What If All Insects Actually Disappeared?

What if insects disappeared tomorrow? A science documentary with the actual science explained. Pollination collapses, bees vanish, and the world quietly stops feeding you without insects. Everyone already knows the answer: No insects, no humanity, dead within months. That line comes from one 1987 essay by E. O. Wilson. It was never a study. Run the numbers and the truth is slower, stranger, and far worse than a quick apocalypse. In 1951, a Hungarian entomologist walked into an Australian paddock buried under 300 million cow pats a day: The continent had cattle, but no dung beetles that would touch them. A million hectares of grazing land ruined a year. One missing group of insects, and a continent drowning in its own manure. So what breaks, and in what order? 87.5% of flowering plants need animal pollinators, and a Harvard model in The Lancet put total pollinator loss at 1.42 million extra deaths a year, not from famine, but from calories with no vitamins. Then the bigger job nobody looks at: insects drive 29% of the carbon released from the world's dead wood. Take them out and forests don't just stop being pollinated. They stop rotting. Then the food web. 96% of land birds raise their young on insects; one chickadee nest eats 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars. A single mayfly hatch over Lake Erie once lifted 88 billion insects into the air, enough to feed 54 million baby birds, and it has fallen 84% in four years. Meanwhile in Sichuan, people hand-pollinate apple blossom with brushes of chicken feathers and cigarette filters, because the bees are gone. Here's the honest catch most videos leave out: you would not starve. Wheat, rice and maize are wind-pollinated. Nature once asked twenty ecologists what would happen if we wiped out mosquitoes, and most said ecosystems would absorb it, while malaria still kills 600,000 a year. But surviving is not the same as being fed. And this stopped being hypothetical long ago. Think about a windshield after a long summer drive thirty years ago. Then the last time you had to clean one. Would you bring back every insect if you could, mosquitoes included? Drop a comment. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE EXPERIMENT WE ALREADY RAN ▸ Bornemissza, G. F. (1976). "The Australian dung beetle project 1965–1975." Australian Meat Research Committee Review, 30: 1–30. ▸ Wilson, E. O. (1987). "The little things that run the world." Conservation Biology, 1(4): 344–346. WHAT POLLINATION HOLDS UP ▸ Ollerton, J., et al. (2011). "How many flowering plants are pollinated by animals?" Oikos, 120(3): 321–326. ▸ IPBES (2016). Assessment Report on Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production. IPBES. ▸ Toledo-Hernández, M., et al. (2017). "Neglected pollinators: Can enhanced pollination services improve cocoa yields?" Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 247: 137–148. ▸ Smith, M. R., et al. (2015). "Effects of decreases of animal pollinators on human nutrition and global health: a modelling analysis." The Lancet, 386(10007): 1964–1972. ▸ Partap, U., & Ya, T. (2012). "The human pollinators of fruit crops in Maoxian County, Sichuan, China." Mountain Research and Development, 32(2): 176–186. THE BIGGER JOB — DECOMPOSITION ▸ Seibold, S., et al. (2021). "The contribution of insects to global forest deadwood decomposition." Nature, 597(7874): 77–81. ▸ Griffiths, H. M., et al. (2019). "Termites can decompose more than half of deadwood in tropical rainforest." Current Biology, 29(4): R118–R119. ▸ Losey, J. E., & Vaughan, M. (2006). "The economic value of ecological services provided by insects." BioScience, 56(4): 311–323. THE FOOD WEB ▸ Narango, D. L., Tallamy, D. W., & Marra, P. P. (2018). "Nonnative plants reduce population growth of an insectivorous bird." PNAS, 115(45): 11549–11554. ▸ Stepanian, P. M., et al. (2020). "Declines in an abundant aquatic insect, the burrowing mayfly, across major North American waterways." PNAS, 117(6): 2987–2992. ▸ Labandeira, C. C., & Sepkoski, J. J. (1993). "Insect diversity in the fossil record." Science, 261(5119): 310–315. THE HONEST CATCH & THE DATA ▸ Fang, J. (2010). "Ecology: A world without mosquitoes." Nature, 466(7305): 432–434. ▸ World Health Organization (2024). World Malaria Report 2024. WHO. ▸ Hallmann, C. A., et al. (2017). "More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas." PLOS ONE, 12(10): e0185809. ▸ Sockman, K. W. (2025). "Long-term decline in montane insects under warming summers." Ecology, 106(9): e70187. ▸ Stork, N. E. (2018). "How many species of insects and other terrestrial arthropods are there on Earth?" Annual Review of Entomology, 63: 31–45. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ For business inquiries: [email protected] ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #Insects #WhatIfInsectsDisappeared #Pollination #Bees #InsectApocalypse #ScienceDocumentary #Ecology #Entomology #Biodiversity #ScienceExplained