The Disappearing Insects

For twenty-seven summers, volunteers in Krefeld, Germany set out the same insect traps, and what they found changed how scientists think about the living world: the flying insect biomass in protected nature reserves had fallen by more than seventy percent. The Disappearing Insects is a careful, vivid investigation of what is happening to the small creatures that hold ecosystems together. Travel from the windshields that once splattered with bugs to a rainforest that went quiet, from the monarch wintering mountains of Mexico to a bumble bee on the endangered list, and from vanishing fireflies to meadows plowed to the edge. Weigh the alarming headlines against what the data really show, learn why a managed honeybee hive is not the wild, and see what seed coatings, lost habitat, light pollution, and warming have to do with it. Then follow the food chain upward to the birds, fish, and farms that depend on insects, and to the people finding solutions that are working. Clear, balanced, and grounded in the research, this is the story of the quiet collapse beneath our feet, and of what we can still do about it.