The Fiji Ant study provides new evidence of the drop in insects on remote islands | Insects

Insects living on the island have not been spared the ravages of humanity which have pushed so many of their invertebrate relatives in free falls around the world, according to new research on the populations of Fijian ants.

Hundreds of thousands of insect species have been lost in the past 150 years and it is believed that the world is now losing between 1% and 2.5% per year of its remaining insect biomass – a decline so steep that many entomologists say that we live through an “apocalypse of insects”. However, long -term data for individual insect populations are sparse and unequal.

A new study by the Revue Science highlights what is happening to insects in some of the most distant places in the world. “There is a global concern concerning” the apocalypse of insects “, but a lot of uncertainty and debate on what really happens,” said Evan Economic, entomologist at the Japanese institute Okinawa of science and technology and co-author of research.

“We have a new type of proof of something that we have suspected for a long time: that endemic insect species in the remote islands are in decline.”

The economy and its colleagues have analyzed the genomes of the ants of the Fijian archipelago have met in recent decades and have been held in museum collections. From thousands of samples, they used scientific methods to deduce if the ants increased or shrink according to the variations in DNA sequences between individuals.

They found that 79% of the endemic antimic antimes of the Fiji were in decline, with impacts starting at the time of the arrival of humans on the islands about 3000 years ago and accelerating in the last 300 years – coinciding with European contact, world trade and the arrival of modern agriculture.

For the distant tropical islands where complete historical observations are rare, it is difficult to understand how insects were injured by human activities but of crucial importance. The islands are hot dots of biodiversity due to their isolation. This also makes them particularly vulnerable to extinctions.

“The distant ocean islands such as the species of Galápagos, Hawaii and Fiji have evolved in isolation and often have spectacular differences compared to their continental parents,” said Economo.

The search adds to a patchwork card results of global ecosystems. In Germany, the abundance of flying insects in 63 natural reserves dropped by 75% in less than 30 years. In the United States, the number of beetles has dropped 83% in 45 years, and around 15% of tiger beetle species are declined. The population of butterflies from Europe has decreased by 36% over the past decade.

Insect populations are hammered on all sides while loss of habitat, the use of pesticides, climate rupture and light pollution all add to the emptying of wetlands, forests and prairies in the world.

“We must examine insects in more places, with more methods, to understand what is happening to insects and other invertebrates,” said Economo.

Find more age of the extinction coverage here and follow the journalists of biodiversity Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian application for more natural coverage