Extinct and Endangered

From bees to butterflies, insects help keep natural ecosystems healthy. But the evidence is clear: many insect species are in decline.Experience these tiny animals' outsized impact on our planet through the uniquely powerful macrophotography of Levon Biss, which highlights 40 incredible but imperiled species from specimens from the Museum's world-class research collection in large-format photographs, some as large as 4.5 by 8 feet. Show Transcript EXTINCT & ENDANGERED[Levon Biss examines a delicate butterfly specimen under a desk lamp.]LEVON BISS (Photographer): As a photographer, you know, the most fun you can have is when you’ve got a subject that allows you to play creatively with light.[Biss adjusts pieces on an elaborately-rigged camera and light set-up inside a studio.]BISS: When I photographed humans, for example, I used to use light all the time because it allows me to sculpt around the subject, to emphasize certain features.[Biss arranges the butterfly specimen on the photo rig, very close to the camera lens.]BISS: The challenge here is doing that on the subject is five millimeters long, but the principles are still the same.[Macrophotograph of a brilliant orange and yellow butterfly—the same specimen Biss was arranging in front of the camera.][Text: Extinct & Endangered | Imperiled insects from the collection of the American Museum of Natural History] [The screen is split into a triptych with three different clips of Biss holding a large, black insect (a Lord Howe Island stick insect), pinned in a specimen box. The center strip maintains a clip of Biss and the stick insect, but the flanking scenes show him examining other insect specimens.]BISS: I came into this project, Extinct and Endangered with the view that I think we should talk about more serious and pressing subjects of insect decline and biodiversity.[Biss speaks in his studio.][Text: Levon Biss | Photographer]BISS: I don’t think people really understand the importance of insects and what they do for us—us, as a species, but the planet as a whole.[Biss edits macro images of insects on a desktop computer.BISS: We need to understand that they’re important and we can’t just ignore them because they’re hard to see. [An insect (a firebrat) with scale- and hair-like structures waggles its antenna.]JESSICA WARE (Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology): We think that insects evolved sometime around 450 million years ago.[A damselfly alights on a grass stalk.]WARE: But we know that winged insects, they probably evolved around 400 million years ago. It was before the rise of flowering plants.[A mantis sits on the branches of a conifer. A field with thousands of tiny, flying insects, flitting over grasses.]WARE: There was no birds, there was no bat, there were no pterosaurs, there was nothing in the sky until insects.[Ware speaks in her office.][Text: Jessica Ware | Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology]WARE: It’s hard to imagine the world before insects because so much of what is characteristic about the Earth that we live in has been shaped by, you know, hundreds of millions of years of insect evolution.[Screen is split between a scene of coffee pouring into a mug and pollinating insects bustling around coffee plant flowers. An ant carries a crumb over a picnic blanket.]WARE: From the morning we got up to the point when I’m speaking to you now, actually insects have been a part of that.[A triptych of a silk moth, dozens of silk cocoons trundling down a factory belt, and a sewing machine at work]WARE: Whether it was in the clothing that we wear,[Dozens of apples move down a conveyor belt. A dung beetle rolls a ball of dung along the ground.]WARE: …the food that we’re eating, there’s a lot of things that we kind of take for granted that insects are doing.[A fly buzzes around the inside of a flower. A butterfly lands sips nectar from a garden blossom.]DAVID GRIMALDI (Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology): Most people don’t know about the incredibly important ecological roles that so many insects play. [Grimaldi speaks in his office.][Text: David Grimaldi | Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology]GRIMALDI: They’re the main pollinators of plants. About 85 percent of the world’s flowering plants are pollinated by insects.[Termites chew on a dead leaf.]WARE: You know, they decompose things.[A woodpecker delivers a mouthful of insect larvae to its young.]WARE: They’re a great source of food for a lot of animals. They really structure our ecosystem. [A beetle crawls across a fern and spreads its wings.]WARE: Understanding the history of Earth is understanding the history of insects. [Rodger Gwiazdowski speaks from his lab.][Text: Rodger Gwiazdoski | Entomologist]RODGER GWIAZDOWSKI, Entomologist: I think a core responsibility as a scientist, regardless of what field you’re in, is that you make the unseen seen.[A small tiger beetle darts across a hand displaying it to the camera.]GWIAZDOWSKI: And I think insects get overlooked a lot and get unseen a lot.[A macro view of the same tiger beetle species. A full view of a beetle is flanked by extreme close-ups of its front legs, sporting dozens of spiky hair-like structures.]GWIAZDOWSKI: But when you can see them literally larger than life, it’s a way to realize their importance in the world.[Biss zooms in to an image of the stick insect on his desktop computer.]BISS: Working at this kind of magnification brings a whole new set of challenges. With every different insect that you photograph, there’s so many different elements to it that are unique to that specific insect.[Montage of macro images showing diverse, hair-like structures on the bodies of beetles, butterflies, and bees.]BISS: Hairs, for example, come in so many different varieties. [Biss speaks in his studio.]BISSS: Before I started shooting macro and insects, I had no idea about, you know, the fact that the hairs on the back of a tiger beetles seem to be hollow.[Triptych of macro images of different tiger beetle hairs.] BISS: Certainly, when you put light on them, they kind of glow. [Hands open a specimen drawer in the Museum’s entomology research collections.]GWIAZDOWSKI: Tiger beetles in North America are small. They’re about an inch to about a half inch long.[Close-up of two tiger beetle specimens pinned with labels. Their eyes take up a large portion of their heads.]GWIAZDOWSKI: They all have large, very large eyes, bug eyes, on their head with these very large jaws.[A living tiger beetle pauses for a moment on the sand and then runs off.]GWIAZDOSKI: They’re vicious predators. And they all have very, very long legs because they’re fast runners.[Waves, formed in the wake of a motor boat, lap up on to a sandy river beach.]GWIAZDOSKI: Tiger beetles have inherently evolved to live in very dynamic environments, whether it’s deserts or beaches.[Drone footage of city office buildings and a busy highway along the Connecticut River in Massachusetts.]GWIAZDOSKI: The problem is that we as humans have made some of those habitats unlivable-ly dynamic, even for tiger beetles.[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]GRIMALDI: The first indication that we had that drew a lot of alarm to the plummeting of insect populations and species diversity was a 2017 study[A copy of the research paper lies on the forest floor. An ant crawls over a graph plotting the amount of biomass versus the progression of years from 1990 to 2015. It shows a downward trend.]GRIMALDI: …which recorded dramatic declines in specimen numbers and species numbers. And that was in Germany.[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]GRIMALDI: Since then, people have rounded up data and we’re doing a lot more studies, but the indications are that it’s happening globally. And it’s something that people have noticed anecdotally for a long time.[A single moth flutters around a porch light at night.]GRIMALDI: Where are all the moths at the porch lights?[Archival footage of a car driving down a motorway in 1970s UK.]BISS: When I was a kiddie, I remember you go out in a car on the motorway, a freeway, your windshield and the front of the car will be spattered wi