Tropical Insect Study Sheds New Light on Biodiversity Protection
Contact: Anisa Abid, News Writer for Environmental Science and Policy Program: (517) 432-3823 or abidanis@msu.edu
January 02, 2008
MSU researchers Dr. Anthony Cognato, assistant professor of Entomology and Jiri Hulcr, doctoral student in the department of Entomology, participated in a groundbreaking study this year that holds implications for sustainability and conservation research in tropical regions.
The study, published in Nature (Aug 9, 2007 online), found that regional species of tropical insects that were considered specialized to live in one location were found thriving hundreds of kilometers away. "Contrary to what has been thought, what we found is that if environmental conditions at each site are equal, we can find almost all regional species at each site," said Hulcr.
The team collected data on how diversity is distributed in the lowland rainforest of Papua New Guinea; researchers studied approximately 500 species of insects, including bark beetles, which Cognato and Hulcr specialize in. Hulcr said this is one of the largest areas ever examined in this field of study. They found that even the host-specific insects that feed on certain plants found in one region were found in other regions as well, as long as they found similar plants to feed on. The findings might hold true in other ecosystems but more research is needed, Hulcr said.
Policy makers must often decide on what areas to preserve, and research like this helps guide those decisions to lessen the impact on wildlife. In tropical regions like Papua New Guinea, habitat fragmentation can cause a loss of biodiversity, because it can create a barrier for movement and gene flow between populations of species, and a greater chance of extinction. Cognato and Hulcr's data support the notion that tropical forests have a greater chance of survival if they are kept as large pieces, instead of as a number of smaller fragments. Though the insects he studied were found in many locations, "if you continue to fragment, you might reach a point where... the forest is going to crash, and we don't know where that point of no return will be," Cognato said.
One of the problems this line of research faces is that "there is a need to study tropical biodiversity [in entomology] but there are few to do it," Cognato said. He explained that his study was part of a five-year National Science Foundation grant for Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy. Cognato and Hulcr plan to continue their studies in other tropical regions such as Thailand and South America.
