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The danger of extinction of insects

05.04.2020

Insects make up 80% of the world's living creatures. Yes, this includes plants. And only 10% of them bring some kind of harm to a person: they spread diseases, destroy crops, and finally bite. But even they are involved in maintaining the food webs on Earth. No insects - no birds, amphibians and reptiles that feed on them. Accordingly, predatory reptiles, birds and mammals, which cannot survive without insects, will soon die. No insect pollinators - no plants. And that means all herbivorous creatures, including vegans. It doesn't matter what you eat - everyone will be left without food.

In 1948, the Swiss chemist Paul Müller received the Nobel Prize "for his discovery of the high efficacy of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) as a contact poison." It was the first and only time in history that a scientist received the highest award for discovering a pesticide. But very quickly, scientists became disillusioned with the crude pesticide. On the one hand, he prevented a typhus epidemic in Naples in 1944, and according to WHO statistics, antimalarial campaigns using DDT saved five million lives. But besides this, the pesticide destroyed complex bonds in nature, along with conditionally harmful ones, killed many beneficial insects, including pollinators. It turned out that the poison poisons plants, warm-blooded animals and even humans, but that's a completely different story. Paradoxically, the problem of combating harmful insects turned out to be much more difficult than initially thought, and having killed all the "bad" insects at once, the biosphere as a whole fell down.

Food today can already be synthesized in a test tube, and plants can be artificially pollinated, although this is time consuming and expensive. There are already robotic pollinators that are designed to help the rapidly dying bees. They will not replace natural pollinators, but they will help delay the apocalypse, in comparison with which the COVID-19 pandemic will seem like a children's party. And even theoretically it is impossible to artificially pollinate all plants, as insects do. This means that vegetation will be reduced on the planet and very soon we will not have enough oxygen.

And what to do with garbage and corpses? With the remains of wild living creatures? After all, insects, along with fungi, worms and bacteria, are involved in the decomposition of organic matter and partially inorganic matter. And they do it faster than all the above builders of the biosphere. Add to this that diseases will not only continue to spread, but it will happen much faster.

It can be argued that the absence of insects will lead to a change in the diet of insectivorous animals and birds. However, this is a long process that will not have time to complete. Those single individuals that will switch to plants and meat will also not have a chance, because there will not be enough plants, and then meat.

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