Perspective: Where might be many tropical insects?

Abstract

I have been watching the gradual and very visible decline of Mexican and Central American insect density and species richness since 1953 and Winnie since 1978. The loss is very real for essentially all higher taxa, and the reasons are very evident: intense forest and agricultural simplification of very large areas, massive use of pesticides, habitat fragmentation, and at least since the 1980's, ever-increasing climate change in temperature, rainfall, and synchronization of seasonal cues. There is no ecological concept suggesting that this biodiversity and habitat impoverishment is restricted to this portion of the Neotropics, and our 50 years of occasional visits to other parts of the tropics suggest the same. We are losing most of the insect community that is still in the cloud forests due to the drying of the tops of tropical mountains, just as we are losing the huge expanses of insect communities that once occupied the fertile soils, weather, and water of the lowland tropics. Today we have unimaginable access to the world's biodiversity through the internet, roads, dwellings, education, bioliterate societies, DNA barcoding, genome sequencing, and human curiosity. The wild world gains from our understanding that it needs large and diverse terrain, relief from hunting trees and animals, site-specific restoration, profit-sharing with its societies, and tolerance of humans and our extended genomes. But if our terrestrial world remains constructed through constant war with the arthropod world, along with the plants, fungi and nematodes, human society will lose very big time. The house is burning. We do not need a thermometer. We need a fire hose.