Creatures from black bears to cuckoos provide natural and eco-friendly solutions to control unwanted insects.
Long before there were chemicals and sprays, citronella candles and DEET, nature provided predators for all of humanity’s most annoying creatures. Bats feed on biting flies, frogs on mosquitoes, and swallows on wasps.
In fact, frogs and toads can eat so many mosquitoes that a 2022 study found a surge in human malaria cases in parts of Central America due to outbreaks of amphibian diseases. Other studies show that some bats can eat up to a thousand mosquitoes per hour. (Find out why bats are nature’s true superheroes.)
“Most species are well controlled by natural enemies,” said Douglas Tallamy, T. A. Baker Professor of Agriculture at the University of Delaware.
While these famous types of pest control get a lot of attention, many other animals spend their days and nights searching for and devouring summer insects, in some cases developing specialized skills to devour their prey. Here are some of the funniest ones.
Winnie the Pooh may love honey, but when a real bear digs up a beehive, he’s not looking for sticky, sweet sugar, but soft white larvae.
Although opportunistic American black bears eat almost everything from human trash to sunflower fields and the occasional fawn, they sometimes specialize in insects, including invasive wasp species such as yellow jackets.
“They’re hunting for larvae,” said David Garshelis, chairman of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s bear specialist group. “I’ve seen them dig out nests and then get stung, just like us,” and then continue to feed. (Learn how black bears are recovering across North America.)
In some areas of North America, while black bears wait for the berries to ripen, the omnivores maintain their weight and even gain almost all their fat by eating protein-rich ants such as yellow ants.
Some mosquitoes, such as Toxorhynchites rutilus septentrionalis, found in the southeastern United States, make a living by eating other mosquitoes. T. septentrionalis larvae live in standing water, such as tree holes, and eat other smaller mosquito larvae, including species that transmit human diseases. In the laboratory, one T. septentrionalis mosquito larva can kill 20 to 50 other mosquito larvae per day.
Interestingly, according to a 2022 paper, these larvae are surplus killers that kill their victims but do not eat them.
“If forced killing occurs naturally, it may increase the effectiveness of Toxoplasma gondii in controlling blood-sucking mosquitoes,” the authors write.
For many birds, there is nothing more delicious than thousands of caterpillars, unless those caterpillars are covered in stinging hairs that irritate your insides. But not the North American yellow-billed cuckoo.
This relatively large bird with a bright yellow beak can swallow caterpillars, periodically shedding the lining of its esophagus and stomach (forming intestines similar to owl droppings) and then starting all over again. (Watch the caterpillar turn into a butterfly.)
Although species such as tent caterpillars and autumn webworms are native to North America, their populations periodically increase, creating an unimaginable feast for the yellow-billed cuckoo, with some studies suggesting that they can eat up to hundreds of caterpillars at a time.
Neither type of caterpillar is particularly troublesome to plants or humans, but they provide valuable food for birds, which then eat many other insects.
If you see a bright red eastern salamander running along a trail in the eastern United States, whisper “thank you.”
These long-lived salamanders, many of which live up to 12–15 years, feed on disease-carrying mosquitoes at all stages of their lives, from larvae to larvae and adults.
JJ Apodaca, executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, couldn’t say exactly how many mosquito larvae the eastern salamander eats in a day, but the creatures have a voracious appetite and are numerous enough to “make an impact” on the mosquito population.
The summer tanager may be beautiful with its magnificent red body, but this may be of little comfort to the wasp, which the tanager flings through the air, carries back to the tree and beats to death on a branch.
Summer tanagers live in the southern United States and migrate each year to South America, where they feed primarily on insects. But unlike most other birds, summer doves specialize in hunting bees and wasps.
To avoid being stung, they catch the wasp-like wasps from the air and, once killed, wipe the stingers on tree branches before eating, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Tallamy said that while natural methods of pest control are diverse, “man’s heavy-handed approach is destroying that diversity.”
In many cases, human impacts such as habitat loss, climate change and pollution can harm natural predators such as birds and other organisms.
“We cannot live on this planet by killing insects,” Tallamy said. “It’s the little things that rule the world. So we can focus on how to control things that are not normal.”
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Post time: Jun-24-2024