There's a certain summer road-trip memory that most people over a certain age may immediately relate to: pulling into a gas station, pulling out the squeegee, and scraping a windshield that's looked like a crime scene after a few hundred miles of summer driving. Put the same question to a college student today, and the answer is more confused than nostalgic. The culprit isn't that young drivers spend less time on the road with their windows down; it appears, rather, that there are just fewer insects left to strike their windshields, come to think of it.
That's what the new data from UK entomologists suggests, and it has generated considerable interest this year. The Bugs Matter 2024 report, published by Kent Wildlife Trust and the invertebrate charity Buglife in a citizen-science survey that began in 2021, found that the number of flying insects recorded on volunteers' license plates across the UK fell by 62.5% between 2021 and 2024. The study, which recruited 654 volunteers to attach a standard grid to their number plates and report every journey taken in a specially designed app, has so far tracked tens of thousands of journeys around the UK. The decline was not isolated to just one region, but stretched across England (62%), Wales (64%), Scotland (over 65%) and Northern Ireland (55%). The national figure isn't a simple average of the four regions; it comes from a statistical model run across the full dataset that adjusts for factors like journey speed, distance, and land type, which is why the regional numbers don't need to line up with the national one through basic arithmetic.
