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The New Yorker
Books
November 1, 2021 Issue

Where Have All the Insects Gone?

Scientists who once documented new species of insects are now
charting their perilous decline--and warning about what it will mean
for the rest of us.

By Elizabeth Kolbert

October 25, 2021

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insects
Insects face an array of man-made threats, including habitat loss,
climate change, light pollution, and potent new pesticides.
Illustration by Armando Veve

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In the summer of 1942, Ed Wilson, age thirteen, decided that it was
time to get serious about research. He had already determined that he
wanted to be an entomologist, a choice made partly out of interest
and partly out of injury. As a child, he'd been fascinated with
marine life. One day, he jerked too hard on a fish he caught, and one
of its needlelike spines lodged in his right eye. The lens had to be
removed, and, following the surgery, to see something clearly he
needed to hold it up near his face. Insects were just about the only
animals that submitted to this treatment.

That summer, Wilson was living with his parents in Mobile, Alabama,
in a run-down house that had been built by his great-grandfather. He
resolved to survey every species of ant that lived in an overgrown
lot next door. This proved to be quick work, as there were only four
species. But one of them turned out to be, as Wilson put it nearly
eighty years later, "the find of a lifetime--or at least of a
boyhood." It was a species that Wilson had never seen before; nor, it
seems, had anyone else north of Brazil.

Published in the print edition of the November 1, 2021, issue, with
the headline "Bugs in the System."
[kolbert-el]
Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999, won
the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for "The Sixth Extinction." Her latest book
is "Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future."
More:EcologyInsectsExtinctionBugsNaturalistsAntsBiodiversity

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