"I just got back from Texas, and it was the most unsuccessful trip I’ve ever taken,” he says.
“There just wasn’t any insect life to speak of.”
"It was not only the insects missing, he says, it was everything.
“Everything was crispy, fried; the lizard numbers were down to the lowest numbers I can ever remember.
And then the things that eat lizards were not present – I didn’t see a single snake the entire time.”
"Widespread use of pesticides and fertilisers, light and chemical pollution, loss of habitat and the growth of industrial agriculture have all carved into their numbers.
Often, these were deaths of proximity:
insects are sensitive creatures,
and any nearby source of pollution
can send their populations crumbling."
'In 2019, researchers found that almost a third of US birds – about 3 billion – had disappeared from the skies since the 1970s.
The losses, however, were not evenly distributed: those birds that ate insects as their main food
had declined by 2.9 billion.
Those that didn’t depend on insects had actually gained, increasing by 26 million."
"the loss of insects set other dominoes falling: as bugs declined, so too did the populations of lizards, frogs and birds.
Their disappearance, they wrote, had triggered
“a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web”.
"A tropical forest ecosystem is “a finely tuned Swiss watch”, Hallwachs says –
perfectly engineered to sustain a vastly biodiverse system of creatures.
Each element is delicately tuned and interlocks with the rest:
the heat, the humidity, the rainfall,
the unfolding of leaves,
the length of the seasons,
the start and stop of the life cycles of insects and animals."
No comments:
Post a Comment