Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished.  A “bottom-up trophic cascade”, in which the knock-on effects of the insect collapse surge up through the food chain.

“I don’t think most people have a systems view of the natural world,” Lister said. “But it’s all connected and when the invertebrates are declining the entire food web is going to suffer and degrade. It is a system-wide effect.”

To understand the global scale of an insect collapse that has so far only been glimpsed, Lister says, there is an urgent need for much more research in many more habitats. “More data, that is my mantra,” he said.

The problem is that there were very few studies of insect numbers in past decades to serve as a baseline, but Lister is undeterred: “There’s no time like the present to start asking what’s going on.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems

A trend of planting wildflowers on solar sites could maintain habitat for disappearing bees and butterflies. A Scientific American article …

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-farms-shine-a-ray-of-hope-on-bees-and-butterflies/

Benjamin F. Kaluza1, Helen M.Wallace, TimA. Heard, Vanessa Minden,
Alexandra Klein & Sara D. Leonhard

“Bee population declines are often linked to human impacts, especially habitat and biodiversity loss, but empirical evidence is lacking. To clarify the link between biodiversity loss and bee decline, we examined how floral diversity affects (reproductive) fitness and population growth of a social stingless bee. For the frst time, we related available resource diversity and abundance to resource (quality and quantity) intake and colony reproduction, over more than two years. Our results reveal plant diversity as key driver of bee fitness. Social bee colonies were ftter and their populations grew faster in more forally diverse environments due to a continuous supply of food resources. Colonies responded to high plant diversity with increased resource intake and colony food stores. Our fndings thus point to biodiversity loss as main reason for the observed bee decline.”

Read the paper published in Nature:- social_bees_are fitter_in_a more_biodiverse_environment