Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) and partners in the US have harnessed weather radar data to make a staggering first-of-its-kind estimate: approximately 100 trillion insects take to the air above the contiguous United States on a typical summer day. This massive daily migration represents millions of tons of biomass cruising the aerial habitat.
We often look up at an empty blue sky, but a new study reveals it’s anything but vacant. Imagine a hidden, buzzing highway right above our heads, teeming with life on an almost incomprehensible scale. That’s the picture painted by a novel research approach using an unexpected tool: the national network of weather radars. For the first time, researchers have turned these instruments, designed to track rain and storms, into a continent-wide insect observatory.
The team, including lead author Dr. Elske Tielens, a postdoctoral researcher at WSL, alongside Professor Jeff Kelly from the University of Oklahoma and Dr. Phil Stepanian, analyzed a decade of open-access data from NOAA’s network of 140 weather radars. As reported in the journal Global Change Biology, their algorithm sifted through the signals, differentiating the gentle drift of insect biomass from precipitation and bird flocks. The resulting number—100 trillion (10^14)—is a monumental figure that finally quantifies a critical, yet overlooked, ecological layer.
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Why does this matter? Insects are foundational to our ecosystems, pollinating crops, controlling pests, and serving as food for countless birds and other animals. Yet, alarming reports of “insect apocalypse” and population declines have been hard to verify on a large scale. “It is likely that the most severe decline in insect populations already took place between the 1970s and 1990s, i.e., before our archived data,” Dr. Tielens told sources familiar with the research. This new method provides a powerful, standardized way to track changes from here on out.
Interestingly, over the ten-year study period from 2012 to 2021, the overall mass of flying insects above the US remained surprisingly stable. But that big-picture steadiness hides dramatic local stories. The radar data revealed a patchwork of increases and decreases, with about half of the regions gaining insect density and the other half losing it. The key driver of these shifts? Winter weather.
The analysis, detailed by WSL, found the strongest correlation wasn’t with summer conditions, but with winter temperatures. Areas where winters warmed the most saw the most significant declines in aerial insect activity. This makes intuitive sense for anyone who’s thought about bug life cycles. Many insects survive winter in a dormant state, and unusually warm temperatures can disrupt this diapause, exhausting their energy reserves or increasing predation and parasite pressure before spring even arrives.
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This radar method isn’t a magic bullet—it can’t tell a honeybee from a moth. “It is therefore important to combine radar data with other data sources – local surveys, citizen science, and so on,” Dr. Tielens emphasized, according to the institute’s release. The stable trend could mask a troubling swap where resilient, generalist species thrive while specialized, vulnerable insects vanish. But as a broad-scale monitoring tool, it’s revolutionary.
The implications are vast. For the first time, we have a baseline and a methodology to see continental patterns. This is especially crucial for regions like the Global South, where systematic insect counts are rare. Furthermore, researchers can now apply these models to historical radar archives, potentially unlocking the secrets of insect population shifts over the past several decades. By peering into the sky with a new lens, scientists are not just counting bugs—they are taking the vital pulse of an entire aerial ecosystem we’ve flown under for far too long.
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