Moths have 'secret role' as crucial pollinators
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It started with what we might think of as traditional predators that feed on other species to keep them from getting out of control. Bass in a river would keep minnows from devouring all the plants.
But it went even farther than that where a traditional large predator's absence might lead to an ant population getting out of control and changing the growth (or lack of it) of an ecosystem.
Other situations where even just predators not scaring deer enough to keep them moving would result in forests floors being cleared out by deer and changing what trees grew and and eradication of entire plant species in an ecosystem and such. You wouldn't notice it at first but later on the results can be dramatic.
I suspect what we think the results of what a moth does, or any given animal might be quite a bit different than we expect.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/2...
The one that tons of people have seen is how reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone changed the course of rivers, made them less eroding, and generally increased ecosystem diversity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q&t=1s
Beavers are another one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pk_VD1-8BM Remember how we learned a lot of westward expansion in US colonial days was led by mountainmen trapping beavers to use their pelts in fancy european hats and we kept going further west because we kept killing off the beavers while demand for fancy hats kept going up? Turns out when you remove all those beaver ponds that would slow down water flow, you end up with a lot more erosion, incision, and flooding -- the landscape we have now. Fisherman think beaver ponds decrease fish populations because they tend to have warmer water, but this doesn't quite pass the thousands-years-of-coevolution-before-beaver-extermination sniff test... some experiments have showed that beaver ponds actually increase fish stock because they create lots of fish nurseries, and trout and salmon can instinctively swim up through beaver dams.
Then when you consider how things like aquaponics incorporate fish because fish poop makes great fertilizer, it starts to become clear how important beaver ponds can be to nutrient cycling in these ecosystems. One of the most fascinating fish-based nutrient flows is salmon migrations... they're hatched upstream, put on most of their growth and biomass in the ocean, and then migrate back upstream to die. Well, when they die, their bodies bring all those nutrients that washed down out of the watershed back up into the watershed, where they're spread by the bears and hawks that eat them, creating a grand flow of energy through the landscape that gives ecosystem stability. And beaver ponds have historically created the habitat needed to support this critical piece of the machine.
A fascinating example of how removal of keystone species can permanently stunt ecosystems is this guy trying to reforest scotland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAGHUkby2Is We think of scotland as grassy rolling hills, but the scotland of lore was actually covered in forest. This guy is finding that the forests can't grow back because deer populations are too high and they just eat any small saplings that try to take hold. Without reintroducing keystone predators like wolves, he's found that small interventions like fencing off the edges of tree thickets for a few years until the saplings can take hold can start the healing process.
Reintroducing the wolves was part of a much larger mis-management of the park where we basically destroyed 80-90% of Yellowstone over a half century, by doing things like screwing with the animal population, or the controlled burning by indigenous/native populations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_effect_(ecology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade https://kottke.org/15/01/yellowstone-how-not-to-manage-a-nat...
IANA ethologist anyway.
If you can check out the video.
There are various kinds of flying insects other than bees that are key pollinators.
In avocados I believe there is still quite a bit of research to do about A type and B type flowers and pollinator insects. The current knowledge is that the flower opens as type A and then closes and reopens later as type B. The one type pollinates the other type. Some varieties will have type B during the day, allowing immediate cross polination between that tree and the other variety with the type A open at that time.
Now, the part where I say research is lacking: As general advice in farming circles, people currently tend to use a B type cross pollinator (a second cultivar in about 1/20 trees) for a A type tree. However, there are cases of monocultivar orchards with very high yields that don't have the cross pollinators. So, if the tree opens at night as type B, it means there is something that is active at night that pollinates the trees (I'll give you a hint, bees sleep at night)...
I've tried to summarise something that is a bit more complicated, so I hope it makes sense. Another thing you'll point out is that the insect that's active at night would also need to be active during the day if it's pollinating with pollen from earlier the same day. Otherwise you'll still need some access to a type A flower at night. In any case, my main point is that studying the night phase of the flowers is something that I don't know a lot of farmers are doing. For example, it's common to use bee hives for better pollination, and that presupposes that the farmer is not particularly aiming for night time pollination.
Am I reading this right. Moths are as or more important than Bees as pollinators?
>The study says that the moths' transport networks are larger and more complex than those of daytime pollinators like bees.
No. It's only new to the headline writer who apparently isn't a gardener, and wants to use the word "secret" to drive clicks.
There are even moths that mimic hummingbirds[1]. First time I saw one, I thought it was a hummingbird.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemaris
EDIT: I meant European Honeybees, but still news to me that sweat bees and the like are considered bees as well. Interesting.
Hoverflies were the big surprise for me. They employ mimicry to be mistaken for bees (or occasionally hornets), but they are also important pollinators.
There are around 4000 known species of bee (Anthophila) native just to North America.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angraecum_sesquipedale#Reprodu...
(from Steve Blanks' secret history of silicon valley)
https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%E2%80%99d-...
It reminds me of when someone said if the honey bees die, all plants will die. and I was like ... you realize that honey bees came to north America with the European settlers right? and they were like ok? They still didnt get it.
Not wanting the death of honeybees, but here are other pollinators out there.