“When I was a kid, you could go out driving in the summer, and you would come home, and your car windshield was covered in bugs,” said ecologist Cheryl Schultz. Today, you can cruise through peak season with spotless glass.

A once-normal layer of splattered wings and legs has vanished, and that absence has become its own warning sign. Scientists call this long decline an “insect apocalypse,” and for once, the dramatic name matches the data.

Researchers speaking with Live Science described a global pattern that has shifted from a gentle decline to an unmistakable drop. Bee diversity has fallen by roughly 25 percent since the mid-90s.

Butterfly numbers in the United States are down over 20 percent. A long-term German monitoring project reported a 76 percent decline in flying insects in so

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