- Many different species rely on bramble [e.g. raspberry, blackberry, etc...]
- Bramble fruits can grow twice as large if the flower was visited by multiple insects, which improves bramble's ability to support its many species
- Moths are an outsized contributor to the pollination of bramble, and therefore to supporting those many species
- So conservation efforts should focus on things that uniquely help moths, like limiting light pollution
Given the prevalence of pollinators that are hyper specialized to what they pollinate, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that general purpose pollinator efficiency is both a useless metric, and not what was studied here.
I believe it is actually the other way around: butterflies are colorful moths that learned to exist during the day. The moths are also vastly more diverse and numerous.
In German the category of both is called "Schmetterling" which is also the German word for butterfly, which are technically called "Tagfalter" (day folders). Moths are called "Nachtfalter" (night folder) or simply "Motte" (moth), which technically refers only to specific smaller moths, especially pests.
Moths have mouthparts, butterflies generally don't. They have a specialized nectar sucking tube type organ with a "tongue" in it.
Moths can rob flowers, which means they cut a small hole inside the bottom of the flower's nectar reservoir and then lap it up. Butterflies can't cut flowers.
>Moths have mouthparts, butterflies generally don't
I'm not sure where you get that information. Butterflies also feed on nectar from plants, so they do have mouthparts.
On another note, some butterflies (and maybe moths) are cannibals [1] and feed on their own caterpillars:
"Some butterflies don’t only look like horror movie stars, but are horrors in themselves. Milkweed butterflies (Danainae) — the same subfamily that includes the regal monarch — are vampiric cannibals that use clawed feet to tear open their own caterpillars and mercilessly suck the guts out of them. But why devour your own offspring from the inside out? It’s an even stranger phenomenon known as kleptopharmacophagy."
Relatedly, the article states that more than 80% of pollination happens during the day. I reckon that'd probably be higher if we hadn't been so hellbent on decimating daytime pollinator populations.
Well, we are also hellbent on decimating nighttime pollinators (probably even more than daytime), as well as most other types of insects (except maybe cockroaches).
At least in North America, the "colony collapse" stuff was a livestock phenomenon more than it was a wildlife/ecology issue. Honey bees aren't native to the US; if you see a honey bee in your back yard, there's a pretty good chance that somebody owns it.
I have wild honey bees in my yard (New Mexico) and have seen them in other places. I believe they are Africanized but just looking I can't tell the difference.
At any rate, in warm areas of the US there are many feral old world bees.
One of the things you may be missing is that the article is about "efficiency" as opposed to total impact.
"researchers found that 83% of insect visits to bramble flowers were made during the day. While the moths made fewer visits during the shorter summer nights, notching up only 15% of the visits, they were able to pollinate the flowers more quickly."
Moths are doing great work, but they don't have much time to do the work in and they are not doing the bulk of the work. Also it seems that the night pollinators actually may largely work different flowers than the day pollinators so one can't necessarily pick up the load left by the absence of the other.
Per the article, the bulk of the pollinating happens during the day. Moths being individually more efficient at pollinating is only one of several variables at play here; others include the pollinator populations, the length of daytime v. nighttime, and whether or not flowers bloom during daytime v. nighttime and for how long.
Beekeeping is a business. Much beekeeping business lies in renting hives to farmers (meaning: driving them to far away farms where the bees are then allowed to pollinate for a few days, then on to the next far away farm). Hive renting is pretty stressful to beehives, and farmers tend to use a lot of pesticides. And guess what: pesticides are pretty indiscriminate, so they hurt bees too. So yeah, this particular business has colony collapse issues. Beekeepers who produce honey, queens, and hives mostly only have to deal with varroa mites and such predators.
Where I'm at colony collapse is not really a big deal. Beekeepers manage to keep the number of hives up, we're trying to get agribusiness to reduce the usage of pesticides, we have ways to deal with the varroa mites, etc.
Are spiders vegetarian? Yep. Some are. Do European butterflies migrate like the monarch butterflies do?, yep. Do mosquitoes eat diseases? yep. Do they eat other mosquitoes? Double yep...
Don’t forget about hummingbirds. In the Americas, a lot of the pollinating job of moths is done by hummingbirds. Hummingbirds in the day, moths at night.
My impression is that bees and moths/hummingbirds mostly work on different kinds of flowers that are evolved for the size and mouths of pollinators,
well, that was kind of my point - there is an entire universe of small creatures, and not so small ones (lemurs, for example), that perform pollination, and we mess with them at our peril.
As a gardener I have noticed that most types of insects tend to visit as many flowers as possible. None seem to show a vast preference. I know that's not what the data shows but it's my experience.
