Fuck The Pandas

A guest post from A Daughter

Now when I say “fuck the pandas” I don’t actually mean it – either figuratively or literally. However, as the year has gone on and I have learnt more and more about the rapid and frightening decline of insects all across the globe, I have steadily become resentful of the panda. You see their campaigns everywhere, even the World wildlife fund logo is a rather round looking panda. Yet you see scarily little on the many insects disappearing from our planet, which would threaten ecosystem collapse if they were to go extinct. We all know the basics of the food chain (thanks to primary school), and we understand that insects generally lie close to the bottom. They are the food source of small reptiles, birds, amphibians, and even small mammals – which of course are in turn food for larger predators. So you can imagine the domino effect across the food chain as the number of small insects rapidly decline. A recent study showed that the current rate of said decline could result in the extinction of a whopping 40% of our insect species over the coming decades. We need insects to pollinate our flowering plants, to help the natural decomposition and recycling systems in habitats around the world, and as mentioned before insects are a vital foodsource as well. What are Giant Pandas? No offence to WWF and their logo but the loss of pandas, however sad it may be, won’t cause a worldwide collapse of functioning ecosystems.