It’s been a long time since I’ve seen fireflies. I also noticed that there are fewer dragonflies, grasshoppers and butterflies today. Urbanization has something to do with it. Grasslands and farmlands have been converted to subdivisions, industrial and commercial centers. Insects have lost their homes.
It seems that this phenomenon is not unique to the Philippines. It’s happening all over the world. Scientists are calling this decline as the global insect apocalypse. As human activities rapidly transform the planet, the global insect population is declining at an unprecedented rate of up to 2% per year according to researchers.
The world has lost 5% to 10% of all insect species in the last 150 years — or between 250,000 and 500,000 species, according to a February 2020 study in the journal Biological Conservation. One April 2020 analysis in the journal Science suggested the planet is losing about 9% of its land-dwelling insect population each decade. Another January 2021 paper tried to paint a clearer picture by synthesizing more than 80 insect studies and found that insect abundance is declining around 1% to 2% per year.
It’s not just the loss of habitat that is driving the decline in insect populations. Insecticide and pesticide use, artificial light pollution and climate change are also to blame. Sadly, all of these are due to human activities.
The loss of insects has a damaging effect on the food web. Many creatures depend on insects for food. Birds, bats, frogs, spiders and lizards are just some of them. And it’s not just animals. Plants are affected too because they depend on insects for pollination.
Insects pollinate more than 75% of global crops, a service valued at up to $577 billion per year, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services says. They provide other nature services too. They are vital in organic farming as they kill harmful insects.
In the United States, insects perform services valued in 2006 at an estimated $57 billion per year, according to a study in the journal BioScience. Dung beetles alone are worth some $380 million per year to the U.S. cattle industry for their work breaking down manure and churning rangeland soil, the study found.
Humans eat insects too. A report says that some 2,000 species of insects are food. Kapampangans have kamaru (crickets) and in Palawan they have tamilok (woodworm). According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, edible insects contain high quality protein, vitamins and amino acids for humans. Insects have a high food conversion rate, e.g. crickets need six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and twice less than pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein.
We may treat them as nuisance. We hate and fear them sometimes. But insects have an important role in nature.