Introduction ‘If we die, we’re taking you with us’ A great image that has been doing the rounds is a picture of a bee saying ‘If we die, we’re taking you with us.’ Invertebrates are the glue that binds the plants, microbes, fungi and animals to each other on this small planet, and we can quite safely say that we would not last long without invertebrates. Loosing even a small amount, a tiny percentage, of bug life could be catastrophic locally. Bugs sit at the bottom of the food web; if they disappear, so will the species that feed on them. We would lose many bigger animals such as birds, bats, some mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians that we’ve come to love, and which mean so much for our identity and culture. Whole ecosystems and even landscapes will change in a cascade of impacts we can’t even imagine. Bugs are a vital part of the recycling of nutrients, without which we cannot survive. The soil in which we grow most of our food is created largely by the guts and jaws of worms, mites, springtails, termites, beetles and many more. They mash up the leaf litter and the dead bodies, so we don’t have to, releasing some nutrients and making plant material more easily decomposed by fungi and microbes, which then releases more vital nutrients like sugars, nitrates and phosphates for plants to absorb and grow. And, without many bugs, most plant pollination would be impossible save for some carried out by the wind and a few reptiles and mammals (if they don’t need the bugs, too, that is). But these larger beasts won’t fit into a buttercup or a bluebell. The intricate way in which plants and bugs have evolved together is extraordinary and largely irreplaceable. To be blunt, without pollinating bugs and other beasts (which, in turn, need bugs to survive), almost 90 per cent of our flowering plants would die off.4 This would have a catastrophic impact on ecosystems worldwide, not
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