A sweeping new review in Nature Reviews Biodiversity reframes the conservation case for insects. Led by Eliza Grames at Binghamton University, the paper catalogs the non-trophic services insects provide to vertebrates — services that go far beyond the predator-prey relationship that dominates conservation thinking. The headline finding: nearly three-quarters of terrestrial and freshwater vertebrates eat invertebrates, but the dependency web runs deeper than anyone's diet. The documented relationships are startling in their specificity. Chimpanzees apply insects to open wounds. Over 200 bird species use ants for parasite removal and feather maintenance. White-throated round-eared bats excavate cavities inside termite mounds for roosts. Dung beetles dry out and aerate animal waste, reducing parasite survival rates. Moths living in bird nests consume feces, feathers, and debris — a sanitation service beetles were already performing in dinosaur nests during the Cretaceous period, 145 to 66 million years ago. Some of these relationships are genuinely mutualistic. Sloths rely on moths to deposit nitrogen in their fur, spurring algal growth the sloths then eat. The sloths reciprocate by descending from trees once a month to defecate on the ground, providing substrate for moth eggs. Snakes feed on firefly larvae to obtain defensive toxins. Antbirds use live crickets in courtship displays. The climate dimensions are concrete. Grames notes that approximately 12% of global forest carbon stock is leaf litter and dead wood, and insects decompose roughly 30% of it. Insects also drive forest regeneration through seed dispersal into areas where large-seed dispersers have disappeared. Pollination and seed dispersal — both insect-dependent — are the two biggest bottlenecks in forest regeneration. The paper's central warning is structural: "widespread and considerable disruption" of insect communities is "inevitable" as land use changes, yet the consequences for vertebrates remain nearly impossible to predict. The reason is a data void. The study notes a "lack of systematic descriptions of trophic and non-trophic interactions, hampered by an ongoing decline of natural history research." We are losing the capacity to even document the relationships before they vanish. Co-author Chris Elphick, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, puts it plainly: "If you want to have vertebrates, then you've got to be thinking about insect conservation, and we don't do that nearly enough." The review estimates between 14 million and 30 million insect species exist globally — most undescribed, many performing ecosystem functions no one has cataloged. This is the core fragility: insects are load-bearing infrastructure for vertebrate ecosystems, but the infrastructure is unmapped and the monitoring systems don't exist. Conservation strategies designed around charismatic vertebrates routinely ignore the insect dependencies those vertebrates can't survive without. The paper is less a discovery than a diagnostic — identifying a systemic blind spot before the system fails in ways we can't model.
