Thank the dung beetles
How do you get economists excited about protecting insects and their habitat? With a capitalist-based cost-benefit calculation: the unpopular dung beetles, for example, save the Americans 380 million dollars in expenses - simply by building dung balls.
The common honey bee - in accordance with its industrious nature - submitted to the drudgery of the money economy hundreds of years ago and therefore has little to worry about its own survival. Things are different for their fellow wild animals and many other, anarchistly organized representatives of the insect world – although they are not lazy themselves, their work and work largely eludes the attention of human observation. With the unpleasant result that the inconspicuous fellows are all too often overlooked when distributing state nature conservation funds.
An injustice, said Mace Vaughan, director of conservation at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and entomologist John Losey of Cornell University - and meticulously calculated how many dollars Americans would have to pay annually if the hard-working creepy-crawlies rested their feelers because of disregard or extermination.
Because insects perform a multitude of tasks in a functioning ecosystem, but at the same time only a few of their activities have found their way into scientific documentation that could be used for their research questions, the researchers limited themselves to a total of four areas of insectoid services: The Pollination of plants, the control of grain pests, the processing of animal feces and the role of the six-legged creatures as a food source of coveted objects for anglers and hunters.
In particular, the dung beetle or scarab beetle, the main player in the processing of animal digestion products, proved to be an economic jack of all trades, according to the authors. With his fondness for rummaging through and tasting fresh cow dung, he not only reduces their rotting period from 28 to 22 months and thus helps to restore the manure-covered grass in a cattle paddock to a tasty state of purity as quickly as possible. The beetle also functions as a fertilizer helper: when processing the cattle dung into dung balls, the little fellow binds large parts of the nitrogen contained in the cow dung and thus makes it accessible to plants; without his efforts, about eighty percent of the nitrogen is usually lost through evaporation processes.
But of the total of 9,000 kilograms of cattle manure that each of the 100 million animals living in the USA produces annually, only a fraction makes it into the recycling chain triggered by the dung beetle. While three-quarters of ruminants do live in the wild, more than half are treated with pesticides that are toxic to the black six-legged creature. Too bad: Because the beetle is also able to fight against cattle parasites - by withdrawing the moist nutrient soil from them with its ball spinning.
Despite these adversities, Losey and Vaughan calculated that the dung beetle still amasses an annual financial benefit of $380 million-money that thanks to it doesn't have to be invested in fertilizer, larger paddocks, or anti-parasitic drugs. Still, the dung beetle's efforts are peanuts compared to the amounts non-domestic insects are making in controlling and controlling crop pests.
Between 1988 and 1990, the annual financial loss from crop pests in North America was $7.5 billion. From this percentage, the authors calculated an average annual total loss for the entire US agricultural industry of almost $16 billion, plus another $3 billion in insecticide spending. A handsome sum. But how high would the financial losses be if there were no insects that keep a large part of the plant pests in check thanks to their appetite? Exactly 23.5 billion dollars, Losey and Vaughan determined in a complicated arithmetic operation - thanks to ladybugs, parasitic wasps and co., the agricultural industry saves 4.5 billion dollars a year.
Non-domesticated insects also still play a major role in pollination: every year, with their sightseeing flights over forest, meadow and field, they provide fruits and plants worth about 3 billion dollars. Even amateur anglers are dependent on insects: After all, the six-legged friends are the food base for many finned animals. And the hunters would also have less sense of achievement if the chicks of quail, grouse and pheasant could not eat their necessary portion of insects.
So insects are very active. Losey and Vaughan estimate the total economic output of their tireless detailed work in forest and field and for people and animals at 57 billion dollars per year. Small livestock also mess up - and therefore deserves to be protected from an economic point of view.
