A thousand thousand bug and flies,

Buzzing, flying, landing in your eyes,

This was the norm, it was a pestilence,

It was nature's enduring dominance.

A hundred thousand bugs and flies,

They seemed so many, who noticed their decline?

Still abundant, still kept busy,

The wild continued to seem fizzy.

Ten thousand remaining bugs and flies,

They eat and excrete, they seem in high supply,

They connect ecology from birth to death,

But the warning signs were no longer bereft.

A thousand left of those bugs and flies,

Their dwindling numbers start to be defined,

The ecosystems have begun to crumble,

But we didn't care, or feel at all humble.

A hundred remain of the bugs and flies,

Pollination fails, the world begins to die,

Predators go hungry, rotting flesh amasses,

But our species ignores, as the food web crashes.

Just ten hold on of the once abundant flies,

A rarity, and novelty, of a time gone by,

Can you imagine the world was once abuzz?

The latest generation don't recall what once was.

The final remaining species of the flies,

Studied desperately, to save our own demise,

Can we clone, recreate, or engineer?

Will a robot do, or is our own end near?