Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
New York has a secret weapon when it comes to dealing with refuse on city streets, according to a new study: arthropods
Dr. Elsa Youngsteadt, a research associate at North Carolina State University and lead author of a new paper published Tuesday in the journal Global Change Biology, said that she and her colleagues calculated that arthropods in that area alone devour over 2,100 pounds of waste products – equal to roughly 60,000 hot dogs – each year.
It could even be more than that, Dr. Youngsteadt explained. The researchers are assuming that the creatures take a break during the wintertime. Lest you think this is just a useless fun fact, the entomologist said in a statement that the research “highlights a very real service that these arthropods provide. They effectively dispose of our trash for us.”
She and her colleagues were working on a long-term study of urban insects when Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in 2012, and the following spring, they expanded their work to investigate if the storm had any effect on the behavior of those bug populations. The authors sampled arthropods in street medians and parks in Manhattan to measure the biodiversity at those sites, then set out to determine how much garbage they consumed.
Dr. Youngsteadt’s team also attempted to find out if insects and other arthropods would consume more waste food in some areas than in others, with one hypothesis suggesting that they would eat more garbage in regions with more biodiversity. To measure the appetites of those arthropods, the research team set out to carefully measure quantities of potato chips, cookies and other types of junk food at sites in street medians and city parks.
Image Credit: Elsa Youngsteadt
They placed two sets of food at each site: one in a cage so that only arthropods could reach the food, and the other in the open where other animals could also eat it. Twenty-four hours later, the scientists collected the food to determine how much was consumed. While they found that the hurricane had no impact on arthropod food consumption, they found that those in medians ate two to three times more junk food than those in parks.
“We thought, oh, the parks, with their more diverse species — that’s where we’re going to see the ants doing a more thorough job. So we were surprised when the opposite was true,” Dr. Youngsteadt told Rachel Feltman of the Washington Post, noting that pavement ants were likely responsible for the imbalance. “It really underscored for us how important it is to have different kinds and sizes of green spaces around the city.”
The finding comes despite recent research that found that just 18 of the 42 different species of ant recently identified as living in New York City live in median strips, Feltman said. A greater amount of the food outside of the cages was eaten, naturally, but the results indicate that other animals are competing with arthropods for the food littering the city streets. “When one group gets it, the other doesn’t,” Dr. Youngsteadt told the Washington Post reporter.
While the arthropods consumed only a few grams of food at each site, Youngsteadt told National Geographic reporter Carrie Arnold that those seemingly small amounts can quickly add up, and in just one corridor along Broadway, ants and their kin could consume the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of cookies and chips over the course of time.
“This is another in a series of elegant studies on urban ecology by this group of researchers at NCSU,” Ohio State University entomologist Daniel Herms, who was not involved in the study, told Arnold. “Insects are important in the natural environment, and this study is another example that they are providing critical services even in urban areas.”
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