Fiji ant study provides new evidence of insects’ decline on remote islands | Insects
New research on Fiji ant populations did not get rid of the destruction of humanity, which pushed most of the invertebrate relatives of insects living insects to the worldwide free decline.
Hundreds of thousands of insect species have disappeared in the last 150 years, and it is believed that the world’s insect biomass has lost 1 to 2.5% per year – many entomologists say we live with “insect apocalypse .. Nevertheless, long -term data for individual insect populations are sparse and irregular.
A new Working in Science Magazine Some of the most remote parts of the world sheds light on what’s going on to insects. “There is a global concern about the ‘insect apocalypse’, Evan Economo, the joint author of the Entomologist and the research of the Okinaawa Institute of Science and Technology of Japan, said, but there is a lot of uncertainty and discussion about what really happened,” he said.
“We have a new evidence about something that we have suspected for a long time: endemic insect species are reduced to distant islands.”
Economo and his colleagues analyzed the genomes of ant populations, one of the Fiji archipelago, which has been gathered in recent years and organized in museum collections. From thousands of examples, they used scientific methods to raise whether ant populations have grown and grew on the basis of variations in DNA sequences among individuals.
They found that 79% of Fiji’s endemic ant species declined and that people started to arrive in the islands about 3,000 years ago and accelerated in the last 300 years – European theme has fallen with the development of global trade and modern agriculture.
For remote tropical islands where comprehensive historical observations are rare, it is difficult to understand how insects are damaged by human activities, but it is critical. The islands are the warm points of biological diversity due to their insulation. This also makes them vulnerable, especially against extinction.
“Far ocean islands such as Galápagos, Hawaii and Fiji Port species have magnificent differences from the main relatives, such as the species of Hawaii and Fiji Port species,” he said.
The research contributes to a patchwork map of findings from world ecosystems. In Germany, the abundance of flying insects in 63 nature reserves fell 75% in less than 30 years. In the USA insect numbers It fell 83% in 45 years and about 15% of the tiger beetle species decreased. Europe’s pasture butterfly population has decreased by 36% in the last decade.
Insect populations, habitat loss, use of pesticide, climate distribution and light pollution contribute to the evacuation of forests and pastures from the world’s wetlands.
Economo, “Insects and other invertebrates to understand what is happening in the insects more in more places, we need to look more methods,” he said.
Find the age of more extinction here and follow Biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield for more nature scope in the Guardian application
