Ideas & Essays · August 2026
Jessica Ware, on why insect populations are collapsing so fast: habitat destroyed for cities, warming temperatures, light pollution disrupting insect navigation and mating. She's blunt that the decline isn't a natural cycle but an ongoing, human-driven process.
Transcript
Oh, so yeah, so ticks are not bugs. They're arachnids. It's not that we're bad at killing ticks. It's that because of climate change, because of changing temperatures, ticks from other regions are moving and they're expanding their ranges. That's why we have the lone star tick here, for example, which is the one that causes a meat allergy. It can carry a pathogen that can cause a meat allergy. It's not, that's because of us. We changed the climate and now they've been able to move in. So we've created habitats
that previously were hostile to some varieties of insects. Now they can hang out and do the backstroke. And now we're affected by that because that was a place we created. Yeah,
we created them. The catastrophe that we're seeing, we created and we're kind of keeping it going. We could make decisions that would actually have really beneficial impacts on insects that we should make.
Why don't we make that? I can't just go past this because I know people who've been bitten by the lone star tick. They can't. So it's not that they can't eat meat, apparently. They can't eat mammals. So they can eat chicken and fish. So I heard. You know what I think? I think vegetarians created this in the lab. Yeah.
They were like, what
could we do? Aflogal. That's a good
More from StarTalk Radio
