But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world’s ecosystems would collapse.īuglife, The Invertebrate Conservation Trust If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. This view has now entered the mainstream, even appearing on Buglife’s website as expressed by Sir David Attenborough:

Insects and other land-dwelling arthropods are busy doing that, as they have been for millennia. It reminds us well that mankind does not run the world.

No doubt Oliver Milman had that in mind when giving Insect Crisis its subtitle. The Harvard professor re-issued those ideas in an essay entitled The Little Things That Run the World in his 1996 collection of essays In Search of Nature. As dead vegetation piled up and dried out, closing the channels of the nutrient cycles, other complex forms of vegetation would die off, and with them all but a few remnants of the land vertebrates. Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and with them the physical structure of most forests and other terrestrial habitats of the world. Most of the amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction about the same time.

So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months. Wilson, who died last December, wrote the following chilling words: In his 1992 book The Diversity of Life the great American biologist Edward O.

The insect crisis oliver milman