THE END IS NEAR …! (Well in lunar time +/- an eon.)

Something you will never see on TV or any of the so called major media outlets. If you can get your hands on a copy of the latest National Geographic magazine, May 2020 issue — the feature article is “Where Have All the Insects Gone?” which reports from around the world point out the fact that recently bugs have gone missing at alarming rates and that could be disastrous for us.

Since first appearing some 400 million years ago, 200 million before the dinosaurs, insects have changed this dead piece of rock into a life supporting environment and continue to do so today by recycling all our trash (and poop) into viable products.

I’ll cite two examples from the many in this article. Entomologists from Krefeld, Germany, collected flying insects for two weeks in August 1994 and, at the same site with an identical trap, in August 2016 gave a shocking result: a 76% drop in insect biomass…!

It’s hard to assign a dollar value to all the work done by insects but in 2006, a pair of entomologists looking at only four services of the many performed by insects and came up with a figure of $57 billion a year for the U.S. alone.

The cause of this recent drop in insect population is a scientific mystery but our best guess is it a combination of many factors, including climate change, but its real and when the insects are gone the human race won’t be far behind — laugh but we have been warned. Planet Earth will sail along but without life as we know it.

John Richcreek, Seymour