Six-Legged Workers Contribution? $57 Billion

April 12, 2006 -- -- The next time you spot a bug, you might think twice before squashing a loyal member of the U.S. workforce -- one who never complains about long hours, poor working conditions and a lack of health and dental care.

Insects are obviously an important part of the U.S. ecology, but new research suggests they're also a vital part of the U.S. economy -- to the tune of $57 billion a year.

"We're trying to turn these creatures into something people can relate to and understand how they contribute to our lives," said Mace Vaughn, an entomologist who co-wrote a new study on the economic impact of insects. The research was completed for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation -- a nonprofit environmental group where Vaughn works as conservation director.

"We scoured whatever was out there on how money was exchanging hands in our economy and related it back to insects," he said.

Vaughn and co-author John Losey, an entomologist and associate professor at Cornell University, discovered that insects are intertwined in many areas of our economy, and their contributions total what the authors believe is a conservative estimate of about $57 billion annually.

"Because of all the things insects do that we couldn't account for, our value of over $50 billion is almost certainly an underestimate," said Vaughn.

The researchers studied four "services" native insects provide: pest control, pollination, wildlife nutrition and, of course, dung burial -- for their article in the April issue of the journal Bioscience.

They concluded that native insects annually provide more than $4.5 billion in pest control, pollinate $3 billion in crops and save ranchers more than $380 million by cleaning up grazing lands.

If you want to see how America's bug economy affects you, Vaughn points to the supermarket.

He emphasizes that our meals would be a lot less exciting and lot more expensive if we didn't have insects to cross-pollinate our crops.