Correction appended: A previous version of this story misstated the year Ruth McIlhenny moved to Gainesville. It has been corrected.
For decades, drivers on Florida’s highways cruised to the sound of lovers: the thunk thunk thunk of hundreds of lovebugs splattering onto their cars.
Ruth McIlhenny remembers the slender black and orange bug as a thick coat on her windshield and mirrors after she moved to Gainesville in 1997. Her first concern: feeling like she was “committing insecticide” on the road. Then came the matter of her car’s cleanup. Once she figured out that wiping the bugs off quickly was best for protecting her paint job, she learned to live with lovebugs, she said.
But the past several years have brought cleaner windshields and fewer face-to-face brushes with clouds of paired-up lovebugs — a change that left McIlhenny wondering what it could mean to live without them.
“I think that [people] recognize that there's something fundamentally wrong when an insect just disappears,” she said.
In a trend scientists say poses risks to all ecosystems, 40% of all insects are declining globally in “the insect apocalypse.” The lovebug, whose loss across Florida remains unexplained, joins them.
A march fly species called Plecia nearctica, the lovebug is best known for mid-flight mating, the source of its namesake. The insect couples up for at least 12 hours at a time, a notable portion of its adult lifespan, which lasts just three to four days.
The lovebug began its love affair with the Southern United States in 1940, flying in from its original home in Central America and reaching Florida in 1949. A swarm of urban myths have followed it, including one falsely claiming lovebugs were genetically engineered by University of Florida scientists to kill mosquitos.
In the 1970s, the lovebug gained enough notoriety to prompt state-funded research at UF on the extent of their population, which is known to peak seasonally from April to May and again from August to September.
Among Floridians, the everyday question of lovebugs long remained the same: “Five years ago, it would have been, ‘What can we do to get rid of them?’” said UF entomology professor Dr. Norman Leppla.
Despite their present population decline, no institutional research on lovebugs has been funded since, according to Leppla, who has studied the bug since the ’70s.
Leppla verified their disappearance on his own by way of observational sampling, browsing packed parking lots to check the fronts of cars, finding little sign of lovebug life. He said the remaining population lingers in nearby pastures.
As a nuisance pest, lovebugs capture little research interest because they don’t pose any threat to human health or agriculture, Leppla explained. Well-studied pests like cockroaches and house flies stir more emotion in people than do lovebugs, even if that emotion is “Get them out of my home!”
While lovebug larvae help decompose dead plant material, Leppla said the insect doesn’t play a significant role in Florida’s ecosystems. Still, its abrupt decline is worrisome because of what it signals: the increasing endangerment of insect species.
“The problem is, what else are we losing at the same time that does matter?” Leppla said.
The answer — a great deal.
Of all the species documented on Earth, insects make up two-thirds. Globally, insects are declining at a rate of up to 2% each year, with moths, butterflies, bees and beetles among the affected. Their loss doesn't just mean fewer bites, stings and accidental swallows but a significant ecosystem disruption from the ground up.
At the base of food chains, insects are a meal for birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals, setting off a flow of nutrients that travels from small animals to increasingly larger ones.
Insects also do essential work like pollination, decomposition and control of other pests. Over a third of global crop production relies on pollinators, whose services are valued at an estimated $34 billion in the United States alone.
With fewer insects, crops and humans alike become more vulnerable to disease-carrying pests and pathogens. “It’s not happy,” Leppla said of these threats.
Behind the decline of insects lies human harm. Habitat degradation, pollution, pesticides and other stressors have insects facing “death by a thousand cuts.”
Climate change, which is shifting global temperatures, rainfall patterns and seasons, threatens to deepen these cuts. For insects, which can’t generate body heat and might live out the entirety of their adulthood in the span of a day, even slight environmental fluctuations can disrupt life cycles, ranges and access to host plants.
Lovebugs may find their synchrony disrupted because of the warming climate, which could alter their seasonal peaks and allow them to extend their range north. Because lovebugs hail from the tropics, North and Central Florida will likely become less favorable to them, Leppla said, as the local climate becomes more temperate and less tropical. Changing moisture conditions could also spell trouble for the bugs, which rely on a particular range of soil moisture. Drying grasslands or heavier rains affect their ability to survive.
For now, the absence of lovebugs lingers in the air as much as the heat, particularly for Gainesville car-wash owner Nick Gallo.
When he opened the first of his two Gallo Car Washes in May 2023, just shy of the lovebug’s spring peak, his economic calculus included the bugs’ reappearance in fall.
But the demand for lovebug cleanings, once high enough to double business, hasn’t returned, Gallo said. When his staff members find a lonely lovebug hovering inside the building, he said, they release it back into the open air.
While the loss of lovebugs sticks out to Gallo, an Orlando native — sometimes he asks himself, “Man, is this something I just imagined as a child growing up in Florida?” — he wonders if his care is shared.
“It seems like insects are way less loved,” he said. “Nobody’s mascot is a lovebug.”
McIlhenny suggests otherwise. The creature that once decorated her car hood now decorates her shirt: a plain white tee displaying a picture of the insect pair. Beneath the image read the words, “Gainesville is for lovers.”
“When I first moved here, I never thought I would feel bad about not having a lot of lovebugs,” McIlhenny said. “But after 27 years, seeing the changes in them showing up — I'm sad.”