A petition has been launched to stop the expansion of the Port of Tilbury over fears that it will kill off the local insects.

Titled “For Bug’s Sake - Stop the Tilbury Expansion”, the petition has reached almost 400 signatures in three days.

It has been set up to prevent the Tilbury 2 development which is set to replace the decommissioned power station in Tilbury.

The site supports a collection of bugs which play an important role on a national level.

There are approximately 1,397 species recorded in recent surveys, including 159 species of conservation concern and 31 species that have been identified as rare or threatened.

BugLife - a conservation trust that is dedicated to protecting insects - has identified a number of particularly important of flying insects that they say will struggle to survive following this expansion.

These include the Shrill carder bee, the Brown-banded carder bee, the Sea aster mining bee and the Five-banded weevil-wasp.

Jamie Robins, planning lead at Buglife said “This is an exceptional site for brownfield invertebrates.

"The wide mosaic of successional habitats such as Pulverised Fuel Ash (PFA), Lytag and other substrates, has allowed drought stressed grasslands, lichen heath, herb and lichen-rich grasslands to develop.

"The incredible assemblage of invertebrates currently found on this site won’t be able to survive on the tiny areas of land that will be retained following this development.

"Much more needs to be done to ensure that these plans don’t lead to yet another loss of brownfield biodiversity in the Thames Gateway.”

Now the Trust has taken action and want to see the plans stopped to save the bugs.

The proposals are for a new Roll-on/Roll-off terminal to import and export containers, a new terminal to import and process bulk construction materials and external storage areas for other goods such as cars.

To help the movement of goods and containers, new rail sidings will also be built as well as a new link road and extended jetty.