Do insects weigh more than us?

By Oliver Morton

One of the delights of following environmental news is that you are regularly enjoined to eat more insects. Reading one such article recently, I was struck, among the well-worn benefits (low fat, low carbon, widely available, tastes like chicken, etc), by a new one. Lest readers should worry that there were not enough insects to go round, the author wrote reassuringly that there are in fact 40 tonnes of them for every human being on the planet.

This is what an editor I used to work with called a nifty—a neat little fact of the sort that might come in handy at, say, a drinks party, but which had a bit more to it than mere neatness. In this case the bit more comes from the way the fact acts as a perspective-shifting micro-homily: hey humankind, you may think you're great, but if the insects got together they could crush you like, well, bugs.