(Foto / Voa News)
(Foto / Voa News)

Bye-bye bugs? Scientists fear non-pest insects are declining

PESKY mosquitoes, disease-carrying ticks, crop-munching aphids and cockroaches are doing just fine. But native bees, moths, butterflies, ladybugs, lovebugs, mayflies and fireflies appear to be less abundant.

Scientists think something is amiss, but they can’t be certain: In the past, they didn’t systematically count the population of flying insects, so they can’t make a proper comparison to today. Nevertheless, they’re pretty sure across the globe there are fewer insects that are crucial to as much as 80 percent of what we eat.

“You have total ecosystem collapse if you lose your insects. How much worse can it get than that?” said University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy. If they disappeared, “the world would start to rot.” He noted Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson once called bugs: “The little things that run the world.”

Scientists are noticing fewer flying insects that aren’t really pests, like moths, fireflies and butterflies. A variety of reasons are suspected but they all lead back to what humans are doing do the environment, especially landscapes.

Last year, a study found an 82 percent mid-summer decline in the number and weight of bugs captured in traps in 63 nature preserves in Germany compared with 27 years earlier. It was one of the few, if only, broad studies. Scientists say similar comparisons can’t be done elsewhere because similar bug counts weren’t done decades ago.

The lack of older data makes it “unclear to what degree we’re experiencing an arthropocalypse,” said University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum. Individual studies aren’t convincing in themselves, “but the sheer accumulated weight of evidence seems to be shifting” to show a problem, she said.

Most scientists say lots of factors, not just one, caused the apparent decline in flying insects. To Tallamy, two causes stand out: Humans’ war on weeds and vast farmland planted with the same few crops.

Weeds and native plants are what bugs eat and where they live, Tallamy said. Manicured lawns in the United States are so prevalent that, added together, they are as big as New England, he said.

Those landscapes are “essentially dead zones,” he said.

University of Maryland entomology researcher Lisa Kuder says the usual close-crop “turf is basically like a desert” that doesn’t attract flying insects. She found an improvement—70 different species and records for bees—in the areas where flowers are allowed to grow wild and natural alongside roads.

The trouble is that it is so close to roadways that Tallamy fears that the plants become “ecological traps where you’re drawing insects in and they’re all squashed by cars.” Still, Tallamy remains hopeful. (AP)

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