects because insects play critical roles in pollinating plants we eat, breaking down waste in forest soil and forming the base of a food chain that other, larger animals — including humans — rely upon. Insects pollinate more than 75% of global crops, a service valued at up to $577 billion per year, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. “Three quarters of our crops depend on insect pollinators,” says Dave Goulson, a professor of biology at the University of Sussex in the UK. “Crops will begin to fail. We won’t have things like strawberries. We can’t feed 7.5 billion people without insects.”
And if the environmental concerns don’t convince you, here’s one for capitalism: insects provide a lot of free labour on farms that we take for granted. In China, the loss of insects in some parts has forced armies of people to fan out through orchards with paintbrushes and feathers on sticks to pollinate crops by hand, according to Milman. Imagine the cost and labour involved in replicating this around the world when insects aren’t around to do this for us, for free.
Thankfully, efforts are underway to make sure we don’t reach this stage of total extinction. Countries, such as Germany and Costa Rica, have pledged big money on insect conservation and research. Even apps, such as iNaturalist, where users upload images of bugs for identification and categorisation, are helping expand our collective knowledge base. On an individual level, we can minimise the use of pesticides in our gardens, and turn our lawns into natural areas where weeds and bare earth can breed bugs.
So the next time a fly is annoying you, try not to let it get to you. Remember, our actions irk them even more.
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Dig Deeper
Narrated by Paul Rudd, this docuseries showcases nature’s lesser-known tiny heroes. Spotlighting small creatures and the extraordinary things they do to survive, each episode is filled with surprising stories and spectacular cinematography.
…and now what?
A few months ago, a study tried to calculate the number of ants on the planet. Can you guess how much? According to their calculation, it’d be around 20 quadrillion (as much as this number can make sense). That’s about 2.5 million per capita. When I heard that, I have to say, I felt less bad getting rid of some when, back in Tahiti, we had colonies of ants regularly “invading” our kitchen in those infamous queues.
But maybe it was my way of trying not to see the major problem, which is human impact on bugs. With our usual direct and linear thinking, we tend too often to forget how intricate the interactions are between all living things on this planet. Like an infinite Rubik’s cube, every time you turn one cube, it impacts the whole in a different side to the point where there seems to be no final solution: whatever we do, we will have an impact.
We are starting to understand those interactions, and more and more scientists and activists are raising their voices on this specific issue: we are bound to live with every single living thing or we may be causing our own end by trying to over control, over populate, over separate and segregate. Because clearly having those kinds of attitudes among humans haven’t taught us a lesson already.
But it’s hard to change these views. We like to get the world fit our reality. Look only at this “war on lawns” that is happening in the US. We know that letting your grass grow for a bit gives time for these bugs to flourish and reproduce until the end of the season when it’s actually a good time to mow the lawn. But these seasonalities don’t fit the strict aesthetic requirements of some residential rules, so here we are!
In our persistent vision of a black-and-white world, where humans dominate and can control everything, we keep trying to fit things into our thinking. And it’s harder to review our interactions with nature when some of its components have the face of horror movie monsters.
So if it’s too hard for some to reframe their perception of the world beyond a black-and-white approach, perhaps we can work around this. And maybe we can start with our kids. They are usually very curious about bugs. They’re new, they’re different, they’re tiny. But we often ask them not to touch them. We look and act disgusted in front of some, and we are afraid of catching diseases from them. So eventually we’re sending kids one clear message: bugs are bad. And they grow up with this assumption and don’t feel bad killing an ant because they know there are 2.5 million of them for each of us!
If we have to rethink the way we interact with nature, maybe we should rethink the way we appreciate some of its “ugliest” components. The documentary we recommend this week does this perfectly: it presents you this tiny invisible world in a way that is mind blowing, amazing, touching, sometimes even moving. And it changes your perception: even the ugliest bug has some insane abilities, they have challenges, fears and end up in humorous situations. Like this outback peacock spider that deploys hilarious moves to attract a mate.
The same way that discovering new ideas and new cultures can be pleasing if we take the time to learn about it, then we can start thinking about how to avoid killing them blindly, or failing to consider them when we want to impose the “perfect” lawn size.
It’s probably time to debug our brains and let our new pe(s)ts be a of our lives in a more positive way!
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury
I grew up as a passionate insect lover. One curious thing I saw in my lifetime was the New Zealand native mantis being replaced by a South African invasive species. It's not clear why that happened but the two species don't coexist. Where the climate doesn't suit the South African species such as in Wellington where I live now, the New Zealand species persists. But in Auckland where I grew up you'll never see the native species.