Is the Insect Apocalypse Really Upon Us?

In 1828, a teenager named Charles Darwin opened a letter to his cousin with “I am dying by inches, from not having anybody to talk to about insects.” Almost two centuries on, Darwin would probably be thrilled and horrified: People are abuzz about insects, but their discussions are flecked with words such as apocalypse and Armageddon.

The drumbeats of doom began in late 2017, after showed that the total mass of local flying insects had fallen by 80 percent in three decades. The alarms intensified after published a on the decline of insect life late last year. And panic truly set in this month when the researchers Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris Wyckhuys, having , claimed that “insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” , , wrote that “insects could vanish within a century”—a crisis that Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys believe could lead to a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.”