Insecticide is an ecological disaster that will affect us all
While the plight of mammals and birds commands the world’s attention, insects are quietly but rapidly disappearing.
The recent alarms in Britain, Europe and America about the fate of the honey bee – colonies have been crashing in increasing numbers – have started to open people’s eyes to insects’ importance in a more general way, says Matt Shardlow, director of Buglife, the Invertebrate Conservation Trust.
“It remains the case that levels of awareness of what’s happening with the small things, such as insects, are much lower than with what’s happening with big things, such as trees, or birds, or whales,” he says. “The bigger you are, the bigger the bit of wildlife, the greater the chance that people will be paying attention to what’s happening to you.
There is clear evidence of the sharp decline in Britain’s insects, one being the disappearance of the “moth snowstorm”. Anyone over 40 will probably remember that during a car journey at night in midsummer, the moths in the headlights were so numerous that they looked like snow, and the windscreen would become so coated with colliding moths that by the end of the journey it would have to be washed.
Not any more. Moth snowstorms are today moth showers, if that: the phenomenon has all but disappeared, and this is robustly backed up by the figures. Two-thirds of Britain’s individual moth species have declined in the past 40 years, some by enormous amounts, and moths as a whole have lost about a third of their abundance in that period.
We know this because, since 1968 the agricultural research station at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire has maintained a substantial network of moth traps around the country (at about 80 sites) to which the insects are attracted at night by a light-bulb.
Types and numbers caught are carefully noted, and with long-term records for no fewer than 337 species of larger moths over four decades, this is one of the biggest sets of animal population data in the world.
Analysis in 2003 showed more than 200 species had declined, and nearly 70 by more than 50 per cent. Species once well-known and abundant were tumbling: the magpie moth had declined by 69 per cent, the cinnabar moth by 83 per cent and the strikingly handsome garden tiger moth by no less than 89 per cent.
Source: The Independant (UK)
