Some people wouldn't give a second thought to squashing them underfoot but entomologist Ruud Kleinpaste predicts a doomsday scenario in a world without bugs.
Known here and internationally as "The Bug Man", Kleinpaste says insects consistently get "bad press" but he can't imagine life without them.
"About 80 per cent of plants are pollinated by insects and imagine if bugs didn't clean up all the crap from cattle, people or whatever.
"Dung removal is a really important job and if you didn't have it, in two months' time you'd be up to your neck in shit."
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Still speaking with a Dutch accent despite migrating here in 1978, Kleinpaste said he never trapped insects in jars as a child nor did he do any experiments involving magnifying glasses and ants. In fact, his foray into the study of insects was "completely by accident".
"I actually wanted to study biology but when I went to university in 1969 we were all given a large frog and a brick and with the brick we had to smash the shit out of the frog," he said.
"That's the way they did things in those days. I studied forestry because you couldn't do those things to trees."
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