“The secret of all victory lies in organization of the non-obvious.” — Oswald Spengler, “The Decline of the West” (wrongly attributed to Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor)
So often it’s the unseen or non-obvious that rules how successful living systems are.
It’s something I and every other person brought up in the age of accelerated science needs to remind ourselves of. Given the human tendency to trust entirely the data we have at hand, we find ourselves relying on “facts” that are considered relevant primarily because they have become part of older models. The reality is that all the things you and I care about—the food web, ecosystem health, reversing biodiversity loss—are greatly under-researched.
We don’t know, as they say, what we don’t know. Which is all the more reason to be grateful to those doing research in native plants and gardening for biodiversity. To those people I say Thank You for helping us organize the non-obvious and achieve more wins.
Didier Descouens, Manduca quinquemaculata MHNT CUT 2010 0 116 Schuylkill Haven, Schuylkill Co. Penna male dorsal, CC BY-SA 4.0For example, new data about monarch butterfly declines in October of 2023 started at least a couple of scientists second-guessing. In my mind the newness of this information, which at first seems to call into question assumptions about monarch populations, only highlights how much more we can learn.
Thankfully there is more and more research being done around pollinators, especially as our appreciation of their roles in healthy ecosystems grows.
I was reminded of this by a research article published in Science on February 8, 2024. In simple language, it suggests air pollution interferes with pollination. More specifically, it found that ozone and nitrate radicals (NO3) inhibit the pollination of Oenothera pallida (Pale Evening Primrose) by a nocturnal hawkmoth of the Manduca genus. This is a genus of moths within the family Sphingidae, commonly known as sphinx moths, hawk moths, or hummingbird moths due to their rapid and sometimes hovering flight patterns that resemble those of hummingbirds. Research like this spins out trustworthy data. Even if it is very specific—recall the data modeling trap mentioned above—it tells us something new and thought-provoking, and it can be correlated to other clues about pollinator networks. It leads me to wonder why few people have studied the impact of air quality on pollinators.
A couple of years ago in an eco-friendly landscaping seminar I asked a speaker, “Is there any impact on biodiversity from the intense traffic and ozone pollution created from the nearby interstate?” I expected him to demur, but he said, “No, there isn’t.” We do know, though, that car and truck pollution, and most commonly diesel exhaust, emits various pollutants including nitrogen oxides (NOx), made up typically of nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). These pollutants have been shown to have adverse effects on invertebrates, which are crucial for ecosystem functions such as pollination and seed dispersal.
Where I live on Colorado’s Front Range we have a serious problem with ozone as well, primarily due to car traffic. Ozone can alter the biogenic volatile organic compounds emitted by plants, which are crucial for communication between plants and insects. For example, it can degrade floral scents that attract pollinators, thereby reducing pollinator efficiency and potentially impacting plant reproduction and invertebrate food sources.
But getting back to the point about these things being non-obvious, consider this. If the “victory” in the case of biodiversity is restoring key elements of the food web, then we shouldn’t assume that invisible factors like air pollution aren’t key obstacles. In fact, the things we haven’t studied well may have the biggest impacts.
While not all moths are nocturnal, a significant number of moth species do most of their pollination work at night, taking advantage of the specific traits of nocturnal flowers and their own adaptations for nighttime activity. Thanks in part to their hairy underbellies, moths are likely major players in many pollination networks, transporting pollen from a diverse assemblage of plants, including some that are not often visited by bees. The range of the five-spotted hawkmoth, which was one of the species in the new study, includes Mexico, most of the United States, and occasionally southern Canada. They are commonly found in tobacco fields, vegetable gardens, and wherever their host plants, which belong to the Solanaceae (nightshade) family, are found.
How many of us notice the efficiency of moths at spreading pollen at night? Very few, of course. Which makes them just one more of those non-obvious organizers of thriving natural ecosystems, and one whose health and survival we need to take very seriously.
By the way, if you haven’t seen it, this video reveals some very interesting new information about why moths seem to be attracted to lights. It’s another example of why we need to keep interrogating the data, and admitting that we have a lot to learn.
