BIOPHILIAC
ABOVE A bee-imitating hover fly visits a yellow water lily blossom. RIGHT Butterflies like the tiger swallowtail can be important pollinators.
The Pollination Bomb Insect decline is a big—and mostly overlooked—piece of the biodiversity loss puzzle
words & photos :: Leslie Anthony “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” So said eminent biological philosopher and author E.O. Wilson, an entomologist who specialized in ants (and coincidentally coined the term “biophilia”). The quote resurfaced in a 2014 book by biologist Dave Goulson, the world’s foremost expert on the behaviour, ecology and conservation of bumblebees. In Goulson’s A Buzz in the Meadow, Wilson’s quote is a springboard both to declare that insects are vanishing worldwide, and to question our lack of concern. Goulson contrasts the ramifications of no insects—i.e., potential global cataclysm—with something of far less consequence on which we expend much conservation capital: the ever-lovable panda, whose disappearance, while symbolic, might mean only “… a tiny bit more bamboo in a forest in China.” 82
His point: big, cute animals like pandas speak to our philanthropic instincts, while most insects—animals we barely notice—do not. Adjusting our attitude toward insects as a group would be a first step to taking their declines seriously. As winter moves into spring and another year of insect Armageddon looms, it’s an issue worth considering. Fortunately, the insect world has its own pandas, and these do have our attention. Accelerating declines in wild pollinators like butterflies and bees, and annual losses of up to 80 per cent of hives of the yeoman European honeybee (employed in agriculture around the globe), have been big news. With pollinators required for reproduction in 90 per cent of flowering plants and three-quarters of crop species, worldwide declines raise the spectre of global food shortages. Beyond humans, fruits and seeds derived from insect pollination are on the menu for a quarter of all birds and mammals. But while pollinators’ important ecological roles were once familiar to most, times have changed: a study in Britain found one in