Insect Collapse: 'We Are Destroying Our Life Support Systems'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished. His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by far is global warming. 'It was just astonishing,' Lister said. 'Before, both the sticky ground plates and canopy plates would be covered with insects. You'd be there for hours picking them off the plates at night. But now the plates would come down after 12 hours in the tropical forest with a couple of lonely insects trapped or none at all.'

'We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet,' Lister said. 'It is just horrifying to watch us decimate the natural world like this.' Lister calls these impacts a 'bottom-up trophic cascade', in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain. 'I don't think most people have a systems view of the natural world,' he said. 'But it's all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect.' To understand the global scale of an insect collapse that has so far only been glimpsed, Lister says, there is an urgent need for much more research in many more habitats. 'More data, that is my mantra,' he said.

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