What If Every Insect on Earth Disappeared

No mosquitoes. No flies. No wasps at your picnic. For a few weeks, a world without insects would feel amazing. Then the flowers stop making fruit, the birds go hungry, and the world slowly fills up with its own leftovers. Here's what would really happen if every insect on Earth disappeared. Chapters 0:00 What if every insect vanished? 0:40 How many insects are there? 1:19 Day one: paradise 2:06 Nobody comes to the flowers 3:06 Your supermarket, a year later 4:31 Who eats insects 5:45 The pile-up 6:38 Years later 7:51 This is already happening 8:49 The answer Sources and notes • ~1 million insect species described; ~5.5 million estimated (Stork 2018, Annual Review of Entomology). • ~10 quintillion insects alive at any time (Smithsonian estimate). ~20 quadrillion ants (Schultheiss et al. 2022, PNAS). Terrestrial arthropods outweigh humans (Bar-On et al. 2018, PNAS). • Malaria: ~600,000 deaths per year, mostly young children (WHO World Malaria Report). • ~87.5% of flowering plant species are animal-pollinated (Ollerton et al. 2011, Oikos). • ~75% of leading food crop types benefit from animal pollination (Klein et al. 2007); pollination value US$235–577 billion/yr (IPBES 2016). • Cacao is pollinated mainly by tiny midges. Hand pollination of apple and pear orchards in Sichuan, China. • Wheat, rice and maize (wind- or self-pollinated) supply roughly half of human calories (FAO). • Chickadees: 6,000–9,000 caterpillars per brood (Tallamy and colleagues). Yellowstone grizzlies eat army cutworm moths, up to ~40,000 a day. • Australian Dung Beetle Project (CSIRO), from the late 1960s. • E. O. Wilson's warning about insects is paraphrased in the video. • Hallmann et al. 2017, PLOS ONE: 76% decline in flying insect biomass in German protected areas over 27 years. Tori is an animated character. His voice is AI-generated, and the script was written and fact-checked for this channel. Next episode: could 100 people rebuild civilization from scratch? #science #nature #insects #whatif