The Guardian view on vanishing insects: a silent threat | Editorial

The astonishing global collapse in their numbers is a danger to almost every other speciesOne of the classic moments in the Simpsons comes when the venal TV anchorman Kent Brockman sees on his screen an ant crawling across a lens and assumes at once that this is not a negligible terrestrial arthropod but a giant alien descending from space that will become one of “our new insect overlords”, a species to which he instantly and publicly pledges allegiance. The joke hinges on the idea t