Almost all claims exaggerate the importance and sensitivity of ecosystems and the biosphere. Professors of entomology have clear incentive to exaggerate the importance of their field. Other people hold nature on a pedestal and will happily believe strong claims uncritically. They'll read how the extinction of cockroaches might mean that red-cockaded woodpeckers lose 50% of their natural diet, and think this is a global catastrophe.
The real worst case scenarios of insect extinction and other ecosystem disturbances, are ... (read more)
Entomology bacchelor here. My naiive model would have been that termites and earthworms, followed maybe by "the entirety of all pollinators", would have major effects on ecology at the macro-scale. But my default model also has comments along the lines of "there are species that will trigger black swan effects, and you can't always predict which ones they are." And that later part of me is very confused.
The model is less that every single species matters, and more that there are "keystone species": the often-highly-specialized regulator (a predator, parasitoid, or lethal disease) of a toxic/high-reproductive-rate/invasive-like species, where if that invasive species were to be left unchecked, it would dominate the environment in a manner detrimental to just about everything else living there. See: Otters that kill sea urchins which would otherwise detatch kelp from the sea floor, or... in a case closer to what I'd expect here, things like small wasps that specifically kill a beetle that would otherwise kill large numbers of trees.
Non-expert, but high confidence:
Almost all claims exaggerate the importance and sensitivity of ecosystems and the biosphere. Professors of entomology have clear incentive to exaggerate the importance of their field. Other people hold nature on a pedestal and will happily believe strong claims uncritically. They'll read how the extinction of cockroaches might mean that red-cockaded woodpeckers lose 50% of their natural diet, and think this is a global catastrophe.
The real worst case scenarios of insect extinction and other ecosystem disturbances, are ... (read more)