The more you think about it, the more remarkable it seems – a whole world of life laid waste, devastated, with hardly anyone realising or taking on board the real scale of what has happened.
But then, not many people care about insects, hitherto the world’s most successful organisms, do they? Fixed, as the nature-loving population is, on vertebrates, on fur and on feather, there is very little attention available, still less sympathy, for the hordes of chitin-skeletoned little things that creep and crawl, or, as the great American naturalist E. O. Wilson called them, the little things that run the world.