Here's What Would Happen If All Insects on Earth Disappeared

Without insects is a dull place without coffee and chocolate

What if insects disappeared from the planet?

Some bugs chew up our lawns and plants, others are gross-looking enough to give a fella the willies, and still, more have an ingenious ability to get into places where we don’t want them, such as bathrooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. But humans need insects in order to live, and so do plants and animals. It all has to do with the circle of life, the planet’s food chain, and the reproduction of plants through pollination.

Insects are an important part of the food chain, and not just for the adventurous eaters who dine on beetles, crickets, and grasshoppers in Thailand. Some animals, like small birds, frogs, and other reptiles and amphibians, survive almost entirely on an insect diet. If there were no bugs for these animals to eat, they would eventually die off. That, in turn, would eliminate the food source for other animals farther up the chain. Breaks in the food chain eventually would work their way all the way up to humans, many of whom maintain meat-heavy diets [sources: Purdue University, Brown].

So, without insects, everyone would just have to become a vegetarian, right? Not unless you count dirt as a vegetable. Insect pollination is a crucial ingredient in most of the fruits and vegetables that humans and animals eat. Take honeybees, for example. These flying insects buzz around flowers and plants, transferring the male pollen grains of one plant to the female reproductive parts of another. In other words, the honeybee is the stork that delivers little plant babies [sources: Purdue University, Nature Conservancy].

While some plants also rely on wind to move pollen from Point A to Point B, many crops are largely or fully dependent on the work of bees and other pollinating insects, such as beetles, moths, and flies. That’s not to mention the other important work that insects do to stimulate plant growth. Feeding on just about anything, bugs help keep pests like weeds and parasitic insects in check. They also break down dead animals, animal waste, and other plants that help fertilize the soil in which our crops grow. Insects that burrow into the ground aid in the fertilization process by opening up soil to air [sources: Scholastic, Purdue University, Nature Conservancy].

There are a few insects most people would be happy to see vanish. Like mosquitoes. They kill hundreds of thousands of people every year by transmitting malaria, the West Nile virus, and other diseases. But if they disappeared tomorrow, we might actually miss them. There are over 3,000 species of mosquitoes on Earth, all of which are food to birds, bats, frogs, and other animals. No more mosquitoes mean these creatures and the animals that eat them could go hungry. The same goes for the dreaded cockroach, a protein-packed meal for birds, rodents, and even humans in some parts of the world. If we lost all 4,400 species of roach, entire ecosystems would struggle to survive. Believe it or not, we’d have even worse troubles ahead since we’d face a serious poop problem without one of the world’s greatest recyclers, the dung beetle.

What If Insects Disappeared From The Planet?

You see, history has taught us exactly what happens when these critters can’t do their job. Back in 1788, the British introduced cattle to Australia, and these cows pooped a lot. Each one poops enough to fill five tennis courts every year. But while the dung beetles back in Britain would eat and break down cow poo, the native Australian beetles wouldn’t touch the stuff because they evolved to munch only on dry, fibrous marsupial dung. So, the cow poop piled up. By 1960, the cattle had carpeted 500,000 acres of pasture in dung. That’s enough to cover over half of Rhode Island, and while a little bit of poop is great for fertilizer, this ocean of dung would flood plants with nitrogen, making it impossible for anything to grow. So, imagine if all 8,000 species of dung beetle, plus other doo-dining insects, like flies, vanished worldwide. The land would be knee-deep in…you know.

So, that’s where we could end up in an insect-less world. Starving to death while drowning in a sea of poop and corpses.

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