Loss of insects

[Doug Morris]

I just watched a video stating that some beneficial insects have gone extinct and others have declining populations.  This can be very dangerous because insects perform many important functions, such as pollination, helping to control harmful organisms, serving as food for other animals, conditioning soil, and removing waste material.

At least he wasn't advocating statist remedies.  He advocated informing yourself about what to expect and raising some of your own food on whatever scale you can achieve.  But this is the sort of thing the statists would jump on.

Does anyone have any sources of info on how bad this is?

 

[DavidOdden]

I think the problem is a general lack of objective information of a high-enough level of generality to address the question “how bad is it?”. One the one hand, you can find specific studies that e.g. count a particular kind of bug in a location at different times. You can find empirical studies that indicate beneficial effects of a particular bug, for example, honey bees are non-controversially good for us. It also does seem to be true that there has been a decline in honey bee populations in the US (where it is technically an invasive species). In that case, one might want to check the underlying science of reported bee declines. This graphic and the associated Wiki page suggests less than total doom and gloom, and while Wiki is generally a cheesy source for verifying information, it does tend to me more-accurate when it reports hard-core scientific facts, and when dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles are cited. In my opinion, objectively assessing “how bad is it” w.r.t. honey bees in the US is a major research undertaking, one that is orders of magnitude above my pay-grade.

The fact that some insect species have gone extinct is a non-issue until it is associated with concrete measures of significant. Insofar as there are about a million named insects (a subset of the total number of bugs) and 2 to 20 times that many unnamed species, the loss of a few bugs is insignificant, except as I noted, the loss of a single species (Apis mellifera) would be rather catastrophic.