One reason that studies into the decline are limited is that entomology and taxonomy are themselves in decline. At the 2019 Entomology Congress, leading entomologist Jürgen Gross said that "We are ourselves an endangered species" while Wolfgang Wägele ? an expert in systematic zoology ? said that "in the universities we have lost nearly all experts".
General biology courses in college give less attention to insects, and the number of biologists specialising in entomology is decreasing as specialties such as genetics expand. In addition, studies investi- gating the decline tend to be done by collecting insects and killing them in traps, which poses an ethical problem for conservationists.
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