My sister shared this image of the Spiny Flower Mantis with me. Call it a work of God or evolution it is still a wonderment. I contrasted it to nightmarish news stories about the loss of insect life all over the world that has been reported the past two years. Humans have riddled the Earth’s most fecund locales with herbicides, insecticides, and chemicals. The fewer insects the fewer birds, frogs and other insectivores upon which the terrestrial food chain depends not to mention all the pollinators which all our most common plants, wild and agricultural depend on for propagation. The latest National Geographic has a front cover full of insects with the heading “You’ll miss them when they’re gone.”
Paging through the magazine I came upon an arresting visualization of our decimation of insects. In Krefeld, Germany in 1994 all the insects captured in a two week span in August 1994 on the left was compared with the insects captured in the same time period in 2020.
Corona virus is far from our worst nightmare.
