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Alex Wild

Do you want to photograph every insect species on earth?

If you started now, shooting 100 species per day, it’d take about 30 years to get through just the known species.

14 comments
DELETED

@alexwild The good thing with biotic crises is that it makes the daunting task a little easier each day

John Shirley

@alexwild And yet: The insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them’

Insects have declined by 75% in the past 50 years – and the consequences may soon be catastrophic.

theguardian.com/environment/20

weirdmustard

@JohnShirley2023@mastodon.cloud @alexwild@mastodon.online Yea you better start with the near extinct species and update the red list from time to time to see which one you gotta rush to shoot next.

𒀭Ralf Muschall🐙-

@JohnShirley2023 @alexwild It will be interesting. The total mass of humans is about 500 million tons. The total mass of insects eaten each year by spiders is the same. It's an easy guess what happens once we have killed all insects.

Ahd Child

@alexwild Shooting insects is so different from shooting other kinds of wildlife. Its amazing that I find so many subjects in my own backyard.

For any bird I shoot, I can find a million other images online. Shooting insects, I found one unique one that I can't find anywhere else online. I recently shot a yellow poplar weevil and only found a handful of other images on Flickr.

I'm still pretty new to macro and the insect world, but I am loving it

𒀭Ralf Muschall🐙-

@alexwild Taking into account that almost everything has a chalcid wasp eating it from the inside, this gets a tough job. Thinking further about chalcid wasps parasiting each other on multiple levels, the total number will be infinite.

Alex Wild

(Good luck trying to identify 100 species every day though)

Mary625

@alexwild

You would still have a better chance of doing that than you would to become a billionaire
😁

Toby

@alexwild and that’s assuming they stand still!

MJA

@alexwild it’s very tricky with new species coming into existence with (I assume) a known frequency, and old species going out of existence with some known frequency, even leaving aside borderline new species and borderline extinct species.

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