If your summer road trips used to come with a splatter of bugs on the windshield, you may have noticed something’s changed: the bugs are gone.
It’s not just a trick of memory. Around the world, scientists are warning of a major insect decline. And while much of the research points to pesticides, habitat loss, and climate change, a team at Binghamton University is taking a different approach — by examining the science itself.
“Insects are really, really important for ecosystem function,” says Dr. Eliza Grames, assistant professor of biological sciences at Binghamton. “They’re pollinators, they decompose nutrients, they’re food for birds and bats and other species… and honestly, they’re just beautiful. Butterflies, dragonflies, who doesn’t like the idea of being able to fly or migrate?”
Instead of heading into the field, Grames and her team conducted a sweeping review of 175 studies published over the past eight years. Their goal: to figure out what the scientific community has, and hasn’t, been asking about insect decline.
“If we could get 600 scientists all in a room, all to write on a whiteboard together and say what they thought the causes of decline were… that’s essentially the approach we were taking,” Grames explains.
The idea of a global insect collapse first made headlines in 2017, after a study in Germany reported a more than 75% drop in flying insects over 27 years. Since then, researchers have raced to figure out what’s going on. But Grames noticed some critical gaps.
“We found that, you know, no one was thinking about natural disasters as a driver of insect biodiversity loss. Nobody was thinking about war as a driver of declines,” she says. “And so we want to get people together to go back through the literature, find studies that have been published on those topics, and figure out how important those different stressors really are for insect declines.”
Another issue? Bias. Grames says we tend to focus on the insects we find appealing—or beneficial.
“We found a really strong bias towards studying pollinators. So bees, butterflies, and I think it was only one review article was thinking about aquatic insects,” she says. “And even within pollinators, people will often focus on kind of the floral resource issues.”
But many insects, especially in their juvenile stages, have different needs, and sometimes, very different diets.
“So flies are really underappreciated pollinators,” Grames says. “They do a ton of work for us, and a lot of them in their juvenile stages, they're carnivorous, so they need decomposing flesh, as opposed to more flowers.”
To be clear, she’s not advocating for a yard full of rotting meat. But there are practical ways to make your outdoor space more insect-friendly.
“I think one of the things people can do that’s a really simple action is not to just plant wildflowers in your backyard, but also just have a sort of messy yard.”
When she’s not sorting through scientific literature, Grames likes to spend time with some of the insect world’s more under-appreciated species.
“I am partial to moths because I think they’re a little bit underappreciated,” she says. “It’s so neat to just go out at night and put up a light and have them all come to a sheet and see that much diversity in one spot.”
