Insect populations are declining at alarming rates globally, threatening the ecological foundations that support all animal life. Understanding insect welfare and the cascading consequences of their decline is essential for conservation.
Insect decline is a welfare issue at multiple levels. For vertebrate animals — birds whose chick-rearing depends on caterpillar abundance, bats whose foraging depends on flying insect density, freshwater fish whose diet depends on aquatic insect emergence — insect decline translates directly into nutritional stress, reproductive failure, and population collapse. For the insects themselves, the evidence for basic forms of nociception and stress responses is growing, and the scale of insect mortality from pesticide exposure, habitat fragmentation, and light pollution represents potential suffering at extraordinary scale. Regardless of how the insect sentience question resolves, the welfare consequences of insect decline for vertebrate animals alone constitute a moral emergency.