Time for action

Insects are vital to human life but they are under threat and we can all do our bit to help, writes Jenny Bennion from Lancashire Wildlife Trust

- Jenny Bennion

Across the country we are seeing an alarming decline in our numbers of insects. In fact, 41 per cent of UK insect species are currently facing extinction, with insect populations declining eight times faster than mammals. But it’s not too late to take action and help to stop the decline.

You may not think you’re a great lover of insects, except maybe bees and butterflies, but insects are actually the most important family of animals on our planet. More than 80 per cent of plants are pollinated by insects, and that includes our food crops, with three-quarters of them relying on insects for pollination.

And although this doens’t relate to Lancashire’s wildlife, the cocoa tree is almost exclusively pollinated by a certain type of midge (the ceratopogonid midge to be exact), so without insects we wouldn’t have chocolate – and that would affect us all!