Insects and Bugs: Not the same thing
I remember a day around a decade ago that still leaps out from the recesses of my mind from time to time, and each time growing more prominent in my head. My family and I were on a road trip through California, and we plowed down the freeway at 80 miles per hour in our little red minivan. It was the middle of spring. My enthusiastic young eyes stared out at the immense flat plain of the San Joaquin Valley that stretched out into the horizons to the east and west, the multitudes of crops and irrigation channels shimmering in tones of green, blue, and brown. Then suddenly, it appeared if we had been caught in a blizzard. A storm of miniature white flower petals engulfed our car and blotted out our view of other drivers on the freeway. My parents cried out in a mixture of awe and shock, and I realized what it was: Butterflies. Millions of Cabbage Whites, spiral around us like a flurry of snow. I saw dozens on dozens of them hit the windshields of our car and others. My father noticed my dismay at this, and reassured me with “Don’t worry, they’re just butterflies”.
This instance that passed without much consequence when I was 11 years old has recently jumped back into my mind as alarming reports have come out in recent months. Scientific journals have published dozens of reports that all point to one conclusion: The global insect population is dying. At an unprecedented rate. The Scientific American published in November of 2018 stated that the global abundance population of invertebrates has declined by a staggering 45% since the 1970’s, most of that being made up of insects. At the current decline rate of 2.5% population decline per year, if you do the math, means almost all insects could be extinct in the next century. Needless to say, the environmental impact such an extinction can not be understated. Insects make up some of the greatest, most important pillars in food webs and fulfill multiple vital ecological roles… their absence would bring about destruction on an unprecedented scale.
Ecological impact aside, it is shocking, appalling, that such a decline has been occurring right under our noses without us keying into it as much as we should’ve. I am interested in the way we think about insects, especially as a highly urbanized, western society. In the way we line our houses and workplaces with anti-insect spray. The way our millions of acres of crops are coated in deadly pesticides. Our outdoor eateries are often not comfortable in the summertime without wasp catchers hanging from every overhang, and by the end of the month they are completely full of the corpses of yellow jackets. And the way we have been almost unconsciously in favor of insect genocide, while simultaneously protecting hundreds of other species.
This is interesting considering how much people will bend over backwards to defend the populations of other, more well known animals: conservation targets like the Spotted Owl, the Beaver, the Bald Eagle, and many more. Conservation efforts for the Spotted Owl alone managed to nearly completely shut down the Oregon logging industry, and laws were passed that prevented logging a full 1.3 miles from any located owl nests. When DDT was found out to be nearly annihilating the population of several birds of prey (most notably the Bald Eagle) the pesticide was completely banned from use. The use of such a powerful, efficient chemical which inevitably killed millions, perhaps billions of insects (a large portion of them not even crop pests) and boosted crop sales/profits, was only finally banned when the populations of Bald Eagles and Peregrine Falcon (not the intended target of the pesticide) had plummeted drastically as a result. Clearly, we are biased towards protecting these larger, more familiar animals. Yet if we see an ant crawling on the wall of our home, more often than not it gets squashed.
A term I came up with to help explain this phenomenon was the title ‘Headline Species’. In other words, species that are popular in relation to conservation. Animals, that when you hear their name, it ignites a mental frame that in some way relates to conservation and protection. A lot of the animals I’ve already mentioned fall under this category, and for those reasons. Buffalo, another Headline Species, were nearly completely annihilated by hunters seeking riches by selling their furs for hundreds of years. Buffalos in particular were reduced to only a thousand individuals in 1889. Now, they number around 500,000, thanks to the efforts of conservation workers. It is difficult for one to talk about them with at least partially considering their conservation history.
I talked to Oregon State zoology/ornithology student Madelyn Geraths about the concept of “Headline Species”, or animals we recognize as under threat of extinction and by extension more vital to the environment. “Maybe it’s not solely based on the fact that they’re seen as more important because they’re in danger, but because we can directly see the environmental impact that the animal have” She said. I found this to be intriguing. We see a Bald Eagle take a fish from a river: we witness its purpose as an apex predator. We find our basements crawling with termites, or our barbecues swarmed by hornets: their purpose is… what now? To bother us? In other words, it is less obvious, that when the Human is taken out of the picture, these species fulfill their environmental roles just as much as an Eagle or Buffalo does.
And this conservational fame is not only limited to furred or feathered vertebrates, of course. There are some insects that have pinged on the conservation radar, particularly the honey bee. Around a decade ago reports began to come out documenting the rapid and sudden decline in the honey bee population in the US. Because they serve a direct role as pollinators for a vast majority of our crops we consume, numerous movements spawned as a result, both ecologically and commercially. Bee T-shirts, bee bumper stickers, etc. When your unpaid labor force begins dying off, the scramble to save them is noticeable. Colony Collapse Disorder, the phenomenon is called. However, as evident by scientific reports coming out since then, this decline was not limited to bees, but all insects. But that notion slipped under the radar, in favor of the slogan ‘Save the Bees’ as other, lesser known species dwindled away slowly, in the shadow of their black and yellow cousins.
Of course, 500,000 buffalo may seem like a lot. Indeed, a growth from a thousand to 500,000 individuals in around 120 years is staggeringly impressive. But 500,00 individuals is nothing when talking about insects… it is estimated that there are around 200 million insects for every human alive. It seems like a lot. And, well, it is. In both population mass and species diversity, insects are unfathomably huge group of animals. Being so numerous and so widespread across the globe, they form part of the bedrock of almost every food web on every continent. Extinction for them means extinction for surface everywhere.
Perhaps part of this bias we have against insects has something to do with scarcity value, the idea that when something is more uncommon, it is more valuable or important. In the early 19th century for example, passenger pigeon flocks would darken the midwestern skies for days on end, flocks numbering well into the billions. They were hunted profusely, with the general assumption being that they could never ever go extinct. They did just that in the 1920’s. Suddenly, when there were only a single digit of individuals left they were a spectacle, a relic of the natural world. Perhaps a similar mentality applies when we swat a fly on our windowsill. “There are billions of flies out there, what will killing one do?”
And to a certain extent, the assumption are not completely unjustified. Insects are wildly different from vertebrates. Their reproduction cycles are much faster, they are significantly less intelligent. These two factors make them both more replaceable and less valuable, respectively. In large quantities, insects like locusts and termites can be quite destructive. Indeed, the reputation insects have as pests is not entirely unwarranted. The word ‘Bug’ seems to have become another word for ‘insect’. If your computer has a bug, it needs to be repaired. If you’ve ‘caught the bug’, you’ve got a fever and need a few days to recuperate. The word carries the implication of a problem thats needs be addressed.
The minute we began thinking of insects solely as pests, we began to fail to notice when their numbers began to dive. And like many problems that are related to the topic of climate change, there is far more than one direct contributor to this decline in insects. But a majority of it is ignorance. An ignorance, that despite their relative simplicity and hugeness of numbers, they are just as vulnerable, perhaps even more so, than other terrestrial vertebrates.
I spoke briefly with Clackamas Community College entomology student Ben Krieske about this issue. “It’s crazy to me” he said “how people talk about insects these days. Or, like, the way people view them compared to other species. If you’re just the average person walking through the woods one day, and you come across a deer, you take a minute to look at it and appreciate it. People go out of their way to avoid walking on flowers and plants. Scratching your name in tree bark is taboo. But you accidentally step on a spider or a millipede when you’re walking? No harm, no foul.”
