Category: Study

A small Hymenopteran and a probable bug in the same flower in Berkeley, June 2025

Recently, a samizdata channel I watch has had multiple reports that insects are missing this summer, in locations scattered around United States.

This was not unexpected. The reduction in insect numbers started decades ago, if German amateur entomologists’ data is to be believed, but it has since been recorded around the world, including places like Colorado and Costa Rica.

The scientists have sounded an alarm – insect are possibly the most important group of land animals in terms of species numbers and biomass. They are important pollinators, decomposers, soil and biome modifiers, and they disperse nutrients even when not serving as important food source to other species in food web.

Bee colony collapses around USA and the rest of the world have been reported for years, and is important for food production and economic reasons. Without the ~2 million beehives transported annually, canola, almond, citrus, and many other insect pollinated crops would collapse. Because not only the natural pollinators are about gone, all the flowers in monoculture orchards are blooming only few weeks a year.

The loss of insects has been attributed on a variety of reasons, among other things pesticide use (and other environmental poisons, including chemtrails and 5G radiation), monoculture, spreading diseases (especially Varroa mite born in bees), and changing climate. While a large number of species are affected, reading the reports has given me an impression that the selection of missing species seems to vary from place to place, suggesting multifactorial causes. The modern world apparently does not have space for bees or butterflies.

I would probably blame monoculture, i.e., humans have appropriated too fat a slice of ecological resource flows for themselves. Traditional agricultural landscape in Europe had many verges, ditches and hedges, where wild plants and insects that relied on them could flourish. Now such places are rare.

For example, I have observed in horror, how most species of the meadow flowers, once common on road sides near Turku, Finland, seem to have had a population collapse in the past decade. I blame this on the municipal maintenance crews mowing the verges before the seeds have ripened. Annual plants fare the worst, but I suspect perennials will eventually follow. Any insects relying on those flowers also likely fared poorly.

As the small wild spots grow fewer and further between, I suspect we have crossed a critical threshold on insect metapopulation dynamics. Ilkka Hanski, studying Glanville fritillary butterflies living on dry meadows on rocky islands, showed that as long as there were enough patches with butterflies near each other (in this case, the minimum was estimated to be 32 patches covering total 10ha over 5km² area), individual patches of plants or insects living on them could be ephemeral, i.e., the butterflies on a given patch could disappear or appear from year to year, but the butterfly populations of individual patches form a metapopulation that keeps the species going if the amount and density of patches are sufficient.

Extrapolated onto insects in general, I think the on-going collapse may indicate that despite good people setting their individual gardens for butterflies, bees and other insects, if a garden population is lost, for example to local bad weather or disease outbreak, there are no longer enough insect patches left nearby to repopulate the patch. Sooner or later, isolated gardens will lose their insects. And then the metapopulation is gone.

What can be done to reverse this trend? I suggest starting by restoring some verges. Also not mowing your yard while the flowers are seeding, as ugly as the drying seedheads may look. Insects are not very big, so they do not require nearly as large sanctuaries like roaming megafauna, but there should be plenty enough patches to maintain a viable metapopulation, so that if some species is lost from one spot, it can be colonized by insects from the neighboring spots. I believe this type of microrewilding to be compatible with current human population, possibly even essential if we want to retain their ecosystem services necessary for food production. Assuming there are no confounding factors like (possibly) 5G radiation to prevent its success.