NEWS / 10
JULY 2018, 09:00AM / STAFF WRITER
The research, published in
Springer’s journal The Science of Nature, highlights the important role birds
play in keeping plant-eating insect populations under control. Picture: Maurice
Baker
Birds around the world eat 400 to
500 million metric tons of beetles, flies, ants, moths, aphids, grasshoppers,
crickets and other arthropods a year, according to an international study by
Martin Nyffeler of the University of Basel in Switzer- land.
The research, published in
Springer’s journal The Science of Nature, highlights the important role birds
play in keeping plant-eating insect populations under control.
Nyffeler and his colleagues based
their figures on 103 studies that highlighted the volume of prey that
insect-eating birds consume in seven of the world’s major ecological
communities, known as biomes.
According to their estimations,
this amounts to between 400 and 500 million tons of insects a year, but is most
likely to be on the lower end of the range.
Their calculations are supported
by a large number of experimental studies conducted by many different research
teams in a variety of habitats in different parts of the world.
“The global population of
insectivorous birds annually consumes as much energy as a megacity the size of
New York.
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