Journal
CURRENT BIOLOGY
Volume 29, Issue 13, Pages 2167-+Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.05.036
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Royal Society University Research Fellowship scheme [UF150126]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [31822043]
- Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [BK20170026]
- China Scholarship Council
- Jiangsu Graduate Research and Innovation Projects
- Innovate UK's Smart Crop Protection'' program
- Gates Foundation's Smart Armyworm Surveillance (SAS)'' project
- European Union [795568]
- United Kingdom Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
- Marie Curie Actions (MSCA) [795568] Funding Source: Marie Curie Actions (MSCA)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Despite the fact that migratory insects dominate aerial bioflows in terms of diversity, abundance, and biomass [16], the migration patterns of most species, and the effects of their annual fluxes between high- and low-latitude regions, are poorly known. One important group of long-range migrants that remain understudied is a suite of highly beneficial species of hoverfly in the tribe Syrphini, which we collectively term migrant hoverflies. Adults are key pollinators [7-10] and larvae are significant biocontrol agents of aphid crop pests [11], and thus, it is important to quantify the scale of their migrations and the crucial ecosystem services they provide with respect to energy, nutrient, and biomass transport; regulation of crop pests; and pollen transfer. Such assessments cannot be made by sporadic observations of mass arrivals at ground level, because hoverflies largely migrate unnoticed high above ground. We used insect-monitoring radars [12] to show that up to 4 billion hoverflies (80 tons of biomass) travel high above southern Britain each year in seasonally adaptive directions. The long-range migrations redistribute tons of essential nutrients (nitrogen [N] and phosphorus [P]) and transport billions of pollen grains between Britain and Europe, and locally produced populations consume 6 trillion aphids and make billions of flower visits. Migrant hoverfly abundance fluctuated greatly between years, but there was no evidence of a population trend during the 10-year study period. Considering that many beneficial insects are seriously declining [7, 10, 13-19], our results demonstrate that migrant hoverflies are key to maintaining essential ecosystem services.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available