“If it gets too hot, and [insects] are unable to ride out heat waves in micro-habitat refuges, they may be exposed to temperatures that either kill many of them, or which render them sterile,” Harvey explains.A 2018 study, for example, found that laboratory-induced heatwaves wreaked havoc on flour beetles’ sperm, while repeated heat waves made them “almost sterile,” according to the paper in Nature Communications.But tropical insects are even more imperiled by climate change than temperate ones, with some likely to disappear before we even recognize they exist.“This timing is driven by a combination of snowmelt timing and June maximum temperatures, both of which have shifted,” she says, noting that summer maximum temperatures are already 1.5-2° Celsius (2.7-3.6° Fahrenheit) warmer than when she launched her work decades ago.Overall, climate change is playing havoc, throwing birth, maturation and migration timing out of whack, imperiling the many and complex ways insects interact with plants and other animals."