On a related vein of thought, one can almost model any currently-visible adults of a species with a high potential number of offspring-per-adult as a “surplus” that doesn’t necessarily have a large effect on trophic “throughput”. Phytoplankton come to mind as the extreme case; they sequester a huge quantity of carbon dioxide, but the oceans aren’t green (usually...) because huge quantities of them are constantly sinking to the ocean floor or being eaten. That small surviving fraction still reproduces at a high enough level to maintain themselves. (Land plants seem to have a very different equilibrium, which probably has something to do with… better herbivore control by predators, and maybe also counter-herbivore adaptations and the necessity of infrastructure-deployment to handle water scarcity? Not especially confident on this.)
Insects don’t have the reproductive rate of phytoplankton, though. And from the other comments, it sounds like this really is starving out some members of higher tropic levels.
On a related vein of thought, one can almost model any currently-visible adults of a species with a high potential number of offspring-per-adult as a “surplus” that doesn’t necessarily have a large effect on trophic “throughput”. Phytoplankton come to mind as the extreme case; they sequester a huge quantity of carbon dioxide, but the oceans aren’t green (usually...) because huge quantities of them are constantly sinking to the ocean floor or being eaten. That small surviving fraction still reproduces at a high enough level to maintain themselves. (Land plants seem to have a very different equilibrium, which probably has something to do with… better herbivore control by predators, and maybe also counter-herbivore adaptations and the necessity of infrastructure-deployment to handle water scarcity? Not especially confident on this.)
Insects don’t have the reproductive rate of phytoplankton, though. And from the other comments, it sounds like this really is starving out some members of higher tropic levels.