Science
Weighed, Not Counted
Germany has a word for the death of its insects, a law against it and a famous number: three-quarters gone in 27 years. The number is the weight of insects caught at 63 sites in protected areas, 57 of them in one federal state and 37 of them trapped in one year only. Where it was measured, the fall holds up. Nobody had measured the country as a whole when the number appeared in 2017, and nobody has since.
In October 2017 the Entomological Society Krefeld, on the Lower Rhine, and a group of ecologists from Nijmegen published what the society’s insect traps had caught over 27 years. The answer was less and less: by 2016 the weight of …
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