Scientist
Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground
insects had vanished
Damian
Carrington Environment editor
Tue 15
Jan 2019 06.00 GMTLast modified on Tue 15 Jan
2019 06.02 GMT
“We knew that something was amiss in the first
couple days,” said Brad Lister. “We were driving into the forest and at the
same time both Andres and I said: ‘Where are all the birds?’ There was
nothing.”
His
return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal
an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food
for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the
ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely
culprit by far is global warming.
“It was
just astonishing,” Lister said. “Before, both the sticky ground plates and
canopy plates would be covered with insects. You’d be there for hours picking
them off the plates at night. But now the plates would come down after 12 hours
in the tropical forest with a couple of lonely insects trapped or none at all.”
“It was a
true collapse of the insect populations in that rainforest,” he said. “We began
to realise this is terrible – a very, very disturbing result.”
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