Balance of nature: importance of insects in ecosystems (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, July 04, 2019, 20:38 (1968 days ago) @ David Turell

Insects have existed long before dinosaurs and birds and are vital to ecosystems:

http://nautil.us/issue/73/play/we-need-insects-more-than-they-need-us

"In 'Buzz, Sting, Bite' you quote E.O. Wilson: “The truth is that we need invertebrates but they don’t need us. If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on with little change… But if invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt that the human species could live more than a few months.” What did Wilson mean?

"If all insects were to disappear from today to tomorrow, if they were all gone when you wake up tomorrow, we would all be in big trouble. But the good thing is that insects have been here for 479 million years. They predated the dinosaurs by a wide margin. They were the sole flying creatures for 150 million years. They have survived five mass extinctions already. It’s not like we were going to kill them off, anyway. It’s not like that is something that is at all realistic. Of course, if we blow the entire planet to pieces, they will go, but then we definitely will, too. So they will be here long after we are gone, I think.

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"I think it is strange more people don’t care about insects. They are so common—there are between 1 and 10 trillion individuals out there—and they are such an important part of all sorts of ecological processes that go on. A decline in insects that leads to a decline in birds, fish, small game, would certainly influence us. A paper from 2006—old now—estimated the annual value of the ecosystem services of recreation and wildlife watching, provided by primarily native insects in the United States, to be worth $50 billion. And there are other ecosystem services. According to the IPBES, the abundance and species diversity of wild pollinating species are declining, even as the cultivation of crops that require pollination has tripled in the last 40 years.

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"My pure research is with deadwood insects: Insects that live in dead trees and hollow trees. Right now we are looking into how fungi and insects cooperate in this sort of janitor work that they’re doing out in nature, decomposing deadwood. The fungi have spores that will be blown by the wind in all directions—they don’t have any sort of directional dispersal—so they gain a lot by hitchhiking with a beetle, getting stuck on their side or in the gut. The beetle flies to a new and recently dead tree, which is right where this fungi wants to be, too. And that’s actually an advantage to the beetle, also, to have fungi along, because the fungi can break down some of these compounds that the insects have a hard time breaking down themselves. It’s a win-win thing, is our hypothesis.

"Otherwise, all those nutrients would be locked up in that dead biomass, especially in a forest. With trees being big plants, they have a lot of nutrients locked in. That’s the reason why, at least in the forests over here in Norway—and it’s probably not that different in other places—you will find almost one-third of all the species that live in the forest in the deadwood. A bit more than 20,000 species, and 6,000 or 7,000 of them are associated with deadwood. That’s not just insects, that’s fungi as well. And the rest of them, pretty much, are in the soil. So that’s really where you find the diversity: In the brown food web, in the decomposing organic material.

"Well, 5 percent of all plants on this planet have their seeds dispersed by insects. And it’s usually ants. But the coolest example would be this bush from the southern hemisphere, from the African continent. It produces seeds that both look like and smell like the dung of an antelope, one of these animals that live in the same area.....If it was dung, they would then lay eggs into it. But researchers found they didn’t do that! So probably the beetle realizes that she has been fooled, so she doesn’t lay eggs on it and she doesn’t eat it. But the plant has achieved what it really wants, which is to get the seed carried away a certain distance from the mother plant—and even planted!

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"The ecosystem services provided by insects in the United States alone is valued at $50 billion.

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"'But the life of an insect is pretty much governed by these basic things: eating, reproducing, and avoiding being eaten before you do the other two. So I don’t they would have time for play, just for fun. Everything pretty much has meaning. (my bold)

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"We don’t really even understand how metamorphosis actually works. That is really quite a mystery. That this larvae changes, turns into this pupa or chrysalis, and then everything is just rebuilt inside there? It’s like if kids were playing with LEGO bricks, took those LEGO bricks and put them into the box, shook it, and then a completely new figure was inside when you opened it up."

Comment: dhw loves to discuss and denigrate animals eating animals in ecosystems, which are created by God in His design of evolution. This author would disagreed with dhw! Nature must be in superb balance, all during the time from the first bacteria to the current time with humans.