As dead vegetation piled up and dried out, closing the channels of the nutrient cycles, other complex forms of vegetation would die off, and with them all but a few remnants of the land vertebrates.

Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and with them the physical structure of most forests and other terrestrial habitats of the world. Most of the amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction about the same time. So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months.

Wilson, who died last December, wrote the following chilling words: Oliver Milman is a British journalist and the environment correspondent at the Guardian.In his 1992 book The Diversity of Life the great American biologist Edward O. Part warning, part celebration of the incredible variety of insects, The Insect Crisis is a wake-up call for us all. agriculture that have proved a killing ground for bees and an offbeat experiment in Denmark that shows there aren’t that many bugs splattering into your car windshield these days. He joins the scientists tracking the decline of insect populations across the globe, including the soaring mountains of Mexico that host an epic, yet dwindling, migration of monarch butterflies the verdant countryside of England that has been emptied of insect life the gargantuan fields of U.S. In The Insect Crisis, acclaimed journalist Oliver Milman dives into the torrent of recent evidence that suggests this kaleidoscopic group of creatures is suffering the greatest existential crisis in its remarkable 400-million-year history.Īt this Science on Tap, Milman explores this hidden emergency, arguing that its consequences could even rival climate change.

Three out of every four of our planet’s known animal species are insects. What is causing the collapse of the insect world? Why does this alarming decline pose such a threat to us? And what can be done to stem the loss of the miniature empires that hold aloft life as we know it?įrom ants scurrying under leaf litter to bees able to fly higher than Mount Kilimanjaro, insects are everywhere. The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World

The insect crisis by oliver milman