SAVE THE WORLD’S INSECTS

The dawn is barely visible in the sky above the trees as biologist Bradford Lister and his team of assistants busy themselves in the rainforest of Puerto Rico. They are placing insect traps in the trees and on the forest floor. At sunset, Lister and his team will return to collect their catch.

Thirty-six years earlier, when Lister went through the exact same procedure in the exact same place, a trap on the ground caught an average dry weight of 473mg of insects a day, while a trap in the trees caught 37mg. This time around, it is just 13mg per trap on the ground, and 5mg per trap in the trees – a reduction of 97.3% and 86.5% respectively.

The disappearance of these Puerto Rican insects is just one indicator within a potentially disastrous global trend. Scientists everywhere are reporting alarming reductions in insect numbers. The most recent news comes from an international team of scientists who have analysed 166 long-running studies covering almost 1700 different locations around the world from a period right back to 1925 and up