Insect Declines and Case for Long-term Insect Monitoring in India
Separated by 15,000 km, tied to the same fate. Left : Antioch dunes shieldback katydid Neduba extincta , declared extinct by the time of describing the species from the Antioch sand dunes of USA (Rentz, 1977; see archive.org ; under CC BY-NC 3.0); Right : Enigmatic tiger beetle Apteroessa grossa (Iconographia Zoologica - Special Collections University of Amsterdam; see Wikimedia Commons ), not seen alive along the coastal and wetland areas of southern India; both gone because of severe land-use changes from ill-informed infrastructure developments. ‘Nature is under siege’ begins a collective of publications (Wagner et al., 2021) addressing the inquiries on the ‘validity of claims of rapid insect decline’. Within the last two decades, several studies established declines in insect abundances based on long-term monitoring data: In Great Britain, aerial biomass of insects studied between 1973 and 2002 showed significant decline in one of the four sites (Shortall et al., 2009), sugg