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Erik Runquist saw it for a moment, then it was gone. Walking a tract of Nature Conservancy-owned prairie outside Moorhead, Runquist caught a glimpse of a Dakota skipper, a thumbnail-sized, orange and brown butterfly. It perched atop a coneflower before disappearing into the prairie grass. "Skippers are evasive. You may get only a few seconds to be able to find it before it zips off the coneflower, especially if it's a windy day," said Runquist, the Minnesota Zoo's butterfly conservation biologist. "Once they get in flight, it's almost impossible to find them again.

A new study by the Xerces Society showed a 74 percent decrease in the number of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) over the last two decades. Butterfly conservationists at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History monitor the monarch numbers on the Monterey Peninsula and said the study's results come as no surprise. They are similar to a trend conservationists are seeing locally. Their numbers are going down," museum representative Patrick Whitehurst said. Whitehurst said that between 2014 and 2015, the monarch population at Pacific Grove's sanctuary was cut in half.

The latest Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) report, published today, has revealed that Turtle Dove (Streptopelia turtur) numbers have hit a new low, declining by 93% since 1994. This trend is mirrored across Europe, with a decline of 78% between 1980 and 2013. The highest remaining breeding densities occur in eastern and southern England, and they have now disappeared from large areas of the country.

Insect populations are declining dramatically in many parts of the world, recent studies show. Researchers say various factors, from monoculture farming to habitat loss, are to blame for the plight of insects, which are essential to agriculture and ecosystems.

Neonicotinoids may be contributing towards the disappearance of butterflies from the countryside, according to the first scientific study to examine the effect of the controversial agricultural pesticides on British butterflies. Researchers found that 15 of 17 species which commonly live on farmland – including the small tortoiseshell, small skipper and wall butterfly – show declines associated with increasing neonic use.

The head of Australia’s only dedicated frog hospital believes powerful insecticides are behind a staggering decline in frog populations along the Queensland coast. But Deborah Pergolotti, of the Cairns Frog Safe project, has struggled to drum up government and academic interest in researching the bizarre malformations she has documented in amphibians. “The first domino in the sequence is chemicals,” she says, specifically neonicotinoids.

Once free to flit over millions of acres of unmolested prairie, the humble Dakota skipper's range has been drastically reduced over time. It was relatively easy in the 1970s for Robert Dana to find the Dakota skipper (Hesperia dacotae), a pollinator that clings to scattered remnants of native prairie that provide its habitat. "It wasn't difficult to find," he said.

Recent declining numbers of honeybees, Apis mellifera, in colonies threatens crop production as well as feral plant community biodiversity. Chemicals applied in agroecosystems are regarded as one of primary causes of the decline. In Japan, the heavy loss of honeybee colonies associated with pesticide use has been reported from beekeepers recently, leading to lessened use of honeybee colonies to facilitate pollination of cultivates. Nevertheless, no study has quantitatively examined the damage to honeybee colonies caused by the pesticide application in Japanese agricultural fields to date.

Non-target aquatic insects are susceptible to chronic neonicotinoid insecticide exposure during the early stages of development from repeated run-off events and prolonged persistence of these chemicals. Investigations on the chronic toxicity of neonicotinoids to aquatic invertebrates have been limited to a few species, under different laboratory conditions that often preclude direct comparisons of the relative toxicity of different compounds.

Sardines used to form the major catch for traditional fishermen who ventured out to sea during the trawl ban in Kerala’s coastal waters. But the availability of sardines has declined to alarming levels, affecting the livelihood of hundreds of fishermen. Sardines have been caught from coastal waters mainly using seines for about 200 years. Sardines in the 10-14 cm size group, less than one year old, form a major component of sardine population.