Thomas Klikauer and Meg Young for BuzzFlash: Insectageddon Is Coming
April 1, 2022
By Thomas Klikauer and Meg Young
It becomes increasingly obvious that Insectageddon – a merger of insects and the hellish end of the world scenario of Armageddon – is coming. Many became aware when, the now famous, Krefeld Study found a more than 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas.
Of course, once insects are gone, birds will suffer. The humble sparrow, for example, needs around 200,000 insects to be served up to raise a single swallow chick to adulthood. Once insects are gone, roughly 10,000 species of birds on earth will starve to extinction.
As a consequence, a vast assortment of dead birds’ bodies will begin to pile up across valleys, hills, parks, and elsewhere. Perhaps human beings will be next to follow. Most non-appetizingly, the rather unassuming blowfly will lay maggots capable of consuming up to 60% of a human corpse within a week. When the blowfly is gone, no-one will be around to break down the deceased.
The remaining still surviving humans might still hope that some of the 8,000 species of dung beetle are still around. They do the cleaning up of the dead and they have done so for about 65 million years. Once they are destroyed, a truly global disaster of Biblical imagination will come on a much grander scale as ever imagined. The Uninhabitable Earth has arrived.
Without insects, millions of square kilometers of fertile land will be laid to waste. Fallen trees and leaves will accumulate and they will rather stubbornly refuse to disintegrate back into the earth. The few remaining insects will be, by far, not enough to turn fallen leaves back into soil.
Worse, the earth’s food supply will quickly start to disintegrate. Well over 1/3 of our global food production was once dependent on pollination. But, once thousands and millions of bees and others have been wiped off of the face of the earth – this will no longer be the case.
With pollinators destroyed, global food production will grind to swift halt. The once sprawling farmland covered with fruit and vegetables will be left to wither away. Long before all that, many farmers had stopped to spray pesticides as very few invaders would have little to destroy anyway. The loss of bees had already stripped us of available strawberries, plums, peaches, melons, and broccoli. While the remaining fruit and veggies helplessly withered away.
Yet, before all that, about 700 million people globally were already starving or were malnourished. With insects gone, most, if not all, were pushed over the edge into certain death once the few remaining crops were no longer pollinated. Apart from the human cost, almost 90% of all wild flowering plants depend on pollination to thrive – after Insectageddon, this will stop.
Accelerated by global warming, some biologists are already forecasting that within just a few decades from now, earth might return to the state where it was a billion years before Insectageddon. That was a time when our planet consisted mostly of three things: bacteria, algae, and a few very simple multicellular plants – no insects and no human beings.
Today, there is very serious evidence that insect populations are facing stern problems in the very near future. We also know that almost all life on earth will die if we no longer have insects. Much of this becomes even more life-threatening when we realize that our life-enabling nourished soil on earth – that allows farming to take place – is just 15-centimeter thick.
It is those six-inches that sustains all of humanity. Without the work of insects, these 15cm will rather quickly turn into a Martian death-zone where nothing grows except a handful potation growing on Matt Damon’s own shit.
Unlike on Mars, insects have been part of a biological network allowing us to live. In every ecosystem, everything is connected to a network of interactions. Yet, every time earth loses a specie – moving closer to the 6th mass extinction – we are cutting off some of those vital networking links. Eventually, the life-nourishing biological network can no longer sustain the damage done to it. It stops functioning, it disintegrates, and we die.
And it all starts rather simple: we destroy flies – we destroy chocolates. In past decades, big agro-businesses based on the massive use of chemicals has decimated all sorts of insects. This has happened through three attacks on insects:
a) Insects’ habitat destruction occurred through the massive and prolonged spraying of highly toxic chemicals;
b) through the obliteration of bio-system via global deforestation, ever expanding cities and roads, and monoculture farming; and finally,
c) increasingly through the heating up of the planet leading to capitaliocene’s hell for most insects.
All three combined are set to destroy a good number of what the Smithsonian Institution estimates to be around ten quintillion insects still populating our world. These are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects “before” we set Insectageddon upon them. This is a huge number. Yet, the damage we cause is also huge and it is overwhelming even for insects.
Already in the year 2014 the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that insect populations decreased by 45% globally over the past four decades.
Meanwhile, Dutch, British, and German scientists found a more than 75% decline over twenty-seven years in total flying insect biomass even in those protected areas which their research had covered. Worse, since 1989, the annual average weight of flying insects caught in their traps collapsed by a whopping 76%. When I drove to a local lake in Germany for a late summer afternoon swim many decades ago, the windshield of my uncle’s car was covered with insects. Forty years later, barely any insect is on the windshield.
By instigating chemical warfare against insects, life itself is attacked. And, these are the three headless horsemen of the insect apocalypse: 1) insecticide, 2) global warming, and 3) habit destruction.
Together, they have contributed significantly to the most noteworthy disappearances of living creatures since mammoths were extinct some 10,000 years ago, and conceivably, since the end of the dinosaurs. With Insectageddon, the 6th mass extinction, also known as Holocene extinction becomes hell on earth.
But before that, countless insect species have been eradicated without we, – as human beings – ever to know that they even existed in the first place. Worse, a report by France’s Natural History Museum found that 5-10% of insect species have been annihilated since industrialization began. While 5-10% might sound small, it translates into a whopping 250,000 to 500,000 lost insect species. Even scarier is the fact that it happened in a relatively short time – essentially since steam engine appeared during the mid 18th century.
Meanwhile, a United Nation report identified a staggering one million so-called “at-risk species”. These will be wiped out in the near future. Simultaneously, about three-quarters of our planet’s land has been radically altered through destruction. On top of that, plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, as the globe has devastated a third of its forests.
