1Were every insect on Earth weighed together, their mass would dwarf humanity's many times over, yet their disappearance passes almost unremarked.
2Entomologists speak of a windscreen phenomenon: drivers of a certain age recall splattered glass, while today's windscreens remain eerily pristine.
3The data, patchy though they are, sketch a downward trajectory that an increasing number of researchers do not hesitate to call catastrophic.
4In one much-cited German study, flying insect biomass in protected reserves plummeted by more than three quarters within a single generation.
5That such a collapse could unfold inside nature reserves, ostensibly the sanctuaries of the natural world, gives the finding its peculiar sting.
6The culprits are manifold: industrial agriculture's chemical regimen, the effacement of hedgerows, light pollution, and a climate increasingly out of joint.
7Insects, for all their want of charisma, underpin the pollination of crops, the churning of soil, and the diets of countless birds.
8Remove them, and the edifice of terrestrial life does not so much crumble as unravel, thread by inconspicuous thread.
9What makes the crisis insidious is precisely its quietness; extinction here arrives not with a bang but with an absence.
10Remedies exist, and some are disarmingly modest: mow less, spray nothing, and leave corners of the garden to their own devices.
11Whether governments will muster the will to act at scale, before the silence becomes irrevocable, is another matter entirely.