 |
|
|
|
||
|
|
Biologists estimate the value of services provided by insectsApril 1, 2006
Elementary schoolchildren learn that bees make honey and worms make silk, but insects provide many other valuable services that generally are overlooked by nearly everyone. In the April 2006 issue of BioScience, the monthly journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, John E. Losey of Cornell University and Mace Vaughan of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation estimate the minimum dollar value—as indicated by documented financial transactions—of some less well-known insect services. Understanding such services and appreciating their value is important, because evidence points to a steady decline in beneficial insect populations. The article's assessment is restricted to just four services—dung burial, control of crop pests, pollination, and wildlife nutrition—because data are not available to allow a more comprehensive assessment. Moreover, Losey and Vaughan excluded the value of services provided by domesticated insects, mass-reared biological control agents, and commercially raised insects. Nonetheless, the value of the ecological services that the authors did examine is an impressive sum: at least $57 billion per year in the United States. Dung beetles, for example, save the cattle industry $38 million each year by reducing the effects of parasites and pests on cattle, enhancing the palatability of forage to cattle, and making nitrogen in dung more readily available to plants. The authors estimate the value of natural control of crop pests attributable to insects at $4.5 billion annually. Native pollinators—almost exclusively bees—seem to be responsible for over $3 billion-worth of fruits and vegetables in the United States. And insects constitute a critical nutritional resource that supports hunting, fishing, and observation of wildlife, valued at close to $50 billion. Losey and Vaughan stress that their assessment is conservative in that it includes only a fraction of the value of all the services insects provide. They suggest that their estimate implies that an annual investment of tens of billions of dollars would be justified to maintain service-providing insects, and urge that conservation funding pay specific attention to insects and the role they play in ecosystems.
### The complete list of research articles in the April 2006 issue of BioScience is as follows: Integrating Evolution and Development: The Need for Bioinformatics in Evo-Devo. Paula M. Mabee The Economic Value of Ecological Services Provided by Insects. John E. Losey and Mace Vaughan The ¾-Power Law Is Not Universal: Evolution of Isometric, Ontogenetic Metabolic Scaling in Pelagic Animals. Douglas S. Glazier Is Peer Review a Game of Chance? Bryan D. Neff and Julian D. Olden Revisiting the Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America. James M. Dyer
ContactDonna Royston, Communications Representative.
|
|
|
|
||||
|
||||
