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Bugs are important. Even the ones who bother us.
That’s the gist of the message of scientists at the University of New Mexico Museum of Southwestern Biology, who made a presentation last week to the Corrales Village Council.
Dewey DeVivi, a museum technician and volunteer coordinator, said their main role is as pollinators.
For example, DeVivi said, a bee will collect pollen from one flower while trying to get at its nectar, then carry the pollen to a flower of the opposite sex and deposit it.
“If we did not have pollinators doing this, we would lose 80 to 90% of our wildflowers, thereby leading to a possible environmental catastrophe,” he said.
DeVivi told the Sandoval Signpost Thursday that most native arthropods (the animal category that includes insects, spiders and crustaceans) are also important to their respective habitats in other ways.
“They fulfill an ecological role in that ecosystem,” he said. “Currently, the attention is on insects that contribute heavily to pollination, such as butterflies, bees, flies, wasps, etc., because they are critically threatened … that being said, many other insects fulfill key ecosystem roles that we know and don’t know of.”
Some detritivore beetles, DeVivi said, consume dead animal tissue and convert it into nutrients that are better absorbed by the soil, and some predaceous insects are great for keeping pest populations in control.
He told councilors humans are largely responsible for the ongoing sixth mass extinction of the planet’s life history.
“For insects, the popular term is ‘death by a thousand cuts,” DeVivi said. “And what this means is that different environmental factors are … coming together as one to lead to cumulative decline and damage for insect populations.”
He said Thursday those factors include climate change-driven drought, pesticides, invasive species, and land development.
“With pollinators on the decline, we expect there will be a substantial loss of diverse plant life, including crops that we eat,” DeVivi said.
He told councilors the Southwest is among the areas in which that decline is most noticeable. DeVivi said studies show butterfly populations in the region have decreased by 54% in the last 20 years. Those include Morrison’s bumblebee and the American bumblebee.
Councilor Bill Woldman asked about ways to control mosquito populations without harming pollinators or other beneficial bugs.
DeVivi said that requires strategies that change on a case-by-case basis, and that natural ways of controlling mosquitoes tend to be expensive.
There’s also a trade-off. DeVivi said mosquitoes are pests to humans, but have an important role in ecosystems — the larvae feed on algae and are an important food source for fish and other aquatic animals, and the fact that adults transmit disease gives them an important regulatory role in managing animal populations
Aerial pesticides, he said, can be very hard on bee populations.
Current measures being done to protect insects, DeVivi said, are first surveying them and assessing their risk of decline and need for conservation. Scientists are working on a website doing that very thing for arthropods of New Mexico, and the New Mexico Department of Wildlife is adding 93 insects to its State Wildlife Action Plan, used to decide where to add funding priorities pertaining to the management and protection of wildlife.
“Before June of this year, insects weren’t even considered wildlife in NM Wildlife,” DeVivi said. “But that’s now changed and a huge step forward for insect conservation in New Mexico.”
Future efforts needed include better recording of where insects of all kinds are found and analysis of the impact on insect populations during consideration of land management practices.
“There also must be a shift in the public and legal perception of endangered species to include endangered habitats,” DeVivi said. “The whole reason why a given species would be of conservation concern is because their habitat is changing or suffering in a way which creates conservation risk for a species to happen in the first place.”
Also at the Sept. 8 meeting, councilors approved a proclamation in support of pollinators, which includes a pledge to “preserve and support the preservation of local pollinators and the agricultural community” through education, enhancing economic development for local growers and preserving open space to provide habitats for local pollinators.
In the United States alone, DeVivi said, insects provide more that $90 billion in ecological services to the economy.
“It isn’t just a moral imperative why we’d want to save insects,” he said.”It is of critical importance to our own survival, too.”
More information:
The New Mexico Rare Arthropods Resource (NM-RARe) has information about New Mexico’s rare, threatened, and endemic arthropods.
Citizens may help track species distributions by photographing insects and posting their locations to websites such as iNaturalist.
Museum staff also recommend volunteering for wildlife conservation groups.
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