You may not believe it when you’ve been devoured by bugs at a garden party, or are in a constant state of purging spiders from your home, but the insect population worldwide is declining at a potentially detrimental rate.

While many bug-phobic people may find themselves cheering this statement, it could be very bad for the state of our planet and way of life as we know it.

That’s because bugs play a huge part in our ecosystems, from feeding the smaller creatures that we know and love, to pollinating the crops we need to feed the world’s ever-increasing human population.

According to researchers from Binghamton University, State University of New York, there are far more reasons for this sorry decline than just the intensification of agriculture.

Though many people worldwide care about the decline in bug populations, the research team found that while there are many different reasons for it, only a few common drivers in insect decline have actually been fully researched and their recommendations implemented.

Thus, they sought to perform a meta-analysis of the vast amounts of literature on bug decline, many of which focused on agricultural intensification, since the use of insecticides and lack of diversity in crops and plants both kills bugs and takes away their potential habitats and foodstuffs.

In their meta-analysis, the team sought to read and list all the different hypotheses for why bug populations declining. Though this was a huge undertaking – with over 3,000 possible links to insect decline and 500 hypotheses compiled – it was a worthwhile endeavour, as lead author Christopher Halsch explained in a statement:

“It’s really hard to talk to everybody about what everyone thinks. And so instead of getting 600 people into a room, we decided to take an approach where we read every paper that’s either a review or a meta-analysis. The idea was to read them and extract what people say are ‘causal pathways’. For example, agriculture leads to pollution, which leads to insect population decline. Then we built a giant network out of them to see which ideas are more often connected to each other, and which stressors are most often seen as the root causes.”

While many papers cited the statement that bug populations declined by 75% in under three decades, the meta-analysis – which was recently published in the journal BioScience – explains that while some bugs and potential factors are widely researched, others fall by the wayside.

In fact, as co-author Eliza Grames continued in the statement, some hugely impactful factors are never discussed, despite being listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as threats to insect conservation:

“None of the papers mentioned natural disasters. No papers looked at human intrusions and disturbance, or the effects of war on insects, or railroads. So there are these big areas that we know in general are threats to biodiversity, but the insect decline literature is really just focused on a few big stressors, as opposed to getting into the more specific ones, which are a lot more mechanistic.”

The reason for this huge gap in our understanding? Unlike crowd-pleasing bugs like bees and butterflies, some of the less known or loved bugs don’t get as much airtime. Even though their decline is just as detrimental to our planet and ecosystems, their relative lack of charisma is to their detriment when it comes to research, as Halsch continued:

“Bees are agriculturally important and people care about them. So there is a lot of research priority towards funding research on bees. So you get this kind of feedback: if you prioritize research on bees, you learn more about bees. One of the important points we’re trying to make in the paper is that conservation actions overly biased towards certain insects or certain stressors will likely be negative for many other insects. If we focus too much on bees and butterflies and their conservation, we will miss a lot of other species, most of them in fact.”

Sure, bees are important, but so are greenfly and weevils. If we are to protect our planet and all its life forms in the face of potential climate catastrophe, all insects need to be understood, not just the pretty ones.

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