I hate bug zappers. They should be illegal. All they do is kill moths and beetles. They are entirely ineffective against mosquitoes and other biting flies, and their otherwise indiscriminate killing disrupts pollination and generally throws the local environment completely out of balance.
Of the 3500 species of mosquito, only 6% bite humans. Of the 200 indigenous species of mosquitos in the US, only 12 of them bite humans. Mosquitos are the world's deadliest animal, killing a million people a year. Moths don't kill anyone, and if they're more efficient than bees at pollination, then they're likely more efficient than mosquitos. If we eliminated only the biting species of mosquito, any detrimental effects on pollination or the food chain would be negligible.
To me, the most fascinating pollinator is the hummingbird hawk-moth (which, interestingly enough, is a daytime pollinator): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbird_hawk-moth. There's not a lot of similarity in photos, but if you see one, its sound and the way it hovers around flowers is just like a miniature hummingbird.
We have hummingbird moths here in Texas. They're not afraid of humans, so I've seen them just a few feet from me several times. They look and act and fly just like hummingbirds -- you have to look closely to see that they're not birds, then you'll notice the antennae, and the lack of feathers, and the "beak" being flexible.
Honeybees are actually not very good at pollinating plants; they take most of the pollen back to their hive instead of spreading it between plants. Furthermore, they often outcompete (non-honey producing) indigenous bees that are actually good at pollinating plants.
Bees do take most of the pollen back, but flowers don't need most of the pollen anyways. As with most species of sexually-reproducing lifeforms, the males produce much much more sperm than is actually needed for the reproductive act, and they do this precisely because so much sperm will be lost in the process. In other words: flowers account for the loss of pollen to pollinators. Flowers also make nectar to reward pollinators -- nectar production is otherwise pointless for flowers, and yet they put serious energetic effort into producing a pointless product.
You did imply something about honeybees being non-native in many areas, thus like invasive species. To be specific, honeybees have not been native to the Americas for millions of years.
Honeybees are domesticated, and as usual humans tend to select for animals that produce more. Even so they'd need to produce enough to hold the hive over winter.
"Hundreds" is a pretty wide range but with that much wattage we're on the order of tens of thousands of lumens. That's a lot of light and would be ~10 flood lights.
indeed, and i would not like to exterminate any of them. but it is bit irritating when the wool pullover you put away in spring is completely buggered come autumn. they are difficult to get rid of.
honey bees are not native to north america. Native Americans called them "white man's flies" (or should I not be learning history by watching westerns?)
I often watch butterflies, and they really suck flowers deep and long using their long straw-like antennas, more than bees. Note: flies, ants, and all kind of insects also "pollinate"
The nectar that butterflies suck is just the "bait" that flowers use to lure insects. What's more important is how much pollen they pick up in the process.
All: please respond to the information in the article rather than just your feelings about moths and bees.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This phys.org article says:
> Moths are more efficient pollinators than bees, oh and bramble is important.
The underlying paper is an easy enough read that you probably don't need phys.org: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
It says:
- Many different species rely on bramble [e.g. raspberry, blackberry, etc...]
- Bramble fruits can grow twice as large if the flower was visited by multiple insects, which improves bramble's ability to support its many species
- Moths are an outsized contributor to the pollination of bramble, and therefore to supporting those many species
- So conservation efforts should focus on things that uniquely help moths, like limiting light pollution
Given the prevalence of pollinators that are hyper specialized to what they pollinate, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that general purpose pollinator efficiency is both a useless metric, and not what was studied here.
The huge difference between moths and butterflies is surprising as I consider moths nocturnal butterflies. I wonder what causes the difference.
I believe it is actually the other way around: butterflies are colorful moths that learned to exist during the day. The moths are also vastly more diverse and numerous.
Indeed, in many languages, even unrelated ones like Finnish, Greek, and Vietnamese, the word for moth is "night butterfly".
In German the category of both is called "Schmetterling" which is also the German word for butterfly, which are technically called "Tagfalter" (day folders). Moths are called "Nachtfalter" (night folder) or simply "Motte" (moth), which technically refers only to specific smaller moths, especially pests.
In French as well: "papillon de nuit"
In german: Nachtfalter ie nightfolder
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If, when in doubt, you assume butterfly unless they have poofy antennae, you'd probably be correct 9 out of 10 times.
Moths have mouthparts, butterflies generally don't. They have a specialized nectar sucking tube type organ with a "tongue" in it.
Moths can rob flowers, which means they cut a small hole inside the bottom of the flower's nectar reservoir and then lap it up. Butterflies can't cut flowers.
>Moths have mouthparts, butterflies generally don't
I'm not sure where you get that information. Butterflies also feed on nectar from plants, so they do have mouthparts.
