Why We Must Save Ugly Bugs

If you think of insects at all, you probably see them as something to be scared of, as pests to be stomped on, or as persistent nuisances ruining a lovely afternoon picnic. For example, no-one has a good word to say about the cockroaches, flies, mosquitoes, or termites that share our homes. In several surveys, including a 2021 report commissioned by insect repellent brand Zevo and conducted by OnePoll, these creatures have been voted some of the most hated insects in America. Yet each of these bugs has a lot to teach us if we look closely enough.

Take the hated cockroach. Surely there’s nothing to admire there? Well, think again. They’re such widespread pests because they’re actually very good at…being cockroaches. At the front end, they have two antennae that are covered in tens of thousands of chemical and touch receptors allowing them to navigate by smell and touch even in pitch darkness. At the back end, there are two similar structures, called “cerci.” Although these are covered in tiny hairs that respond to the slightest air movement, perhaps caused by an approaching predator. Because a roach has two cerci, it can model the air movement in three dimensions and work out exactly where an attack is coming from. Its cerci transmit this information to its brain in just 1/20th of a second—and it’s gone. Roaches are also one of the fastest things on six legs. At top speed, they rear up onto their two back legs and run bipedally like a human sprinter—only, on their scale, a lot, lot faster. All these abilities are the envy of scientists, who have spent a lot of time and money designing robots based on roaches. Robo-roaches have all kinds of uses, from searching for people trapped under rubble after earthquakes to tracking down chemical and radiation leaks.

And then there are those annoying flies, which have inspired even more sophisticated mini-robots, called micro-aerial vehicles or MAVs. Understanding how insects fly took many decades—and a whole new branch of aerodynamics. (Although the research was very well funded, especially by government defense departments, who saw the value of micro-surveillance vehicles.) Flies are the best models for such mini-drones because they’re the Top Guns of the insect world.

Most insects have two pairs of wings, but the fly’s back pair of the wings have evolved into gyroscopic stabilizers that give them amazing aerial abilities. They can even fly upside down which, of course, they must do if they want to land on your ceiling. They also respond to images around five times faster than us. So, to them, everything we do looks like it’s in slow motion. Flies are hard to swat and roaches are hard to stomp on—but it turns out that those are also good reasons to admire them.

There are more important reasons for showing bugs—yes, even the not-so-cute ones—a bit more love. Insect populations are in freefall. In many areas insect abundance has fallen by more than 75% in just the last few decades. Good riddance, you might be tempted to say. Until you realize that three quarters of our crops are pollinated by insects (along with 85% of all flowering plants). Their pollination services worldwide are estimated to be worth somewhere between $235 and $577 billion, although no amount of money will buy us out of a diet of rice, wheat, and corn—our main wind-pollinated crops—if we don’t do something very quickly. They also recycle waste.

Read More: Insect Farming Isn't Going to Save the Planet

Without dungs beetles, for example, we’d be up to our knees in, well, you get it. And that’s exactly what happened in Australia in the first half of the 20^th century. There are plenty of dung beetles Down Under, but they all prefer the dry pellets of dung produced by the local marsupials. As cattle ranches began to spread through the outback, the local beetles turned up their noses (or at least their antennae) at this new kind of sloppy dung. They refused to eat it, so cow dung built up until it smothered the pastures. Australian flies, however, were not so fussy and they bred in the dung in their billions, producing vast swarms that filled the air. Some say that’s why Australian ranchers had to wear those iconic corks dangling from their hats—to keep the flies off their faces. Then, in 1950 ,Hungarian entomologist George Bornemissza, had the bright idea of introducing old world dung beetles and the problem was solved. They cleared up the mess and now vast numbers of these beetles are bred in Australia to keep the cattle pastures free of dung. This is just one of the many ecosystem services that insects provide.

As lifeforms, insects are very different from us, not least since they’re built in reverse. Whereas we hang all our soft bits from an internal framework of bone, they hide theirs away on the inside of a suit of armor, an exoskeleton which can be molded into all manner of bizarre forms. It’s often this alien nature that engenders fear. Yet these differences hide a more fundamental similarity which makes empathy with these tiny aliens much easier. It turns out that many insects are sentient.

For example, USDA entomologist and pollination ecologist Stephen Buchmann (who also happens to be a longtime friend and film-making collaborator) has spent a lifetime working with bees and now considers them to have a form of consciousness. He hasn’t arrived at this startling revelation lightly. Bees might have tiny brains, but they possess elaborate cognitive skills. They learn to extract nectar from different kinds of complicated flowers and remember each different technique for days. They can count up to four and have been trained to slide open doors or lift a lid. They also feel pain. Individual bees in a teeming colony have different personalities and some even get depressed. Given what we’ve done to their world, I don’t blame them.

For a recent series of documentaries on insects, we visited the labs of German zoologist Lars Chittka, at Queen Mary University in London, where bees do even more amazing things. A few years ago, for a documentary on bird intelligence, we filmed ravens (famously smart birds) solving a problem called the “string pull test”. A tasty snack is dangled out of reach on a long string and in no time at all the bird solves the problem. Just pull the string, stand on the loop with your foot, pull a bit more, and repeat until you reach your reward. It sounds simple, but it takes a lot of brain power to work this out from first principles. What Chittka has found out is that his bumblebees can also do this. They can pull on a string to haul a nectar pot from beneath a plastic cover so they can drink the nectar. What’s more, if a bee watches her sisters’ performance, she knows exactly what to do without any experimentation. There’s clearly a lot going on inside a bee’s head since these bees also roll a small ball around, even for no reward. Chittka thinks that they’re playing.

A recent 2022 paper by Chittka and a team of researchers has extended some of these findings to a wide range of other Insects, including cockroaches. This is a game changer. Insects have much richer emotional lives than anyone ever thought possible. In fact, several scientists I know will no longer kill insects for study. So, next time you see an insect of any kind, consider how it’s feeling or what it’s learnt that day—and meet a fellow sentient being.