The Fly in the Ointment at the Talbot County Free Library

by Bill Peak

Remember how, when you went on a long road trip, you used to have to clean all the bugs off your windshield every time you pulled into a gas station? Have you ever wondered why we have to do that so infrequently now?

Well, it turns out that, since 1972, the earth has lost three-quarters of its insect biomass. If there were some way you could have weighed all the insects on the planet fifty years ago, and then could weigh all the insects on the planet today, the second number would turn out to be 75% smaller than the first.

Now this may sound like little more than an interesting factoid—and who wants to have to clean all those windshields anyway?—but it turns out such a massive die-off has ramifications for all of us. Earth's food chain is just one example, but a very good one. If tiny krill are what keep giant whales alive and kicking, on dry land it's the insects that provide the same service for an entire host of terrestrial beasts. If you picture the food chain as a pyramid, that pyramid's foundation stones are insects; remove them and the entire edifice comes tumbling down.

But providing a base for the food chain is just one of the essential services insects perform. Think about pollination. About 145 million years ago, flowering plants first appeared on our planet. In addition to bringing color to the world, they also produced earth's first fruits. Angiosperms (as scientists call the flowering plants) were so successful there are now some 300,000 different species of them, the vast majority of which depend upon insects for pollination. No insects: no apples, no pears, no strawberries, no beans, no peas, no melons, no coffee, no onions, no squash … the list goes on and on.

But no coffee?! Civilization would come to an end.

Actually, of course, it very well might. The late, great Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson once famously pointed out that if all humanity were to suddenly disappear, the world would return quickly to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago, but if all insects were to vanish, the planet's entire ecosystem would collapse overnight.

I learned all this from Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse by Dave Goulson. Silent Earth is, of course, a reference to Rachel Carson's ground-breaking indictment of DDT: Silent Spring, first published in 1962. If you, like me, thought Carson's book had removed both the scales from humanity's eyes and the indiscriminate use of dangerous chemicals from our environment, well, I'm afraid Goulson has a lot to teach the both of us.

DDT was quickly replaced on the market by a host of intentionally unpronounceable chemicals that farmers—their profit margins falling year by year toward absolute zero—had little choice but to utilize if they were to keep their heads above water. Goulson writes, “Today, about 900 different … chemicals that are toxic to some sort of pest-are licensed for use in the USA.” These chemicals, once they've killed whatever pest they were designed to kill, don't just magically go away. For instance, despite the fact DDT has now been banned globally for years, Goulson reports that numerous studies have found that “human milk is still very often contaminated with DDT and its relatives, typically containing ten to twenty times more organochloride insecticides than cow's milk.”

Sometimes being at the top of the food chain has its drawbacks.

But all is not gloom and doom. To give us some sense of the world insects inhabit, Goulson intersperses his fears about an apocalypse with profiles of his subjects' remarkable, if Lilliputian, lives. My personal favorite was the story of a miniscule female wasp that hunts cockroaches much larger than herself. When the little beastie finds one, she uses a neurosurgeon's care to insert her stinger into the precise part of the animal's brain that controls its escape reflex. She then takes hold of her victim's antennae and, using them as one would reins, steers the hapless creature to her nest, where she lays an egg upon it. The rest, of course, is history as far as the cockroach is concerned.

So far as I'm concerned, the world will get along just fine minus a cockroach or two, but Goulson has convinced me that, en masse, insects are the sine qua non of our planet's terrestrial life … and they are also, as he so admirably portrays them, worthy of our interest and respect. You will find Goulson's book at 595.717 GOUL in the Talbot County Free Library—an institution dedicated to improving, and preserving, human life.

Oh, and if you'd like to help reverse some of the damage we humans have caused, you should consider attending Master Gardener Coordinator Mikaela Boley's Planting for Pollinators program at 10 a.m. on Friday, May 20, in the Talbot County Free Library's Easton branch. The program is free and open to the public, but registration is required at: go.umd.edu/pollinators. Think of all the essential little lives you and your garden might nourish.