insects

By Tyler Wells Lynch For years, Toni Genberg assumed a healthy garden was a healthy habitat. That’s how she approached the landscaping around her home in northern Virginia. On trips to the local gardening center, she would privilege aesthetics, buying whatever looked pretty, “which was typically ornamental or invasive plants,” she said. Then, in 2014, […]

Human activity threatens to make summer nights a little less magical. This is a composite of several long exposure photographs of fireflies in a yard in Milo, Maine, U.S. Mike Lewinski / Unsplash A study published in BioScience Monday set out to assess the greatest threats to the world’s approximately 2,000 species of fireflies. While […]

Two men connected to a famous monarch butterfly reserve in Mexico have been found dead within a week of each other, raising concerns for the safety of environmental activists in the country. Homero Gómez González, 50, who managed a butterfly reserve in Mexico’s Michoacán state and campaigned against illegal logging in the butterflies’ winter habitat, […]

Large swarms of locusts have ravaged crops in East Africa, prompting authorities in Somalia to declare a national emergency, making it the first country in the region to do so, as Al Jazeera reported. As EcoWatch noted last week, this locust storm came across the Red Sea from Yemen and first attacked Eritrea, Djibouti and […]

Hanging on a gate is a sign reading: “Potatoes — healthy and delicious.” The slogan, to which the word “rare” could justifiably be added, is in line with Cornel Lindemann-Berk’s philosophy of quality over quantity. “We don’t have enough rain in the summer,” he tells DW. “And since we don’t want to water them, we’ve […]

In an effort to aid North American bumblebee conservation, a group of California researchers has identified which flowers certain bee species prefer. There are nearly 20,000 known bee species in the world, 4,000 of which are native to the U.S., according to the U.S. Geological Society. Bees pollinate roughly three-quarters of all fruits, nuts and […]

By Ajit Niranjan Seven ‘no-regret’ actions could rescue insects on the road to extinction, a new roadmap for conservation says, helping ecosystems even where a lack of research means scientists cannot prove benefits to individual species. Earth’s biodiversity is declining at unprecedented rates but population data on insects — which are small, diverse and abundant […]

East Africa is facing its worst locust infestation in decades, and the climate crisis is partly to blame. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) said that Ethiopia and Somalia had not seen a swarm this bad in 25 years, while Kenya was facing its largest infestation in 70 years, BBC News reported. “Vulnerable families […]