On another note, some butterflies (and maybe moths) are cannibals [1] and feed on their own caterpillars:
"Some butterflies don’t only look like horror movie stars, but are horrors in themselves. Milkweed butterflies (Danainae) — the same subfamily that includes the regal monarch — are vampiric cannibals that use clawed feet to tear open their own caterpillars and mercilessly suck the guts out of them. But why devour your own offspring from the inside out? It’s an even stranger phenomenon known as kleptopharmacophagy."
[1] https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/milkweed-butterflies-suck-out...
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That's not listed here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_butterflies_and_... though certainty possible Wikipedia is wrong.
The article states moths are more efficient pollinators _at night_.
But many types flowers close at night (tulips and hibiscus for instance).
So presumably moths don't pollinate those and we still need daytime pollinators.
Relatedly, the article states that more than 80% of pollination happens during the day. I reckon that'd probably be higher if we hadn't been so hellbent on decimating daytime pollinator populations.
Well, we are also hellbent on decimating nighttime pollinators (probably even more than daytime), as well as most other types of insects (except maybe cockroaches).
So with all of this talk for years about colony collapse and food shortages yet moths were doing the bulk of the pollinating the whole time?
Or am I missing something.
Not that colony collapse doesn’t worry me, it does. But if I was being baselessly told to fear agriculture production issues, I am super mad.
(This is a hobbyhorse of mine...)
At least in North America, the "colony collapse" stuff was a livestock phenomenon more than it was a wildlife/ecology issue. Honey bees aren't native to the US; if you see a honey bee in your back yard, there's a pretty good chance that somebody owns it.
>if you see a honey bee in your back yard, there's a pretty good chance that somebody owns it.
This is true even in Europe. If memory serves the percentage of "wild" honeybees (feral may be a more fitting adjective) is in the order of 1%.
I have wild honey bees in my yard (New Mexico) and have seen them in other places. I believe they are Africanized but just looking I can't tell the difference.
At any rate, in warm areas of the US there are many feral old world bees.
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So what species are the native pollinators here in North America?
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> Or am I missing something.
One of the things you may be missing is that the article is about "efficiency" as opposed to total impact.
"researchers found that 83% of insect visits to bramble flowers were made during the day. While the moths made fewer visits during the shorter summer nights, notching up only 15% of the visits, they were able to pollinate the flowers more quickly."
Moths are doing great work, but they don't have much time to do the work in and they are not doing the bulk of the work. Also it seems that the night pollinators actually may largely work different flowers than the day pollinators so one can't necessarily pick up the load left by the absence of the other.
Per the article, the bulk of the pollinating happens during the day. Moths being individually more efficient at pollinating is only one of several variables at play here; others include the pollinator populations, the length of daytime v. nighttime, and whether or not flowers bloom during daytime v. nighttime and for how long.
> Not that colony collapse doesn’t worry me, it does. But if I was being baselessly told to fear agriculture production issues, I am super mad.
Maybe before getting emotionally attached to a position (again) you should understand what’s going on.
Just be an expert in everything. See easy. And experts never get mislead either, just repeat all research yourself, double plus good. /S
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Beekeeping is a business. Much beekeeping business lies in renting hives to farmers (meaning: driving them to far away farms where the bees are then allowed to pollinate for a few days, then on to the next far away farm). Hive renting is pretty stressful to beehives, and farmers tend to use a lot of pesticides. And guess what: pesticides are pretty indiscriminate, so they hurt bees too. So yeah, this particular business has colony collapse issues. Beekeepers who produce honey, queens, and hives mostly only have to deal with varroa mites and such predators.
Where I'm at colony collapse is not really a big deal. Beekeepers manage to keep the number of hives up, we're trying to get agribusiness to reduce the usage of pesticides, we have ways to deal with the varroa mites, etc.
Ecology. We are always scratching the surface.
Are spiders vegetarian? Yep. Some are. Do European butterflies migrate like the monarch butterflies do?, yep. Do mosquitoes eat diseases? yep. Do they eat other mosquitoes? Double yep...
Ad infinitum
i think we need both, and others
Don’t forget about hummingbirds. In the Americas, a lot of the pollinating job of moths is done by hummingbirds. Hummingbirds in the day, moths at night.
My impression is that bees and moths/hummingbirds mostly work on different kinds of flowers that are evolved for the size and mouths of pollinators,
> Don’t forget about hummingbirds
well, that was kind of my point - there is an entire universe of small creatures, and not so small ones (lemurs, for example), that perform pollination, and we mess with them at our peril.
As a gardener I have noticed that most types of insects tend to visit as many flowers as possible. None seem to show a vast preference. I know that's not what the data shows but it's my experience.
