DNA analysis of endemic specimens in museums finds 79% of ant populations in Pacific archipelago are shrinking
Island-dwelling insects have not been spared the ravages of humanity that have pushed so many of their invertebrate kin into freefall around the world, new research on Fijian ant populations has found.
Hundreds of thousands of insect species have been lost over the past 150 years and it is believed the world is now losing between 1% and 2.5% a year of its remaining insect biomass – a decline so steep that many entomologists say we are living through an “insect apocalypse”. Yet long-term data for individual insect populations is sparse and patchy.
A new study in the journal Science sheds light on what is happening to insects in some of the world’s most distant places. “There is global concern about the ‘insect apocalypse’, but a lot of uncertainty and debate about what is actually happening,” said Evan Economo, an entomologist at Japan’s Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and co-author of the research.
“We have a new kind of evidence of something we long suspected: that insect species endemic to remote islands are in decline.”
