UK Gardeners Noticing That Insects Have Largely Disappeared This Year; Data Supports Their Observations

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Many concerned gardeners and nature lovers in Britain have noticed fewer insects around this year. Kevin Coward has been gardening in south Manchester for more than 40 years, growing a mixture of flowers, as well as fruit and vegetables. He used to love watching butterflies over a cup of tea. “I’ve had a huge reduction in butterflies, with no caterpillars until this past week,” says Coward. “I have not actually seen any larger moths this year.” He says it is “a problem noticed by other people in my village too”. The rumblings have reached social media, with gardeners voicing their alarm and posting photos of quiet, insect-free gardens. The former Top Gear host – and now farmer – Jeremy Clarkson also chimed in: “Just been for a walk round the farm and I’m a bit alarmed by how few butterflies there are. Something is afoot.”

Annual data on insect populations is limited, but the indicators we have say yes, it has been a bad year. “All year, stretching way back into the early spring, people have been contacting us (and indeed I’ve seen myself) that there seem to be relatively few butterflies around,” says Dr Richard Fox, an ecologist and the head of science at the charity Butterfly Conservation. He helps to run the Big Butterfly Count, which is one of the biggest citizen science projects in the world, with more than 50,000 people taking part each year.

British butterflies and moths are probably the best-studied insects in terms of long-term data. This means butterfly numbers are often used as a proxy for how other insects are doing. Provisional data from the 2024 count suggests butterflies have had their worst year on record after a wet spring and summer. In 2022, it recorded its third successive year of record lows. The year 2023 proved an unexpectedly good one, but it appears the downward trend is continuing again this year. The short-term culprit is bad weather. March and April, which are crucial months for insects were cool, wet and cloudy. It was the UK’s wettest spring since 1986. Butterflies, for example, need some warm and dry weather to be able to fly around and mate.

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The climate crisis is changing the natural rhythm of the seasons, which insects are finely tuned to, and makes extreme events – such as “never-ending” rain – more likely. While one bad year is not an indication that things have changed long term, unusual weather conditions are increasing in frequency. “As well as the weather just generally getting warmer, the extreme weather events are becoming more common,” says Matt Hayes, an ecologist at the University of Cambridge. “If that happens then a given population of butterflies might do well one year and then suddenly completely the wrong conditions happen the next. So the fluctuation seems to be becoming more common.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/15/britain-insects-surveys-butterflies-climate-aoe