Extinct & Endangered: Insects in Peril
EXTINCT & ENDANGERED
[Levon Biss examines a delicate butterfly specimen under a desk lamp.]
LEVON BISS (Photographer): As a photographer, you know, the most fun you can have is when you’ve got a subject that allows you to play creatively with light.
[Biss adjusts pieces on an elaborately-rigged camera and light set-up inside a studio.]
BISS: When I photographed humans, for example, I used to use light all the time because it allows me to sculpt around the subject, to emphasize certain features.
[Biss arranges the butterfly specimen on the photo rig, very close to the camera lens.]
BISS: The challenge here is doing that on the subject is five millimeters long, but the principles are still the same.
[Macrophotograph of a brilliant orange and yellow butterfly—the same specimen Biss was arranging in front of the camera.]
[Text: Extinct & Endangered | Imperiled insects from the collection of the American Museum of Natural History]
[The screen is split into a triptych with three different clips of Biss holding a large, black insect (a Lord Howe Island stick insect), pinned in a specimen box. The center strip maintains a clip of Biss and the stick insect, but the flanking scenes show him examining other insect specimens.]
BISS: I came into this project, Extinct and Endangered with the view that I think we should talk about more serious and pressing subjects of insect decline and biodiversity.
[Biss speaks in his studio.]
[Text: Levon Biss | Photographer]
BISS: I don’t think people really understand the importance of insects and what they do for us—us, as a species, but the planet as a whole.
[Biss edits macro images of insects on a desktop computer.
BISS: We need to understand that they’re important and we can’t just ignore them because they’re hard to see.
[An insect (a firebrat) with scale- and hair-like structures waggles its antenna.]
JESSICA WARE (Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology): We think that insects evolved sometime around 450 million years ago.
[A damselfly alights on a grass stalk.]
WARE: But we know that winged insects, they probably evolved around 400 million years ago. It was before the rise of flowering plants.
[A mantis sits on the branches of a conifer. A field with thousands of tiny, flying insects, flitting over grasses.]
WARE: There was no birds, there was no bat, there were no pterosaurs, there was nothing in the sky until insects.
[Ware speaks in her office.]
[Text: Jessica Ware | Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology]
WARE: It’s hard to imagine the world before insects because so much of what is characteristic about the Earth that we live in has been shaped by, you know, hundreds of millions of years of insect evolution.
[Screen is split between a scene of coffee pouring into a mug and pollinating insects bustling around coffee plant flowers. An ant carries a crumb over a picnic blanket.]
WARE: From the morning we got up to the point when I’m speaking to you now, actually insects have been a part of that.
[A triptych of a silk moth, dozens of silk cocoons trundling down a factory belt, and a sewing machine at work]
WARE: Whether it was in the clothing that we wear,
[Dozens of apples move down a conveyor belt. A dung beetle rolls a ball of dung along the ground.]
WARE: …the food that we’re eating, there’s a lot of things that we kind of take for granted that insects are doing.
[A fly buzzes around the inside of a flower. A butterfly lands sips nectar from a garden blossom.]
DAVID GRIMALDI (Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology): Most people don’t know about the incredibly important ecological roles that so many insects play.
[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]
[Text: David Grimaldi | Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology]
GRIMALDI: They’re the main pollinators of plants. About 85 percent of the world’s flowering plants are pollinated by insects.
[Termites chew on a dead leaf.]
WARE: You know, they decompose things.
[A woodpecker delivers a mouthful of insect larvae to its young.]
WARE: They’re a great source of food for a lot of animals. They really structure our ecosystem.
[A beetle crawls across a fern and spreads its wings.]
WARE: Understanding the history of Earth is understanding the history of insects.
[Rodger Gwiazdowski speaks from his lab.]
[Text: Rodger Gwiazdoski | Entomologist]
RODGER GWIAZDOWSKI, Entomologist: I think a core responsibility as a scientist, regardless of what field you’re in, is that you make the unseen seen.
[A small tiger beetle darts across a hand displaying it to the camera.]
GWIAZDOWSKI: And I think insects get overlooked a lot and get unseen a lot.
[A macro view of the same tiger beetle species. A full view of a beetle is flanked by extreme close-ups of its front legs, sporting dozens of spiky hair-like structures.]
GWIAZDOWSKI: But when you can see them literally larger than life, it’s a way to realize their importance in the world.
[Biss zooms in to an image of the stick insect on his desktop computer.]
BISS: Working at this kind of magnification brings a whole new set of challenges. With every different insect that you photograph, there’s so many different elements to it that are unique to that specific insect.
[Montage of macro images showing diverse, hair-like structures on the bodies of beetles, butterflies, and bees.]
BISS: Hairs, for example, come in so many different varieties.
[Biss speaks in his studio.]
BISSS: Before I started shooting macro and insects, I had no idea about, you know, the fact that the hairs on the back of a tiger beetles seem to be hollow.
[Triptych of macro images of different tiger beetle hairs.]
BISS: Certainly, when you put light on them, they kind of glow.
[Hands open a specimen drawer in the Museum’s entomology research collections.]
GWIAZDOWSKI: Tiger beetles in North America are small. They’re about an inch to about a half inch long.
[Close-up of two tiger beetle specimens pinned with labels. Their eyes take up a large portion of their heads.]
GWIAZDOWSKI: They all have large, very large eyes, bug eyes, on their head with these very large jaws.
[A living tiger beetle pauses for a moment on the sand and then runs off.]
GWIAZDOSKI: They’re vicious predators. And they all have very, very long legs because they’re fast runners.
[Waves, formed in the wake of a motor boat, lap up on to a sandy river beach.]
