Seems to fit here 
www.wsj.com/articles/the-bugs-we-cant-live-without-11561042039
The Bugs We Can’t Live Without Insect populations are in dramatic decline,
and the consequences could be serious for everything from waste management
to agriculture By Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, 6/20/19, Wall St. Journal
Most of us tend to see insects largely as a nuisance—buzzing, biting,
stinging pests to be avoided, shunned or even eradicated. But if you value
life as we know it, you should rejoice in the omnipresence of our
six-legged companions and even fear for their fate. Insects are the little
cogs that make the natural world go ’round—and many of these cogs are now
in danger of coming loose.
Despite a 479-million-year track record of success going back to before
the dinosaurs, bugs have lately begun to struggle. We don’t have a
complete global picture of insect populations, but data suggest that while
we humans have doubled our population in the past 40 years, the number of
insects has been reduced by almost half, according to a 2014 report in the
journal Science. An April review of 73 historical reports of insect
declines, published in the journal
Biological Conservation, concluded that nearly a third of evaluated
insects are threatened by extinction, compared with 18% for vertebrates.
Why does this disappearance matter? Because biodiversity underpins all the
natural goods and services that we humans rely on, and insects make up an
outsize proportion of that diversity. Three quarters of all known plant
and animal species on this planet are insects. Those giant quantities help
to keep nature in balance,
so anything that affects them ultimately affects us. A decline in the
number and diversity of insects and other small species ripples through
the ecosystem, interfering with a range of essential functions. As the
renowned Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson wrote in 1987, “The truth is that
we need invertebrates but they don’t need us…if invertebrates were to
disappear, I doubt that the human species could live more than a few
months.”
Insect populations are falling for a number of interconnected reasons.
Most important is our ever-more-intensive use of land for agriculture &
development, which leaves fewer intact habitats, from rain forests to
flower meadows. On top of that, climate change, pollution and pesticides,
as well as the movement of species to non-native environments around the
world, have had a destructive cascading effect on local ecosystems & their
insects.
Even increased use of artificial light has an impact on some species.
At what cost? Among the essential services that insects perform for us and
the planet is waste management. Like janitors in offices or apartment
buildings, they do a lot to clean out the trash.
As life ends for plants and animals of all sizes, from midges to moose,
somebody or something has to break up and eliminate the dead organic
matter. It might not be a hotshot job, but the processes of decomposition
and decay are critical to life on Earth.
Herbivores eat just a tenth of all the plants that sprout & grow.
The rest, 90% of all plant production, is left lying on the ground.
As a result, there are impressive amounts of protein & carbohydrate in
need of recycling. The patient chomping of insects on rotten remains not
only clears the ground of dead plants and animals.
Just as importantly, it returns the nutrients to the soil.
Without it, new life could not grow.
Or consider dung. It contains useful nutrients, but it also carries large
quantities of bacteria and disease-causing parasites. Insects are the
primary agents for dealing with the waste. When they’re not available,
very bad things happen. In 1788, the first cows set their hoofs on
Australian soil, and by around 1900, there were more than a million of
them. But Australian dung beetles were used to recycling marsupial dung
and could not tackle the cow chips.
Up to 500,000 acres of grazing land a year were becoming unusable because
of the crust of dung. It wasn’t until a large research project in the
1960s and ‘70s brought in cow-dung decomposing beetles from abroad that
the problem was finally solved.
Then there’s our food supply. Insect pollination increases fruit or seed
quantity in three quarters of our global food crops. And it’s not just
bees that do this work. It involves many players—
an estimated 20,000 different species of flies, beetles, ants,
wasps, butterflies & other insects. The annual global contribution of the
pollinating insects is estimated to be worth as much as $577 billion,
according to a 2016 study by a U.N.-sponsored panel on biodiversity. That
impact has increased as the volume of agri- cultural production dependent
on insect population has tripled over the last 50 years, the panel says,
even as pollinating species have declined. (In addition to food crops,
pollination also improves crops that provide biofuels, natural fibers,
medicines and construction materials.)
Insects are irreplaceable as a staple food for numerous larger animals.
Freshwater fish live largely off insects. Mosquitoes, mayflies and
dragonflies, to name but a few, all have their immature stages in ponds or
rivers. Most of these critters will never reach adult life and learn to
fly. Instead they end up as snacks for trout or salmon—fish that might
later land on your lunch plate.
Birds depend on insects, too. More than 60% of the world’s bird species
are insect eaters. Each year, they gobble down an estimated 500 million
metric tons of their four-winged distant relatives—
more than the weight of the entire human world population on Earth.
Without insects, the world’s populations of larger insectivorous species
like birds, bats and freshwater fish would simply collapse. Consider a
study by U.S. and Mexican researchers of the rain forests of Puerto Rico,
published in October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. Dramatically declining insect numbers there between 1976 and
2012 are turning into losses for insect-eating birds, lizards and frogs.
Researchers found that the
insectivorous birds declined by 53% in just 15 years, and the relative
decline for six common bird species was dependent on the proportion of
insects in their diet (seed- and fruit-eating birds were relatively
unaffected).
To stabilize insect populations, we need to find ways to take care of
their habitats, whether in rain forests or cities and suburbs.
Many specialized insects cannot survive in a transformed modern landscape.
Nature reserves and other conservation areas are crucial to safeguard
unique species, but it is also important to retain wilderness zones. In
forests, that may mean ensuring enough old, dead trees to house their
requisite share of insect ecosystems.
We also can achieve a great deal with belts of trees and bushes alongside
streams in residential areas, green shoulders and hedges along roads, and
borders of wildflower meadows along the edges of fields. High biological
diversity makes ecosystems more resistant and resilient, thereby more
robust in the face of climate change.
A varied global landscape provides many more opportunities for the
flourishing of complex insect life—and everything that depends on it,
including us.