[imagesource: Getty Images]

It is, quite frankly, lazy to label bugs as irritating pests or dangerous enemies because they are really so much more than that.

Ignore the mosquito in your ear and the fly on your food, because when they’re not pestering us in our homes, they’re lovingly keeping life on planet Earth afloat.

Besides making up almost half of the animal kingdom and being an integral part of the ecosystem, insects are also fascinatingly dynamic and bizarre.

I mean the Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly has an eye on the tip of its penis, for heaven’s sake.

But the joy they can bring us is under major threat as we face one of the worst crises in our time: the insect apocalypse.

Per The Guardian‘s Oliver Milman and his book The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World, scientists are registering an alarming decline in insect populations, with the United Nations estimating that half a million species could be lost by the midpoint of this century.

This could be dire for food security, the creations of new medicines and, of course, the ecosystems we all rely upon to sustain life.

It is not fair that we are creating their version of hell on Earth when they’ve only ever been there for us throughout history.

Say a silent thanks to the “founding mother of the US,” marsh mosquitoes that forced enemies to surrender during the American Revolution, as well as the fruit fly that sacrificed itself to test the potential impact of cosmic radiation on astronauts, becoming the first animal in space.

There are also tiny pollinators that help cacao plants and dairy-producing cows thrive so as to bring us the pleasure of chocolate and ice cream.

Michelle Trautwein, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences, said that each insect is like an “alien life form with a detailed life history that often is so bizarre, you couldn’t create it as fiction if you wanted to”.

Let’s take a closer look, shall we.

Bees:

We are well aware that these buzzing beauties are integral pollinators in the global food supply chain, but there is so much more that they can do – which is to say almost everything, really:

Honeybees understand the concept of zero, can add and subtract numbers and can even be trained to detect land mines more effectively than sniffer dogs.

Their pollination services have become so valuable in the US that there is a growing criminal operation among “bee rustlers” to steal beehives in California’s farming heartland.

Some bumblebees, meanwhile, are able to fly at an altitude of 5,500 meters (18,000 feet) above sea level (a height just shy of Mount Kilimanjaro’s summit), can be taught to play soccer, and remember good and bad experiences, suggesting they have a form of consciousness.

They can even work together to open the lid on a Fanta bottle.

Beetles:

“If you put one of every animal into a bag and pulled one out, you’d have a one in five chance of picking a beetle,” said someone on Reddit, which is fortunate because these little critters have the abilities of tiny superheroes:

The world is awash with not rats, sheep or even humans, but beetles – around 350,000 species and counting. Some have adapted to humanity’s altering of the world, such as the weevils that feast on our grain.

Others are noteworthy in their own right. A horned dung beetle is so strong that if it were a human, it would be able to hold aloft six double-decker buses.

Another type of beetle, a water beetle called Regimbartia attenuata, can even survive being eaten by a frog by swimming through the amphibian’s stomach and crawling out of its bottom.

Mosquitoes:

Try not to judge mozzies too quickly.

Sure, they bring deadly diseases like malaria and dengue, which is feared to spread as “we continue to heat up the world to their liking,” but they also work hard to do good:

Some entomologists have warm feelings towards mosquitoes, pointing to their pollination of certain flowers and their little-known environmental work, where they help cycle nutrients through soils and plants and provide food for animals higher up in the food chain, such as frogs and birds.

If mosquitoes were eradicated there would be a hugely detrimental impact on the world as we know it.

Cockroaches:

I love to hate the common cockroach that has made leaps and bound in adapting themselves to our homes.

Without thinking of them crawling in your sink, these creatures are objectively marvels:

Slow-motion video footage reveals that the cockroach can crash into a wall at high speed with no loss of momentum before scaling it vertically.

These great survivors can fit into cracks as thin as a small coin, bite with a force 50 times their body weight, and survive for two weeks after being beheaded.

We can learn a lot from them, I guess.

They also provide fun pets, if you’re in Australia at least, where many people enjoy the company of giant burrowing cockroaches.

Insects are clearly precious to existence on this planet, and we should really be working hard to protect them as they prepare to battle the environmental changes we have caused.

[source:guardian]