Are we in the midst of a global insect Armageddon that most of us have failed to notice? Here’s another data point: A decades-long decline in plant-pollinating hawk moths has been reported in the Northeast, but its causes and consequences are uncertain because we know so little about the ecology of these insects. In days past, compiling such information would have made a respectable life’s work for a Linnaeus, Humboldt or Darwin. Now such creatures are often ignored because studying them seems unlikely to generate publications, headlines or grants that provide academics with tenure and prestige.

This leaves us with little more than anecdotal evidence to work with. A recent story in The Telegraph noted that automobile windscreens in Britain are no longer heavily caked with splattered insects. It reminded me of the tiny wings, legs and antennas that used to smear the front of my car after midsummer drives during the 1970s. Nowadays, a drive through northern New York, where I live, yields barely a blemish. Is it because cars are more streamlined? Not likely. Last July, I examined parked vehicles in Saranac Lake and found little or no bug debris, even on license plates or the blunt fronts of vans.

What’s behind the decline? Probably not climate change, according to the researchers in the German study who also monitored local weather during the survey. What about collisions with vehicles? Despite my experience and the dashboard observations in Britain, one study published in 2015 estimated that hundreds of billions of insects are being killed in North America by cars and trucks every year. The study’s authors called for additional research to determine whether what they found is “contributing to the substantial declines of pollinating insects occurring on a global scale, thus putting the ecological functioning of natural areas and agricultural productivity in jeopardy.”

Cars were probably not the culprit in the German study, though, because it focused on nature reserves where road carnage is minimal. For some experts, the process of elimination leaves pesticides among the likely suspects.

Why care about this new silence of the bugs? An across-the-board decline in flying insects, if true, means that an entire sector of the animal kingdom is in trouble, representing an immense diversity of life-forms, from butterflies and beetles to hoverflies and damselflies. The eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson, who has spent much of his life studying ants, has warned: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”