The Canaries in the Mine Are Dying - How Much Longer Until It Spreads to Man?

There’s also the human condition to take into consideration, and our friends and allies, the birds, are no longer around in quantities sufficient enough to hold-down the insect population, so besides impacting our food supply, the inexorable increase of insects is bound to cause increased suffering (and possibly disease) among the human population.

Nature left us with one ace in the hole, and that’s nature’s most efficient bug-eradicators, the lowly bat that many of us never see as they toil endlessly through the evening and early morning hours, often eating thousands of insects in a single night:

What do bats eat?

Many of these microbats feed on insects, using their echolocation ability to find flying or crawling insects and their superb flying skills to catch them. Insect-eating bats are supremely good at what they do: a single little brown bat can catch and eat 600 mosquitoes in an hour. Thus, bats play an important role in regulating insect populations; in those places where bat populations have been severely reduced by human activity, the numbers of fruit flies and other pests have risen dramatically.

It should be clear by now that the reputation that bats have as evil, bloodthirsty, winged demons of the night is totally unjustified. Bats are not only elegant and fascinating creatures, they benefit humans by pollinating plants, dispersing seeds, and feeding on insect pests.

Unfortunately, because of human misunderstanding, as well as practices such as habitat destruction and indiscriminate use of pesticides, many bat species are endangered, and some have already gone extinct. In the United States, nearly 40% of the native bat species are endangered. MUCH MORE

If all things were equal, it’s possible the many bat species that inhabit the United States could help to mitigate the insect issues that are being exacerbated by the loss of millions of birds; it would seem natural that the bat populations would expand and flourish with an increased food supply, plus we receive the added benefit with their help in pollinating some of our essential crops, but unfortunately, even the bats are beginning to die - and they very well could be one of the last “canaries” in the mine!

I became aware of the plight of the bats just a few weeks ago, and after correlating it with the butterflies, birds and the bees, it’s easy to see by connecting the dots that this isn’t localized to a single species, but seems to be working itself up the chain, beginning with the most fragile and gradually working its way through our basic ecology. These are just a few of the obvious species that are leaving us in droves, but its the frogs and countless other creatures going as well that will help to finalize our demise: