Where have all the insects gone?

Recently, we commissioned one of Journal of Animal Ecology‘s most experienced Associate Editors, Simon Leather, to compile a Virtual Issue on his great passion – insects. The journal has published many classic insect ecology papers over the years and Simon does a great job of highlighting some of these as well as many new papers that we hope will go on to become classics themselves. In his preface to the VI, Simon bemoans the fact that back in the 1970s, when he first began subscribing to the journal, there were many more papers on insects than there are now and that the journal has perhaps become vertebrate-centric in recent years. This got me thinking – is this really true? And if it is, then why do we publish fewer entomological papers now than back then? Are we alone in this trend or is it common across other general ecological journals? And, either way, should we be worried about the taxonomic distribution of our papers