GWIAZDOSKI: Tiger beetles have inherently evolved to live in very dynamic environments, whether it’s deserts or beaches.
[Drone footage of city office buildings and a busy highway along the Connecticut River in Massachusetts.]
GWIAZDOSKI: The problem is that we as humans have made some of those habitats unlivable-ly dynamic, even for tiger beetles.
[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]
GRIMALDI: The first indication that we had that drew a lot of alarm to the plummeting of insect populations and species diversity was a 2017 study
[A copy of the research paper lies on the forest floor. An ant crawls over a graph plotting the amount of biomass versus the progression of years from 1990 to 2015. It shows a downward trend.]
GRIMALDI: …which recorded dramatic declines in specimen numbers and species numbers. And that was in Germany.
[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]
GRIMALDI: Since then, people have rounded up data and we’re doing a lot more studies, but the indications are that it’s happening globally. And it’s something that people have noticed anecdotally for a long time.
[A single moth flutters around a porch light at night.]
GRIMALDI: Where are all the moths at the porch lights?
[Archival footage of a car driving down a motorway in 1970s UK.]
BISS: When I was a kiddie, I remember you go out in a car on the motorway, a freeway, your windshield and the front of the car will be spattered with insects.
[THE SPLATS OF INSECTS HITTING A WINDSHIELD.]
BISS: You know, it just doesn’t happen anymore.
[Biss speaks in his studio.]
BISS: And that is just a simple way we can understand that the actual mass, the volume of insects surrounding us has declined.
[A fly with a long proboscis and iridescent wings delicately sips at a flower.]
BISS: It is also the diversity, though. You know, you can have vast quantities of insects, but you need diversity.
[Several different types of bees and wasps forage among small flowers.]
BISS: You need to have multiple species working in harmony to produce a balanced ecosystem. And that’s what we’re losing.
[Ware speaks in her office.]
WARE: Like, without hyperbole, we’re in a very serious conundrum. Insects have undergone mass extinctions in the past,
[A single firefly flashes from a blade of grass.]
WARE: …but right now the mass extinction that we’re seeing seems to be the largest that’s ever been recorded.
[A few flashes of fireflies blink in a twilit field. A single firefly cleans its antenna.]
GRIMALDI: Once the populations really start to decline, you become in danger of losing that species.
[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]
GRIMALDI: Right now, we’re just in the process of trying to quantify how much insects are in trouble.
[Close-up of a hand clicking a number on a counter.]
GWIAZDOWSKI: Neil, Abby’s got two.
NEIL: Got it.
[A line of people walk slowly along a river beach, counting beetle sightings and calling them out.]
GWIAZDOWSKI: A core conservation tool for almost all endangered species is population monitoring. And this is the simple but structured process of going to their habitat at certain parts of their life cycle and understanding how many of those individuals there are.
[Gwiazdowski speaks in his lab.]
GWIAZDOWSKI: So, we’ll do these counts for the adult tiger beetles several times over the year in their habitat.
[In a time lapse sequence, five people fan out across a river beach and move towards the camera, counting tiger beetles as they go.]
GWIAZDOWSKI: It’s really straightforward. We will take a line of people. We will walk in that line through the habitat. All of us will be talking to each other about how many beetles we see. By the time we’ve gone all the way through to the end of the habitat, we take a total, and that’s our count.
[Gwiazdowski speaks in his lab.]
GWIAZDOWSKI: And comparing this information year to year allows us to estimate population trends, whether it’s increases or declines, from which we make conservation decisions.
[A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officer, one of the tiger beetle surveyors, drives a motorboat down the Connecticut River. He, along with other volunteers, unload the boat on the river beach.]
GRIMALDI: We have to rely on entomologists and other biologists to go out into the field and monitor insects.
[Leafy trees stretch across the reflection of a blue sky in the waters of a peaceful river.]
GRIMALDI: But we shouldn’t wait for the counts, you know. We should start protecting natural areas.
[Close-up of a tiger beetle hesitating on the sand before it races out of frame.]
GRIMALDI: You can’t really appreciate something unless you know something about it.
[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]
GRIMALDI: The thing I want most for people to appreciate about insects is their exquisite, intricate beauty.
[A montage of Biss’s macrophotography—a beetle, a ladybug, a cicada, a bee, a grasshopper—dissolves into a shot of the actual grasshopper specimen.]
BISS: Now, when you can stand in front of that insect, and marvel in its beauty,
[Biss speaks in his studio.]
BISS: …but then you understand also that it’s extinct, it’s gone, it’s never coming back, and the reason for that is us—
[Biss displays a beetle specimen with a striking pattern on its wings. He moves a magnifying lens over the body of a stick insect.]
BISS: …hopefully, people will walk away with an appreciation of them. And they’ll marvel in them, and they’ll realize that they’re too beautiful to be lost. They’re too important to be lost.
[The camera pulls back from a velvety butterfly specimen with beautiful teardrop-shaped lower wings.]
[Credits roll.]
Entomologists and field biologists are rushing to understand and quantify the rapid decline of insect populations and biodiversity. But we can’t wait to protect ecosystems.
The exhibition Extinct and Endangered aims to inform the public on the current crisis in insect decline and biodiversity loss, and to inspire a new appreciation for the beauty and importance of the tiny animals with whom we share the planet.
Photographer Levon Biss collaborated with Museum scientists to select specimens from the research collections. Bees, beetles, butterflies, and other insects serve as representatives of insect decline.
Visit the new exhibition Extinct and Endangered for more and to see spectacular photographs of 40 species of insects from the Museum's world-class research collections.