Insect life has been in decline across much of the planet in recent decades. It might not be something many of us have noticed, as the change is slow and we might not pay much attention to insects anyway. But if we stop and think about it, we might realise that what we consider normal has shifted.
When you were a child, do you remember seeing bugs on the windscreen on a long drive in the summer? Is that something you still see today? Pausing to remember how it used to be highlight how baselines shift and normal is on the move. Depending on where you live, it’s likely that you haven’t really noticed a windshield bug graveyard at the end of a journey recently.
Bugs Matter is a project that takes this anecdotal evidence and turns it into citizen science. Download their app, and you can help them to monitor insect life by recording casualties from your car journeys over the summer months. Just wipe down your licence plate at the start of a journey, and then take a picture of it when you arrive. Count the number of bugs on the plate and enter the details.
That’s it – but across a wide range of volunteers and journeys, this yields useful data. The app is new, but Buglife have been running this exercise for years. Between 2004 and 2023, the number of bugs found on licence plates declined by 78%. That’s a huge decline that we need to understand better.
Here’s the video with the instructions, and further information. Could you take part this year?
Feature image by Wulan Sari.
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