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Plus bees also make honey on the side which increases their overall efficiency, moths only seek out the lämp.
Biology in a nutshell.
I hate bug zappers. They should be illegal. All they do is kill moths and beetles. They are entirely ineffective against mosquitoes and other biting flies, and their otherwise indiscriminate killing disrupts pollination and generally throws the local environment completely out of balance.
Mosquitoes are pollinators, only the females suck blood, and that's only to produce eggs.
> Mosquitoes are pollinators
Of the 3500 species of mosquito, only 6% bite humans. Of the 200 indigenous species of mosquitos in the US, only 12 of them bite humans. Mosquitos are the world's deadliest animal, killing a million people a year. Moths don't kill anyone, and if they're more efficient than bees at pollination, then they're likely more efficient than mosquitos. If we eliminated only the biting species of mosquito, any detrimental effects on pollination or the food chain would be negligible.
Wow! Learned something new today. I've been misinformed into believe that mosquitoes are useless, and we should wipe them out.
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Interesting. Never had one but I never thought about it. So there aren’t any more pesty bugs that it’s effective against?
Should fly swatters be illegal too?
You're equating genocide to a mugging. It's a strikingly poor analogy.
And check out the bee-fly too:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/bee-flies-cute-bee-mimic-with...
Lots of pollinators out there.
To me, the most fascinating pollinator is the hummingbird hawk-moth (which, interestingly enough, is a daytime pollinator): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbird_hawk-moth. There's not a lot of similarity in photos, but if you see one, its sound and the way it hovers around flowers is just like a miniature hummingbird.
We have hummingbird moths here in Texas. They're not afraid of humans, so I've seen them just a few feet from me several times. They look and act and fly just like hummingbirds -- you have to look closely to see that they're not birds, then you'll notice the antennae, and the lack of feathers, and the "beak" being flexible.
beauty of the night
colors in infrared light
i wish i could see
> However, due largely to climate change and intensive agriculture, there is a widespread decline in wild pollinators.
Source?
There's also hummingbird moths. I've seen more of those than regular hummingbirds.
Bees also produce honey in the process, basically for free.
Everything in real life is a balancing act!
Honeybees are actually not very good at pollinating plants; they take most of the pollen back to their hive instead of spreading it between plants. Furthermore, they often outcompete (non-honey producing) indigenous bees that are actually good at pollinating plants.
Bees do take most of the pollen back, but flowers don't need most of the pollen anyways. As with most species of sexually-reproducing lifeforms, the males produce much much more sperm than is actually needed for the reproductive act, and they do this precisely because so much sperm will be lost in the process. In other words: flowers account for the loss of pollen to pollinators. Flowers also make nectar to reward pollinators -- nectar production is otherwise pointless for flowers, and yet they put serious energetic effort into producing a pointless product.
You did imply something about honeybees being non-native in many areas, thus like invasive species. To be specific, honeybees have not been native to the Americas for millions of years.
This comment captures the actual efficiency of the bee. The article measures it by time-per-plant.
I mean, honey is pure carbs, so anything that produces so much excess of it can’t possibly be very efficient
Honeybees are domesticated, and as usual humans tend to select for animals that produce more. Even so they'd need to produce enough to hold the hive over winter.
I feel like it’s the opposite, the amount of energy packed into a single drop of honey makes it very efficient.
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thaaaat is how the world works (that is how the world works)
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> run hundreds of watts of LED lights
"Hundreds" is a pretty wide range but with that much wattage we're on the order of tens of thousands of lumens. That's a lot of light and would be ~10 flood lights.
20-30 60-100W equivalent LED bulbs in outdoor fixtures around their house. At 10W per LED, that's 200-300W they run most of the night.
I can read by their lights at night from a quarter mile away. I've tried. It's entirely absurd.
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....and more efficient at eating my expensive clothes and my brassicas, so fuck moths and bring on the native bee, wasp and butterfly populations
There are many different species of moths and only a few eat clothing...
indeed, and i would not like to exterminate any of them. but it is bit irritating when the wool pullover you put away in spring is completely buggered come autumn. they are difficult to get rid of.
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honey bees are not native to north america. Native Americans called them "white man's flies" (or should I not be learning history by watching westerns?)
Honey bees, sure, but there are plenty of native bee species to North America.
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So that is why corn syrup is popular in US?
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> fuck moths and bring on […] butterfly populations
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieris_rapae
I often watch butterflies, and they really suck flowers deep and long using their long straw-like antennas, more than bees. Note: flies, ants, and all kind of insects also "pollinate"
The nectar that butterflies suck is just the "bait" that flowers use to lure insects. What's more important is how much pollen they pick up in the process.