>>LEVON BISS: 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.
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.
The challenge here is doing that on a subject that's five millimeters long,
but the principles are still the same.
I came into this project, Extinct and Endangered,
with a view that I think we should talk about more serious
and pressing subjects of insect decline and biodiversity.
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.
We need to understand that they're important
and we can't just ignore them because they're hard to see.
>>JESSICA WARE: We think that insects
evolved sometime around 450 million years ago,
but we know that winged insects,
they probably evolved around 400 million years ago.
It was before the rise of flowering plants, and there was no birds,
there was no bat, there were no pterosaurs,
there was nothing in the sky until insects.
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.
From the morning we got up to the point when I'm speaking to you now,
actually insects have been part of that,
whether it was in the clothing that we wear, the food that we're eating,
there's a lot of things that we kind of take for granted that insects are doing.
>>DAVE GRIMALDI: Most people don't know about the incredibly important
ecological roles that so many insects play.
They're the main pollinators of plants.
About 85% of the world's flowering plants are pollinated by insects.
>>WARE: You know, they decompose things.
They're a great source of food for a lot of animals.
They really structure our ecosystem.
Understanding the history of Earth is understanding the history of insects.
>>RODGER GWIAZDOWSKI: I think a core responsibility as a scientist,
regardless of what field you're in, is that you make the unseen, seen.
And I think insects get overlooked a lot and get unseen a lot.
But when you can see them literally larger than life,
it's a way to realize their importance in the world.
>>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.
Hairs, for example, come in so many different varieties
that 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 beetle, they seem to be hollow.
You know, they- Certainly when you put light on them, they kind of glow.
>>GWIAZDOWSKI: Tiger beetles in North America are small.
They're about an inch to about a half inch long.
They all have large, very large eyes. They've got these very large jaws.
They're vicious predators.
And they all have very, very long legs because they're fast runners.
Tiger beetles inherently have evolved
to live in very dynamic environments, whether it's deserts or beaches.
The problem is that we, as humans, have made some those habitats
unliveably dynamic even for tiger beetles.
>>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
which recorded dramatic declines in specimen numbers and species numbers.
And that was in Germany.
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.
Where are all the moths at the porch lights?
>>BISS: When I was a kiddie, I remember you go out in a car
on the motorway or freeway, your windshield
and your- the front of the car will be splattered with insects.
You know, it just doesn't happen anymore.
And that is just a simple way we can understand that the actual-
the mass, the volume of insects surrounding us has declined.
It's also the diversity, though.
You know, you can have vast quantities of insects, but you need diversity.
You need to have multiple species
working in harmony to produce a balanced ecosystem.
And that's what we're losing.
>>WARE: Like, without hyperbole,
we're in a very serious conundrum.
So insects have undergone mass extinctions in the past,
but right now, the mass extinction that we're seeing, that we're witnessing
seems to be the largest that's ever been recorded.
>>GRIMALDI: Once the populations really start to decline,
you become in danger of losing that species.
Right now, we're just in the process of trying to quantify
how much insects are in trouble.
>>GWIAZDOWSKI: Neil, Abby's got two.
>>NEIL: Got it.
>>GWIAZDOWSKI: Neil, I got one.
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 in certain parts of their lifecycle
and understanding how many of those individuals there are.
So we'll do these counts for the adult tiger beetles several times
over the year in their habitat. 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 the end of the habitat,
we take a total, and that's our count.
Comparing this information year to year allows us to estimate population trends
whether it's increases or declines, from which we made conservation decisions.
>>GRIMALDI: We have to rely on entomologists and other biologists
to go out into the field and monitor insects.
But we shouldn't wait for the counts.
You know, we we should start protecting natural areas.
You can't really appreciate something unless you know something about it.
The thing I want most
for people to appreciate about insects is their exquisite, intricate beauty.
>>BISS: When you can stand in front of that insect and marvel
at its beauty, but then you understand also that it's extinct.
It's gone. It's never coming back.
And the reason for that is us.
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.