“Let’s stop the decline of insects”. It is the motto of the XX Iberian Congress of Entomology that hosts the University of Alicante until Friday June 30
More than 150 attendees meet in this space to learn about the latest international studies on the causes of the serious decline of insects, as well as to address solutions to curb what is already considered one of the most serious problems due to its impact. on the environment and human well-being.
Leading experts such as Fernando Valladares, researcher at the Higher Council for Scientific Research and Rei Jaume I Award winner in the category of Environmental Protection, will participate. At the ‘One Health’ round table, Valladares affirmed yesterday that “we think that we have too many insects left over and that is where many problems come from.”
This simplification of ecosystems, pointed out the doctor in Biology Eduardo Galante, president of the Spanish Society of Entomology, “eliminating natural spaces in our environments, has created ideal spaces for mosquitoes.” In fact, the latest studies indicate that “the mosquito is happy that we live in cities,” said Valladares. In central Africa, the mosquito’s preference for feeding on humans over other mammals has tripled in recent years.
In Europe, as biologist Rubén Bueno, an expert in urban plagues, explained, dengue disease is a reality due to the expansion of the tiger mosquito, “which is due to human action” that “has domesticated” a wild species of the tropics and has made it one of the hundred most damaging species.
One of the contradictions that popularizers face is precisely that preventing certain species of insects that are harmful makes it difficult to convey the idea that the drastic decline in arthropods is a serious risk to the natural balance. As the zoologist Estefanía Micó explained to La Vanguardia, “insects have an image problem, it is easier to convince of the need to conserve golden eagles and lynxes”.
In fact, the abusive use of pesticides to fight against certain evils can have very visible and harmful consequences in our natural environment and in our agriculture. For example, Professor Galante believes that the aggressive campaign against Xylella fastidiosa that the administration has carried out in the mountains of Alicante is related to the catastrophic cherry harvest this year, in which barely 10,000 kilos have been collected, compared to 500,000 last year.
The absence of pollinators prevents the generation of fruits, and this is perhaps the effect that ordinary citizens understand best, who, apart from that, tends to think “the fewer bugs, the better”, says Professor Micó. Insects represent 75% of biodiversity, and entomologists from Spain and Portugal are meeting in Alicante to discuss and study how to reverse their disappearance.
“We have been degrading the environment, losing diversity, and we are losing species that control others that harm us,” summarizes the zoologist.
“We are even verifying that species that used to be very common are beginning to be rare,” he points out. “But there are many things that can be done, improvements to renaturalize spaces, to recover species, because we are losing many pages of biodiversity, often without being aware of it.”
Estefanía Micó remembers that “those of us who lived in houses in the countryside used to see fireflies, and we haven’t seen them again for twenty or thirty years”. For what is this? “Above all, environmental deterioration, understood not only as pollution, but also the loss of habitats that occurs when we begin to urbanize, urbanize, urbanize… all this causes a loss of species amplified by climate change that in we have also caused a good part”.
