What would happen if all Earth’s insects vanished?
PHOTOS: GETTY X5 ILLUSTRATIONS: RAJA LOCKEY
- FOOD CHAIN COLLAPSE
Most non-marine food chains depend on insects.
Almost all birds eat insects, and even those that eat
seeds as adults still feed insects to their young. It
takes 200,000 insects to raise a swallow chick to
adulthood. Insects also break down plant matter and
help recycle nutrients into the soil. Without any
insects at all, most bird and amphibian species would
be extinct in two months. - NO POLLINATION
Of the world’s food crops, 75 per cent are pollinated
by insects. Without insects, we could still grow many
foods, but onions, cabbage, broccoli, chillies, most
varieties of tomato, coffee, cocoa and most fruits
would be off the menu. So would sunflower and
rapeseed oil. Demand for synthetic fibres would also
surge because bees are needed to pollinate both
cotton and flax for linen. - LESS INSECTICIDE
On the plus side, if there were no longer any
insects, we wouldn’t need the 430,000 tonnes of
insecticides that are sprayed onto crops every
year. In the US, pesticide residues cause between
4,000 and 20,000 cases of cancer each year,
according to the National Academy of Sciences.
But this is a small compensation for total
ecological collapse and global famine.
THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENTAt -269°C, helium gas
condenses to become a liquid.
Cool it even further and it
becomes a state of matter
called a superfluid. In this state
it has no measurable viscosity
and so does some odd things,
such as climbing up the walls of
a dish, leaking through
apparently solid materials and
staying motionless while its
container is spun. To create the
liquid and superfluid states, you
cool down helium gas to a few
degrees above absolute zero.This is achieved by
compressing the gas, and then
expelling it through a small
nozzle. As the gas expands, it
rapidly cools (you’ll have
noticed this effect if you’ve ever
used an aerosol deodorant).
The process is repeated until
the gas that rushes out of the
nozzle is cold enough to
condense to a liquid, then if you
repeat the cycle a few more
times the helium will become
cold enough to turn to a
superfluid. MLHow is helium turned into a liquid
and a superfluid?Could you throw a frisbee on Mars?
Since the Martian atmosphere is about 100 times less dense
than Earth’s, the ‘lift’ a frisbee experiences would also be about
100 times less. But the gravitational force on Mars is about a
third of that on Earth, so a frisbee on Mars would act as if it is
about 33 times heavier (100/3). Since the lift depends on the size
of the frisbee, the angle of attack and the velocity it is thrown (as
well as the air density), it would still be possible to make a frisbee
glide, but it would require much more effort on the part of the
thrower! AGu