Only a diverse nature is also a resilient nature. As the most species-rich animal class, insects make a significant contribution to biodiversity on our planet because they keep the cycle of nutrition, digestion and decomposition in balance. Because they break down substances that are harmful to other creatures. And because they “spur on” flora and fauna to respond to the intelligence of insects with ever better strategies.

Not only busy bees, but also mosquitoes, flies and many other insects contribute to the reproduction of flora by pollinating or transporting seeds. Insects maintain our plant world by pollinating more than ¾ of it. This service is worth money: for example, experts estimate the economic benefit of pollination at 265 billion euros per year.

Insects are important elements of the food chain: most birds, freshwater fish, reptiles and amphibians as well as various mammals depend on insects for their diet. The swift (Apus apus), for example, feeds on more than 500 species of insects such as aphids, hymenoptera such as bees and ants, beetles, flies and arachnids. Feeding breeding pairs collect over 20,000 insects per day for their small animals. Many mammals also feed on insects, such as hedgehogs. Even in water, insects are essential: The diet of freshwater edible fish consists of up to 90% insect larvae. Insects also eat insects, which is used in pest control in agriculture. Over 50 insect species are now bred specifically for this purpose and sold commercially.

Around a third of all food is pollinated by insects. Fruit plants, low-growing fruits and vegetables would be inconceivable without insects. Without insects, even a cheeseburger would only be a bun, because cattle prefer to feed on forage plants that are pollinated by insects. And did you know that bearded midges are the only pollinators of the cocoa tree, so every chocolate also contains the work of insects? But that’s not all: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization sees the consumption of insects as a promising solution on the way to a more sustainable global diet.

Without insects, we would have a major hygiene problem. What happens to all the cow dung on our pastures, for example? Insects that feed on dung take care of the dung heaps. They are called coprophages. Some insects lay their eggs directly in the manure and live there, others dig tunnels up to ten centimeters deep and move in with the manure. Scarab beetles even take it many meters away to eat it in peace, protected from competitors.

Like earthworms, many insects are involved in rearranging, mixing and aerating the soil. This promotes the “respiration” of the soil and the root formation of plants. By decomposing organic substances, insects also contribute directly to the formation of humus and the fertility of the soil.

Without insects, we would be pretty naked. This does not only refer to the silk produced by an insect. Without the active participation of insects, the cotton plant could not thrive either. The same also applies to leather goods, because the animals from whose skin we obtain leather are dependent on food plants – and these in turn depend on the work of insects.

Insects help the industry with chemical production: the greasy skin of mealybugs and flour lice is used for wax production and scale insects provide resin. The scale insect Laccifer lacca is particularly well known. The “shellac” obtained from it adheres to many surfaces, has good thermal plasticity and low sensitivity to many solvents and is biodegradable. Today, the product is used worldwide in many forms for insulating, denaturing and sealing, such as electrical appliances, shoe polish, hairspray, nail polish, floor polish and printing inks.

Most health-promoting plants cannot survive without pollination by insects, for example valerian, lavender, lemon balm, eucalyptus, camomile, St. John’s wort and sage. The global market for medicinal plants has been growing by around ten percent for years and is currently worth around 100 billion US dollars. Due to the emergence of multi-resistant germs for which medicine has no safe treatment, maggot therapy has regained importance in recent years. Bee venom has also been used successfully in medicine against arthritis since 1930.

Moths can smell up to 100 times finer than humans, ants can carry several times their body weight, mosquitoes effortlessly defy the force of large raindrops and beetles reliably orient themselves by the stars without an electronic navigation system. Why do fireflies glow, how do springtails manage to be both permeable to air and robust against friction and how do ants live together peacefully in communities of up to 800,000 individuals? Insects are interesting animals and we can learn a lot from studying them.