Thinking about Bugs

Not something we normally do at the end of August. Black flies are long gone and mosquitoes aren’t as evident as they were earlier in the summer. Yet perhaps we should be thinking about bugs the way that writer Dave Goulson does in the Guardian in his recemt article, The Insect Apocalypse - Our world will grind to a halt without them. Here are just a few key points.

• Insects have declined in abundance by as much as 75% in the last 50 years.

• Three million tons of pesticides are going into the global environment each year - much stronger ones than Rachel Carson warned us against.

• Insects provide us with a good deal of service: Goulson notes: “We need insects to pollinate our crops, recycle dung, leaves and corpses, keep the soil healthy, control pests, and much more – but for larger animals, such as birds, fish and frogs, which rely on insects for food. Wildflowers rely on them for pollination.”

• They are the largest population on the planet and outnumber humans by a million to one.

• We don’t eat them directly in the West. On the other hand, we do regularly consume them at one step removed in the food chain. Freshwater fish such as trout and salmon feed heavily on insects, as do game birds like partridge, pheasant and turkey.

• 87% of all plant species require animal pollination, most of it delivered by insects.

• Insects are also intimately involved in the breakdown of organic matter, such as fallen leaves, timber and animal feces. This is vitally important work, for it recycles the nutrients, making them available once more for plant growth.

• Insects are the undertakers of the world, disposing of all types of dead bodies

We are losing far too many of them. Like all aspects of climate change, we start noticing events at the edges - and suddenly they are totally upon us. It’s just another area where we have to consider what we are actually doing to the planet.