At night, pollution keeps pollinating insects from smelling the flowers

Under the cover of darkness, countless moths and other insects furiously dart around woodlands and deserts, seeking nectar from night-blooming plants—and pollinating them in the process. But the scents the insects home in on have grown fainter. Nitrate radicals, a common pollutant, break them down before they can travel far, a research team reports today in Science . The team thinks the olfactory disruption goes as far back as the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. The research, involving field studies, wind tunnel experiments, and the latest atmospheric models, has worrisome implications. For pollinators and the crops and ecosystems dependent on their skills, nitrate radicals are “potentially a very significant threat,” says Robbie Girling, an applied ecologist at the University of Southern Queensland. The same probably goes for other pollutants. The work demonstrates “the ‘fragility’ of these [scents],” particularly at night, adds Maryse Vanderplanck, a chemical ecologist at CNRS, the French national research agency. She, Girling, and others previously showed that ozone, another pollutant, interferes with the ability of bees and other daytime pollinators to find flowers. But impacts at night are especially concerning. “For every bee and butterfly we see by day visiting flowers, [we] know that many more may be visiting after nightfall,” says David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut. Nocturnal insects i...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news