The Bugs in My Life
By: Aaron Hedge
Tags: Sixth Extinction, Ecology, Biodiversity, Insects

You may have sensed it. I have, too.

As a teenager late in the last century, I would rollerblade every day across a bridge in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, that spans the Roaring Fork River on my way to shred at the skate park. During the hatch, mosquitoes and mayflies would rise from the river in the gazillions, and I’d have to shield my face with my backpack while bombing as fast as I could across the expanse.

The Roaring Fork flows into the Colorado in a confluence of two canyons that become one and continue downstream for some miles before geology rolls them out into the flatter, mellower Grand Valley. In those canyons, flying insects would sometimes rise in clouds, engulfing bridges and the stretch of Interstate-70 that facilitates the state’s commerce. In the spring, the windshield of any driven car would be smeared with the corpses of flying arthropods that had failed to look both ways.

In a bugless world, we might not even exist.

One spring in a later part of my life in a different part of the state, the high desert’s bosom extruded a plague of Mormon crickets, turning the ground into a jumping, writhing anarchy. You couldn’t go for any outing but to be swarmed by the three-inch brown grasshoppers. Armed with leg spikes and a fearsome bayonet extending from their abdomens, they would feed on the desert forbs except when they were cannibals: They’d swarm state Highway 40 and were crushed in traffic, and their brethren would feast on the ooze, eventually to be crushed as well. The thoroughfare became a slick of insect gore.

Things aren’t like this anymore. There are single, occasional corpses on my windshield, sure. When I visit home, there are single, occasional crickets on the highway near Dinosaur, Colorado. But I now live in a hotter, more humid clime, where one might expect a windshield to be more heavily smeared with bodily slimes. But they’re not. I haven’t emptied a fluid reservoir or ruined a set of windshield wipers on bug* guts in I don’t remember how long. Years? Decades? I’ve not had to pick mashed palaeopterid cadavers from my arm hair, either.

Crane flies mate under a bridge.

Where did all the insects go?

There’s a two-year-old piece by journalist Brooke Jarvis in the New York Times Magazine. Jarvis leads her article with a similar experience had by Danish high school teacher Sune Boye Riis, who participated in a study by a group of American and European institutions to study the “windshield phenomenon,” which is the popular term for what I described above. People were experiencing it all over the world. Where there once were bodies, there now are none. (For Riis’s part, he had noticed not eating any insects on recent country bike rides, an unsettling contrast with the cycling of his childhood, where ingesting bugs was routine.)

The study Riis participated in, Jarvis writes, came after researchers had published a study showing a more than three-quarters decline in insect populations in a German preserve over less than three decades. The metric the researchers used was not species diversity but total amount of arthropods in weight, or insect biomass.

I sometimes think of arthropods as the world’s most prolific and selfless martyrs. People creeped out by many writhing legs and flitting movements vilify them. House spiders end up goo in boot traction for the sin of helping to clear out fly populations. Roaches, which incidentally hitched with us on our westward trip from the Old World, are seen as the interlopers. Humans invade or create mosquito havens, become annoyed at their presence, and douse their homes with chemicals. We turn insect habitat into toxified monocultures or pave them under for strip malls. The array of arthropods in our world is far past our scope of recognition. We probably don’t know about the existence of four-fifths of the species that exist, and a logical assumption is that we are killing off some of them without realizing it.

A mirinoid climbed from a plant to my camera to my fingers.

Scientists think 80 percent of all animals are insects. There are so many spiders in the world that they eat more than 400 million tons of biomass annually, more than the weight of all the world’s adult humans. National Geographic writes this month that “Just one family of parasitoid wasp, the Ichneumonidae … contains something like 100,000 species, greater than the number of all known species of fish, reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and birds combined.” Arthropods are one of two very powerful natural antigens the world has to human colonization: They and the diseases they carry have kept us out of delicate places like the world’s rainforests more effectively than any government regulation. Insects affect the world in the most impactful ways we can imagine as well as in subtly important ways we could never conceive unless the bugs went away.

So this alarming idea — that most insects in a given space are disappearing over a short period of time — is recently referenced with an appropriately alarming moniker: the “Insect Apocalypse.” It’s a cataclysm that portends the collapse of Euarthropoda, a phylum more than 500 million years old, which in a framework of geological thinking is the biggest tragedy. But more than just that, it also heralds the end of larger specialized creatures that feed on them — some birds, bats, rodents, and reptiles feed only on certain insects. It means the demise of many industries adjacent to agriculture, which depends on insect pollinators. Without bugs, most life on earth would be very different. In a bugless world, we might not even exist.