When a fourth grader named Rex wrote to the American Museum of Natural History to ask what was the most endangered animal on Earth, he probably didn’t expect one of the answers to be the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect. But it’s true that most endangered animals are insects. Insects make up about 40 percent of all animals on the planet. That’s closer to 97 percent if you count all invertebrates (animals without a backbone, which includes worms, spiders, mussels, snails, clams and more). So when we say “animals,” and think only about mammals and birds, we’re missing most of the picture. And that’s a bigger problem than you might think.
The crash of an insect population, due mostly to the usual suspects — habitat loss, chemical pollution, light pollution, climate change — affects everything else up the food chain and damages entire ecosystems in ways we don’t fully understand. And it’s what we don’t know that makes the problem of insect extinctions so fiendishly difficult.
