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If we took all the termites in the world and molded them into a giant ball, this churning clod, in a measure known as biomass, would weigh more than all the birds on the planet.”
The analogy of grandeur that the North American journalist, specializing in environmental issues, Oliver Milman, takes to his first book, The Insect Crisis – The Fall of Small Empires That Make the World Go Around (Bertrand Editora), gives us an scale of the incredible success of these little creatures. Based on numbers and biomass alone, insects are the most successful animals on Earth. However, the number of insects is in serious decline, with the reduction exceeding 90% in some regions. According to Oliver Milman, 5 to 10% of insect species have experienced extinction in the short period between industrialization and the present.
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