Ideas & Essays · August 2026
Entomologist Jessica Ware, curator at the American Museum of Natural History, on the pace of global insect population decline compared to historical baselines. She traces it to habitat loss, pollution, and light pollution driven by human urbanization.
Transcript
Yeah. It's
my first inquiry with you. Does that relate at all to whatever impact climate change has on the world population of insects on bugs? And do they migrate? Do they hang out? Do they spring forth? Are these connected? So
insects we think are declining at a rate that we've never seen before. People after the Industrial Revolution, there's stuff in the literature that said, hey, like, I'm not sure, but I think this might have a negative impact on insects. And fast forward to the early 2010s, people started doing studies that showed that populations of a particular butterfly had dropped by 70%. Populations of this other species dropped by big numbers. And bug zappers
and raid spray are dying. They're doing their
job. Oh my
gosh. Are they really?
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