Insect biological variety is vital for our food security, health, ecosystem and resilience
The devastation that drought, flood, extreme hot and low temperatures and freezing does not need much explanation for how to protect ourselves or our food source.
Global rise in temperature does a lot more than just extreme weather conditions. It causes a whole lot of little changes which don’t seem so important by themselves, but together they can be just as destructive as the extreme ones. At the Excellence in Insect Science Symposium at Michigan State University, I learned how those small changes together threaten our food security, health, and environment. Here are some examples.
1- A mild winter for example does not cause instant devastation like a flood or a drought. Overall, everything looks fine. Trees green up and flower a little earlier. The usual late freezes happen around April, and still nothing looks suspicious. But those late April freezes kill the early flowers, nipping the crop in the bud. This is just the beginning of the whole lot of little things.
2- What if spring and summer are a little warmer than usual? This may not seem a problem by itself. A warm spring may even feel pleasant, and a hot summer is just a little uncomfortable. But those higher temperatures stress the plants. I was surprised to learn how stressed-out plants affect the honeybee life cycle, even if the bees were not exposed to hot temperatures. Honeybees that feed on the pollen produced by the plants exposed to high temperatures have shorter life spans and are not as healthy. We all know what happens if our pollinators get hurt. That means less pollination, less yield, and less food.
3- What about warm fall weather? Who can complain about a few extra warm days before the winter chill sets in? It may not seem like much, but the extra warm days can have serious effects on food security and health. When the temperature gets cold, insects go to hibernation or hide underground for overwintering. With warm temperatures lingering during fall, insects can have more reproductive cycles. A non pest insect can become a pest with just one more reproductive cycle in a year. That means one more pest to deal with in the next year. The solution is not more pesticides either. Some of the pesticides are greenhouse gas emitters (GHG), some lead to more GHG during manufacturing or application.
Increased insect reproduction directly affects human health. Insects such as mosquitos and ticks are vectors for human diseases including malaria, dengue virus, zika virus, and Lyme disease. Warmer temperatures give these disease spreading insects more time to reproduce and allows them to expand into territories that used to be too cold. More pesticides again are not the solutions. Insect pesticide resistance is a big problem in agriculture. Now mosquitoes have started developing resistance to pesticides.
4- Even 1ºC temperature increase has a detrimental effect on our delicate ecosystem, causing loss of insects and loss of functional biocontrol. For example, aquatic insects’ life cycle is more sensitive to subtle temperature changes than terrestrial insects. When an aquatic insect develops faster than the plants it eats due to higher temperatures, it will go hungry and die. Or predators may not be there to eat the pest insect because it developed faster and escaped the predator. If this insect was a food source for a particular bird at certain time of the year, the bird will not have food. In an agricultural context, if the predator insect for an agricultural pest disappears due to global temperature change, now we will have an insect pest problem we did not have before. The predator-prey systems are desynchronized.
5- What about the service insects? I know, you’re thinking the same thing I did when I first heard the term, “service insect”. What service? You don’t know the service is provided until the service is stopped. Have you ever noticed the breadcrumbs you dropped during your lunch break, or the poop and dead animals on your street or garden and other organic waste just disappeared the next day? Well, they were cleaned up at night by insects. The free cleaning service.
In summary, insects have a vital role in food systems, our health, the delicate balance in the ecosystem, and in the fight for resilience.
Next time you see an insect, DON’T squish it!
How do we protect our insect biological variety for resilience? See the next blog!
Author: Dr. Fatma Kaplan is the CEO/CSO of Pheronym. She is an Activate Berkeley Alumni Fellow & Berkeley Lab Affiliate Cyclotron Road Cohort 2021. She is also an entrepreneur and an accomplished scientist with experience in both biology and chemistry. She has a Ph.D. in Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology and postdoctoral training in Natural Product Chemistry with a focus on isolating biologically active compounds. Dr. Kaplan discovered the first sex pheromone of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and published it in Nature. Then she discovered that pheromones regulate other behaviors in both parasitic and beneficial nematodes. Dr. Kaplan conducted the first agricultural biocontrol experiment in Space at the International Space Station in 2020. She has very high impact publications, and her dissertation (beta-amylase’s role during cold and heat shock) was cited in textbooks within 5 years of publication. Dr. Kaplan worked as a scientist at NASA, the National Magnetic Field Laboratory, and the US Department of Agriculture — Agricultural Research Service. Dr. Fatma Kaplan and Mr. Karl C. Schiller co-founded Pheronym to bring nematode pheromone technology to the market and to provide effective, non-toxic, adaptable, resilient, sustainable pest control for farmers and gardeners.
