A World Without Beetles

 

When I was a kid this village was filled with fireflies. Now there were hardly any. Actually, there seem to be much less insects now than there were a few decades ago. In just half a lifetime a lot seems to have changed. Maybe it was my imagination, so in one of my foolish ventures, I decided to find out more about insects.

Insects seem to be as different from human beings as it is possible to be. To begin with, they don’t have a heart, lungs, blood as we know it, a skeleton, or much of anything else. They are clearly built very differently. They have a tough exoskeleton and six legs and this seems to be their most prominent feature. They were the first creatures to fly. You don’t have to be an expert to realize that they took a very different evolutionary line very early on. But what they are is they are essential to all life on earth. They are the food for birds and fish, every terrestrial and freshwater ecosystem relies on them. Oddly out of the millions of different varieties of insects, only about a few hundred have taken to the sea. (The sea is dominated by other kinds of arthropods like crustaceans.) Even plants rely on insects for pollination. It seems that they are declining at an unprecedented rate that some scientists call the global Insect Apocalypse. But there are so many varieties of them that scientists don’t know exactly by how much. Some scientists estimate that they are disappearing at the rate of 2% per year. That is a lot in 20 years.

To begin with, bees are in peril, and so are another order of insects, butterflies and moths (order Lepidoptera), and beetles (Coleoptera), and freshwater insects like dragonflies and damselflies. Loss of habitat, insecticides, climate change, and pollution are thought to be the reasons. It is believed that if insects go so will their predators like many kinds of birds and fish and other animals further up the food chain. Many years ago a writer named George Orwell wrote, "By retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies, and toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable." A world without butterflies, dragonflies, beetles and many birds, fish and toads would be a sad world indeed.