Run an insect trap through a German nature reserve today and it will catch a fraction of the insects it would have trapped in 1989. Entomologists in the Krefeld region did exactly that, season after season, and when they totaled 27 years of catch they found flying insect biomass had fallen more than 75 percent inside protected areas, where nature is supposed to be safe.
Since the turn of the century, two crashes have run in parallel: a steady draining of vertebrate life we know, including the mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles we notice, and a quieter, vaster loss of insects, the wildlife almost no one counts but nearly everything depends on. Much of the underlying data describing the loss of biodiversity reaches back to 1970. What belongs to this century is precise measurement built on long-term studies that matured after 2000 and turned scattered alarm into a documented trend. This is what we have lost while we were watching, and what that loss takes from the generations who come after.
The vertebrate ledger
According to the World Wildlife Foundation and Zoological Society of London’s 2024 Living Planet Report, between 1970 and 2020, the average monitored population of 5,495 vertebrate species shrank by 73 percent. That figure is widely misread, so state it precisely: it does not mean three-quarters of all animals are gone. It means that across the populations scientists track, the average decline was 73 percent, with roughly half falling while half held steady or grew. The average is pulled down by steep losses, including freshwater animal populations that are down 85 percent and wildlife in Latin America and the Caribbean down 95 percent.
The losses are not evenly spread. In North America, a 2019 study in Science tallied a net loss of nearly 3 billion breeding birds since 1970—about one in four—across 529 species, including common backyard birds nobody thought were at risk.
Amphibians are in the worst shape of any vertebrate group. The second Global Amphibian Assessment, published in 2023, found 41 percent of species threatened with extinction, with climate change driving 39 percent of the deteriorations recorded since 2004.
Some losses are now permanent at a level above the species. In a 2023 paper, Gerardo Ceballos and Paul Ehrlich documented that 73 entire vertebrate genera—whole branches of the animal family tree, not single twigs—have gone extinct since 1500, a rate they argue is far faster than the background pace of the past million years. The IUCN Red List, the most comprehensive tally we have, now lists more than 47,000 of its 169,000-plus inventory of species as threatened.
The insect crash almost no one sees
Vertebrates, which tend to the fuzzy and cute, are the animals we grieve. Insects are the ones we depend on, and their decline is harder to see because so few long-term counts exist. But the Krefeld study cracked that open in 2017. Its more-than-75-percent biomass drop could not be explained by weather, habitat type, or land use inside the reserves—the decline was systemic, not local.
A 2020 meta-analysis in Science, combining 166 long-term datasets, put the trend on a global footing: terrestrial insects are declining roughly 9 percent per decade. The same analysis carried a genuinely hopeful finding, that freshwater insects in some regions were recovering, a rebound the authors link to decades of cleaning up polluted rivers and lakes. Declines varied enough from place to place that local action clearly matters. The crash is neither uniform nor does it represent destiny; human decisions can change the future of biodiversity.
The vertebrate and insect declines are not separate emergencies. They feed each other. Insects are the base of the terrestrial food web. The birds North America lost are, in large part, insectivores that ran short of food. Pull biomass out of the bottom and the animals above it follow.
Insects also do work the economy quietly runs on. The IPBES global pollinator assessment found that about 75 percent of the world’s leading food crops depend at least partly on animal pollination. Eighty-seven of the 115 most important crops, from apples and coffee to cocoa, are dependent on robust insect life for pollination. Decomposition of waste, pest control, and soil formation lean on insects too.
These are services no human system currently prices, and none we know how to replace at scale; visions of robotic pollinators, while shiny promises, are far narrower options than the headlines suggest. The machines that work today operate only in controlled environments on crops that already pollinate themselves. Arugga’s ground robots and Polybee’s airflow drones lift greenhouse tomato and berry yields somewhere between 5 and 20 percent, doing the job a handheld wand or a captive bumblebee would otherwise do indoors.
Harvard’s RoboBee, in development since 2013, learned to land reliably in 2025 and still flies on an external tether, carrying no power, sensors, or brain of its own. Nothing on the horizon pollinates an almond orchard or a squash field the way a wild bee does—for free, across miles, while reproducing itself. The robots are a useful supplement for high-value crops under glass and a poor stand-in for the living systems the insect crash is dismantling.
What the next generation inherits
This is where the loss becomes a loss to the future, the question this series keeps returning to.
A child born this year will inherit a thinner world,with fewer birds at the feeder, fewer insects on the windshield, fewer fish in the river. That is the visible loss. The harder losses are what disappear before ever being catalogued: species that vanish unstudied, taking with them chemistry, behavior, and genetic strategies that might have seeded a medicine, a crop trait, or a material we cannot yet imagine because the organism that suggested it is gone.
Extinction is the one environmental harm with no recovery path. A polluted river can be cleaned; a warmed atmosphere can, in principle, be cooled over centuries. A lineage that ends does not come back. The crashes of the past quarter-century are, in that sense, the most irreversible losses we are recording.
The evidence also refuses despair. Half the tracked vertebrate populations are stable or growing. Raptors and waterfowl in North America rebounded after targeted protection and the banning of specific chemicals. Freshwater insects recover where water quality improves. The losses are real and largely human-caused, which means human choices still bend the curve.
What You Can Do
- Make a patch of ground work for insects. Native plants, no pesticides, and leaf litter left over winter give pollinators and the food web a foothold—even a balcony planter counts.
- Cut light pollution. Shielded, warm-toned outdoor lighting on timers eases a documented and growing pressure on nocturnal insects.
- Support long-term monitoring. Community-science projects—bird counts, butterfly and bee surveys—supply the very datasets that made these crashes visible in the first place.
- Push where large-scale impact can happen. Individual yards help locally; pesticide rules, habitat corridors, and protected-area funding decide outcomes at the landscape level. Back them.
- Ease land pressure through what you eat. Habitat conversion for agriculture is a leading driver of both crashes; cutting food waste and high-impact consumption lowers it.
The post Vertebrate and Insect Extinctions in the 21st Century appeared first on Earth911.