Most likely to the utter distaste of Australia’s neoliberal prime minister who prefers to turbo-charge global warming, two Australian scientists found that 40% of insect species are declining globally with a third endangered, and at the edge of extinction over the next few decades.
The undeniable conclusion is, unless we change the way big agro-business is producing food – flooding our crops with an array of poisonous insecticides – insects as a whole, will go down the path of an extinction in a few decades.
In fact, we can see this already. In the USA, for example, four species of bumblebee have plummeted by a deadly 96% in recent decades. And, North America is not alone. A review of 120,000 butterflies in the Netherlands, caught between 1890 and 1980, found that butterflies have declined by 84%. Similarly, the average distribution of insects in Britain has fallen by 10% since 1970, according to a broad assessment by the UK’s National Biodiversity Network.
If such a dramatic decline in insects is not halted very soon, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems will collapse, with profound consequences for human beings. Worse, the genetic diversity of insects too, has taken a very serious hit. This will lead to the inevitable homogenization of the environment – another harbinger of the impending Insectageddon. This might well mean that we end up with an inhospitable environment overrun by cockroaches and mosquitoes.
Even more telling than all this is the story of Christmas Island’s pipistrelle – a small bat weighing just three grams. The bat of the Australian territory suffered an 80% decline. It was a near complete destruction between the years 1994 to 2006.
Wildlife officials pleaded with John Howard’s neoliberal government to establish a captive breeding program before it was too late. Months passed – nothing. The bat’s last calls were recorded on 26th August 2009. This is the only time the extinction of species in the wild can be pinpoint to the exact day.
At the other side of the world, in the UK, the Royal Entomological Society’s Chris Thomas said, when asked about insect decline, I think they, on average, are – undeniably correct. This is particularly true since scientists have been sifting through 166 long-term scientific surveys from almost 1,700 research sites. They found a steep fall in terrestrial insect abundance – on average, there is a 9% drop per decade since 1990.
Adding to this is the story of Anders Pape Møller and his screeching old Ford Anglia driving along two roads: one was a 1.2 kilometer road and the other was a 25 kilometer road in Denmark’s Pandrup. Møller found that in twenty years of driving and measuring, insect numbers had declined by a staggering 80% on the short road trip. On the much longer road, it was devastating: Møller found a 97% decline.
Unsurprisingly, when the insects vanished, birds followed, probably because of a lack of food. Particularly hit hard were those birds that eat mostly insects: warblers, swallows, and bluebirds. They endured a much steeper drop than meat-eaters like crows and starlings. Given all this, some have argued,
people might not give a damn about insects
but they like pretty birds in their garden
Once they are gone, people will realize what Insectageddon actually means. But by that time, it will be too late. What this means can be seen in Germany, where in a little more than a decade, an estimated 12.7 million pairs of breeding birds disappeared.
In the end, one thing is certain: no matter how bad we are treating planet earth, we are going to vanish before insects will go. Yet, before that, we will see fewer or no birds at all in the sky. If we want birds, we need to have insects. If we want fruits and vegetables, we need insects. If we want healthy soils, we need insects. If we want a sustainable and diverse plant community, we need insects.
The truth is, almost all of the world’s flowering plants rely – at least to some degree – on pollinators. The world’s prime pollinators are insects. Insectageddon means good-bye to avocados, blueberries, cherries, plums, raspberries, apples, etc. In other words, a supermarket shelf full of fruits and vegetables demands insects.
Already in the year 2016, scientists examined more than 3,000 scientific papers. They found that the total value of food production directly depending on pollination had reached $577bn – per year! This includes 1.6 million metric tons of honey produced by honeybees.
This also included $5.7bn worth of cocoa beans – no insects: no chocolate. While there are 20,000 species of wild bees that pollinate crops, more than 40 percent of bee species are threatened with extinction in some places in Europe. Quite likely, the world’s sharpest mind was correct. Albert Einstein once said,
if the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth,
man would only have four years left to live.
As always in global capitalism, the poor will suffer disproportionately. Well over two billion people in developing countries are dependent on smallholder agriculture where the loss of pollination will be felt most severely. Even there, the much-hated wasps are important.
Wasps are often seen as reprehensible scoundrels invading countryside picnics. People fear their painful sting and they don’t even produce honey. Still, wasps are key partners of any gardener and farmer. Wasps prey on pests such as caterpillars, aphids, and whiteflies.
Virtually the same goes for the American and the German cockroaches. Interestingly, a Swedish zoologist named Carl Linnaeus gave them their names by simply naming cockroaches after the place where he got his specimens from.
Yet, they too serve a useful purpose in nature just as the even more hated mosquito. Mosquitoes cause more suffering than any other animal by a considerable margin. Mosquitoes, not the shark, not the wolf, and not spiders and snakes, are the most dangerous animal on earth.
Among the roughly 3,500 mosquito species, just ten are responsible in any significant way for transferring diseases to humans. Killing all mosquitoes is a bit like saying let’s kill all primates – all orangutans and all gorillas – because one species of primate is bad. Whether mosquitoes should be eradicated or not, remains hotly debated.
Yet, two things are assured: Insectageddon is moving closer as Oliver Milman’s masterpiece The Insect Crisis – The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World has shown most impressively; and, secondly, we will go first because insects have survived all previous mass extinctions.
Thomas Klikauer teaches at the Sydney Graduate School of Management at Western Sydney University, Australia. He has over 770 publications including a book on Media Capitalism.
Meg Young is a Sydney Financial Accountant and HR Manager who enjoys the outdoors, good literature, foreign music and in her spare time – works on her MBA at WSU, Australia.
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