Plague without locusts

摘要

"BE AFRAID. BE very afraid," says a character in "The Fly", a horror film about a man who turns into an enormous insect. It captures the unease and disgust people often feel for the kingdom of cockroaches, Zika-carrying mosquitoes and creepy-crawlies of all kinds. However, ecologists increasingly see the insect world as something to be frightened for, not frightened of. In the past two years scores of scientific studies have suggested that trillions of murmuring, droning, susurrating honeybees, butterflies, caddisflies, damselflies and beetles are dying off. "If all mankind were to disappear", wrote E.O. Wilson, the doyen of entomologists, "the world would regenerate...If insects were to vanish the environment would collapse into chaos."