It's a good idea to have a search engine compatible device handy when reading Dave Goulson's "Dumb Earth".

You want to know what they look like: the moth that draws salty tears from under the eyelids of sleeping birds with its trunk.

The female dust louse with the sperm-sucking penis.

The leafcutter ant, which rides on its own kind and fends off enemies from above.

Petra Ahne

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

At the end of each chapter is a small portrait of an insect, a testament to both the magnitude of the project Goulson undertook and the skill with which he carried it out.

First, there is the big, frightening whole, backed up by impressive figures: that fifty to ninety percent of insects have disappeared since the 1970s;

that of the five million species of insects, four-fifths have not even been described yet, but hundreds of species become extinct every day;

that 87 percent of all plants depend on being pollinated by insects, including those on which fruit and vegetables grow.

That the disappearance of arthropods will break down food chains, spread pests and leave soils uncultivated.

However, Goulson refuses to link insects' right to exist to their ecosystem services.

Putting price tags on nature has lately been used to help prove the inevitability of nature conservation.

But even the economist Partha Dasgupta, who has produced the most informed account of how biodiversity loss is hurting the economy, sees such calculations as just a tool over which the value of nature itself must not be forgotten.

Real dramas take place in just a few square centimetres

Goulson, a biologist, bumblebee expert and professor at the University of Sussex, also wants to share the sheer enthusiasm for insects that has defined his life since he packed caterpillars in his school lunch box and carried them home when he was six.

His catchy descriptions make the abstract swarm of insects swarming through the book concrete, we meet characters who, from a human point of view, evolution has given strange behavior.

There are honey pot ants that fill themselves almost to bursting with nectar and serve as living storage vessels for other ants.

Wasps that inject their eggs into caterpillars, which are then eaten by the wasp larvae.

Termites that blow themselves up to fight off invaders.

These dramas take place in a few square centimetres, insects tend to be small to tiny.

Many people either overlook them or perceive them as a crawling, stinging nuisance.

In order to get involved with them, you need the will to change your perspective.

That's the problem with Goulson's book, the title of which echoes Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring": If you've never bent over a dark spot on the floor and been fascinated by how it becomes a delicate creature, you will hardly undertake a whole book on insects.

Goulson is aware of this hurdle and does everything he can to win over even the most casual reader.

Like quite a few scientists from areas in which knowledge about climate change and the loss of species is accumulating,

the communication of these insights has become his mission.

He is the narrator among entomologists, skilfully spanning the primordial seas, where the insects' success story, which has been going on for four hundred million years, began, to agricultural landscapes that produce high yields but are unfriendly to the environment.

A reversal is still possible

Goulson was directly involved with a number of studies that raised public awareness of the alarming situation of insects: in 2015, the Krefeld Entomological Association contacted him and asked him for help in reviewing data.

The study, which became known as the Krefeld study, shows that insects have declined by 75 percent since the 1980s.

Goulson not only describes the results, but also the doubts that have been raised about their resilience, for example because the decline was documented by the biomass in the traps set up, which could theoretically have been due to the disappearance of only a few species with a larger body weight.

Long-term data series, which are sometimes hidden in old Excel spreadsheets, are now being searched for worldwide.

gaps in knowledge remain

There are several reasons for insect mortality: climate change, parasites introduced by global trade and above all the loss of habitat: habitats that become roads, settlements or farmland, which the use of fertilizers and pesticides turns into monocultures on which insects cannot grow To have a chance.

It is thanks to Goulson and his team that at least neonicotinoids are now largely banned in Europe: They proved that the insecticide does not remain in the plants that it is supposed to protect against pest infestation, but rather in wild flowers and hedge plants and, through them, also by bees becomes, which makes it become disoriented.

"Dumb Earth" makes it clear that the loss of biodiversity is just as urgent a problem as global warming.

Unlike climate change, everyone can get the comforting feeling that reversal is still possible.

Goulson described how to do this in his penultimate book, "Wildlife Gardening".

All you need is a balcony, a few insect-friendly plants and the willingness to take a close look.

Dave Goulson: "Dumb Earth".

Why we need to save the insects.

Translated from the English by Sabine Hübner.

Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2022. 368 pages, hardcover, €25.