A looming 'insect apocalypse' could endanger global food supplies
18 comments
·November 22, 2025terminalshort
snypher
Forest isn't some Boolean you can toggle 0 and 1. It's not the same forest, why would we expect the same inhabitants?
terminalshort
If you want to claim that the forest that is there now is somehow dramatically worse for insects than the forest that grew there before, that's going to need some evidence behind it.
WillAdams
Habitat seems to play a large role --- I've always raked leaves and piled up sticks which fall from trees in our yard into a compost pile in a shady area, which I've been careful to disturb as little as possible from from fall through spring, since fireflies lay eggs in such piles, and their larvae mature in such conditions.
My kids would invite their friends over on nice summer evenings to see fireflies, since none of the McMansion neighborhoods had nearly as many.
Retric
The windshield test is somewhat deceptive as improved aerodynamics plays a role, but the difference is still quite noticeable when driving around in a classic car.
magicstefanos
But a lot of people drive old as shit cars.
TulliusCicero
"Old as shit" is still a moving target. An old as shit car from 30 years ago is not the same model year as an old as shit car today.
acessoproibido
Archive Link:
exe34
I moved to the countryside in the last year. it's night and day as compared to the nearby town that I lived in, when it comes to insects and spiders. I constantly find corpses of insects on the window sill and the spiders are chunky, given how well they feed.
jmclnx
Plus I heard somewhere song birds are declining due to this apocalypse.
But mosquitoes are not declining, the one insect I wish would decline real fast :)
terminalshort
Actually I feel like they are. I would get mosquito bites all the time as a kid when I went outside in the evening. Now I almost never do.
mschuster91
There's one reason not mentioned - habitat loss, be it caused by urbanization [1] or by land consolidation ("Flurbereinigung") [2][3].
It used to be the case that rural areas were splintered into many small farms, with bushes being used to mark borders, and these bushes in turn provided harbor and food for insects and cover for small rodents and other mammals.
"Thanks" to mechanisation however, which prefers large uniform land because thats easier for ever larger machines to process, a lot of these splinters were consolidated together and so there is nothing left to support any wildlife, be it insects or small animals, which in turn also causes bird populations to drop - when there are no mice because they don't have any place to build their nests, the birds don't have food as well.
[1] https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/...
[2] https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/flugbegleiter-umfrage-...
[3] https://naturschutz-initiative.de/aktuell/neuigkeiten/landwi...
ben_w
Those changes to the rural environments started getting made over a century ago, with horse drawn combine harvesters dating to the 1820s-1830s and self-propelled ones to the 1910s; while the insect decline became noticeable this century.
Now sure, the causes could be multipliers, insect_pop = base * (cause_0 * cause_1 * …), or even exponential, insect_pop = 1/e^(cause_0 + cause_1 + …), so I'm not saying none of that stuff matters, but also there's definitely something nee.
terminalshort
But that isn't true in all areas. And the particular study in Germany that found a 76% decline was done in forest areas.
epolanski
The thing that gets on my nerves is that this is really an unsolvable political problem.
When governments do try to push and make it law to have X amount of bushes and unfarmed land in a way that makes sense for wildlife to thrive you instantly get angry farmers on your roads, lose their votes and get publicly accused to starve the nation.
And farmers, due to the difficulty of their job (in time, investments and returns) and their role in a society's lifecycle get instant empathy.
There's areas in Italy where farms have absolutely polluted water to insane level, and this further compounds with heavy pollution of drinkable water wells (which should always be at least 120 meters from the closest farm from what I know).
Regular citizens, which end up getting heavily sick from all these farms (often in mortal ways) never get any kind of support as they lack the political and financial weight, and as soon as the argument scales, you're back at populist "you want to starve our people and kill our economy" arguments.
I had a house in the country, by law there shouldn't be more than one chicken farm in a 4 miles radius, yet they built two in less than 2 miles, one of them 300 meters from my house. It literally smells in disgusting ways 24/7, from ammonia to rot I had to sell it for pennies (5'000 euros, renovated), as nobody but the farmers in the area had the slightest intention to moving to such a beautiful yet disgusting place. And I haven't even mentioned that to avoid having to bring the hundreds of dead animals to a registered incinerator (as the law requires) they just dig mass graves in 5 minutes and cover the entire land.
Wildlife has absolutely disappeared.
It's really a tough, tough political battle.
Everything from agriculture to cattle to fishing is insanely polluting and bad for the environment, but the idea of really tracking and controlling how those industries operate is beyond naive. The labels on your tuna can saying it didn't kill dolphins are worthless, there's no way to check what happens on these boats, so are the labels for your coffee or cocoa not using child labor or your food being organic. It's all absolutely fake and a matter of money.
maybewhenthesun
Tell it like it is!
Here in the netherlands as soon as you try to do something, the farmers start flyingh upside down flags. I call them the 'head in the sand' flags since they stand for ignoring the problems.
I fear the problem is just that the earth suffers from an infestation of humans and the equilibrium will be restored in the same way all infestations end. It won't be pretty (already isn't in lots of places).
onetokeoverthe
[dead]
null
> The second driver is habitat loss — the inexorable creep of urbanization, deforestation and sterile suburban lawns, which host fewer and less-diverse ranges of insects.
I don't buy this as a cause of a global decline, though. In many areas things have gone in the opposite direction. The Appalachian mountains were clear cut in the 1800s and now are back to forest. If this theory is correct, I would expect there to have been a massive increase in insect populations on the east cost.