It's especially alarming considering how many bugs there are out there. Like 2.5% doesn't feel like a lot, but there's about 30 million species and an estimated 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive rn. So that's 250 quadrillion (250,000,000,000,000,000) insects being lost.
For comparison, there are only 8.3 billion (8,300,000,000) humans alive right now. If 2.5% of that population was lost, we would lose 207.5 million (207,500,000). Which is still a lot, but only about one billionth of the loss we are seeing currently in bug populations.
That's not even mentioning how vital these creatures are to the ecosystem. The spiders and tarantulas that scare you eat the mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, flies, roaches, and sometimes mice that bother you so much. The mosquitoes are a huge food supply to all manner of insectivores. Frogs, spiders, lizards, etc. A collapse of the mosquito population would lead to further collapse of other populations and possibly whole ecosystems. Roaches are detrivores that feed on dead or decaying material, speeding up the decomposition process. Without them, it would take much longer for material to decay into viable nutrients for soil. Not to mention the absolute ecosystem collapse that would occur due to pollinators being suddenly gone.
prguitarman
snowghoul
tangentwithtanner
