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Are America’s Insects Dying Off?

Scientists are having a really hard time determining which insects in North America are at risk of extinction.

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If you’re an insect in North America reading this, the odds are pretty good that the scientific community doesn’t know whether you’re a part of a thriving community or whether your community is collapsing. This is thanks to a new analysis of more than 46,000 species, which found that the conservation status of 88.5 percent of the continent’s insects and arachnids is completely unknown.

The majority of the creatures that make up the various ecosystems of North America live entirely outside the conservation system, leaving us in the dark about which species we need to try to save to maintain ecological balance.

The research, conducted by scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reviewed biodiversity data and compared it with federal and state endangered species laws.

Lead researchers Wes Walsh and Laura Figueroa found that fewer than half of North American insect and arachnid species even appear in NatureServe, the database used by U.S. agencies to track conservation status. Of those that are listed, more than three-quarters have never been evaluated for extinction risk.

Where Did All of America’s Insects Go?

Just as a point of comparison: every bird species on Earth has been assessed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. As for insects and arachnids? That number is at a minuscule 1 percent.

There is a simple problem here: if we don’t know whether a species exists and how many of them there are, we have no idea whether they are at risk and need protection under the Endangered Species Act or some state-level equivalent. Even when species are known to be in trouble, they are rarely protected.

Currently, only 94.7 percent of at-risk insects and arachnids have no federal or state legal protection. Birds, on the other hand, likely because they are pretty to look at and are much more noticeable to the naked eye, receive federal protection about 27.7 percent of the time when they’re considered at risk.

The few bugs that get attention are also the ones people like looking at. It’s the usual suspects of pretty, abundant, and noticeable ones like butterflies, moths, dragonflies, etc. Less glamorous groups, like stoneflies and caddisflies, don’t get such protections, even though scientists use them as indicators of whether water is clean. Yet they are among the most threatened insect species in North America and among the most overlooked by conservation laws.

The study also found a troubling, entirely predictable pattern: states with big oil, gas, and mining operations were less likely to have endangered species laws that cover insects at all. This is especially troubling since the regions where you see this most, the American South and the West, are our major hotspots for insect biodiversity.

Insects and arachnids contribute around $57 billion annually to the US economy in one way or another. Yet, the vast majority of them are so understudied that we have no idea if they’re disappearing.

If they do, our ecosystem will be in trouble, and we won’t just be losing that 57 billion from the economy every year. That will have a cascading effect on multiple sectors for decades to come.

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