A working group of 21 researchers, including Eliza Grames, Chris Elphick, and Rob Cooke, spent a year and a half examining how insect declines affect vertebrates. Their findings appear in a paper published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity in 2026. The researchers found that insects support vertebrate life in ways that extend far beyond serving as food.
Insects function as ecosystem engineers. Termite nests provide climate-controlled nesting sites for parrots and egg-laying spots for reptiles. Some frogs live inside ant nests to exploit humid conditions. The soil around termite mounds enables burrowing by naked mole rats and aardvarks. Ant nests concentrate nutrients that enhance plant growth, creating grazing habitat for gazelles.
Insects also provide vertebrates with chemical defenses. Horned lizards convert ant chemicals into a toxic blood-spurting defense against predators. Poisonous frogs, birds, and snakes obtain toxins from insects they consume. Many birds nest near wasp nests, where the threat of stings deters predators. Some young songbirds in the Amazon mimic fuzzy caterpillars to avoid predation.
Beyond food, insects remove waste from ecosystems. By decomposing carcasses and dung, insects likely reduce disease transmission in wild vertebrate populations. Dragonfly larvae control mosquito populations by eating mosquito larvae. In Australia, scientists used mosquitoes to transmit a virus that controlled invasive rabbit populations, allowing bilby and other native marsupial populations to rebound.
Researchers have found hundreds of medicinal compounds in insects, with more likely undiscovered. Chimpanzees press flying insects into wounds, suggesting medicinal effects.
Insects also affect vertebrate food supplies indirectly. Small wasps are the only pollinators of fig trees, which provide fruit to over 1,200 vertebrate species. Changes in insect communities alter interactions between vertebrates. When an invasive ant disrupted the relationship between a native ant and acacia bush, elephants ate more acacia, affecting how lions hunted zebras.
Sloths and their moths demonstrate another relationship. Moths live in sloth fur and provide nutrients to algae that grow there. The sloth eats this algae, which provides camouflage. The moth reproduces in sloth dung, and the sloth's weekly ground descent allows moths to complete their life cycle.