A looming 'insect apocalypse' could endanger global food supplies

Summary

Imagine driving down a highway in the summer. The windows are down, the music is loud, and the wind is whipping through your hair. Now picture your car's windshield. You might expect to see a handful of splats from unfortunate bugs. But 30 years ago, there would have been significantly more buggy skid marks plastered on the front of your vehicle."When I was a kid, you could go out driving in the summer, and you would come home and your car windshield was covered in bugs," said Cheryl Schultz, an ecologist at Washington State University. "Now, you can go across many areas at the same time of year and your windshield is clean."This phenomenon, called the "windshield test," is indicative of a larger, very worrying trend: Insects, particularly the flying ones that pollinate many crops, are in steep decline. This nosedive is disrupting ecosystems around the world, and could jeopardize the global food supply. But tracking the decrease of insect populations over the past three decades has proved tricky — and stopping the decline may be even harder.However, researchers are working quickly to find ways to stem the tide and even reverse the trend. Key to that is a collaborative approach that includes local and federal conservation efforts, new pollinator habitats, and a reduction in pesticide use.The age of the "insect apocalypse"Both the total number of insects and the number of insect species have been declining for decades in pretty much every place scientists have looked — prompting researchers to dub it "the insect apocalypse." Global bee biodiversity is down 25% compared with pre-1995 numbers, according to research published in 2021. A sweeping 2025 study showed that butterfly abundance across the U.S. fell by 22% over the past two decades. And a study in Germany found a whopping 76% loss of flying insects in some of the country's forested areas over 27 years."It's a worrisome thing," Scott Black, executive director of the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conse...