Nocturnal Pollinators: Scientists Catch Moths Visiting Red Clovers After Dark

Pollination of red clover is not limited to bees. According to new research, moths visit flowers at night, approximately a third of the time.

Moths Taking Bees' Job At Night

(Photo : Frankie Mish/Unsplash)

The results, which are described in the July Biology Letters, are unexpected given that bees have traditionally received the majority of the credit for pollinating red clover.

The finding revealed what scientists may be missing during the night shift of pollination of plants, including a hitherto unrecognized benefit the moth pollination confers on the clover: an increase in seed output, as per ScienceNews

According to Daichi Funamoto, a pollination biologist at the University of Tokyo who was not involved with the current study, this research may assist scientists in better comprehending the pollination services offered by nocturnal moths.

Approximately a century ago, bees--and bees alone--were thought to be the primary insect participants in clover pollination.

Jamie Alison, a pollinator ecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, said that clover is an important agricultural plant and has attracted much attention.

However, none of those studies mentioned the potential for moth pollination.

While researching how plants and the insects that pollinate them respond to climate change by maybe moving higher, Alison and his colleagues uncovered the pollination function of moths.

The team installed fifteen time-lapse cameras in the Swiss Alps to monitor pollinator visits to grassland plants.

The fact that moths frequently pollinate a variety of different plants is well known, but their contribution to clover pollination appears to have been missed, according to Alison.

He and his colleagues also looked at how many seeds the clover blossoms produced, and they discovered that the seed output was increased by moth visits at night.

According to Funamoto, it is evident that the significance of nocturnal moths as pollinators of crops has largely been disregarded.

Future research, in Funamoto's opinion, will show that nocturnal moths do fertilize many plant species that are assumed to be dependent on diurnal insects for pollination.

Also Read: Flowers Facing Upwards Attract More Pollinators, Researchers Say

The Importance of Moths' Pollination

The study, which was published in Biology Letters, demonstrated that networks for nighttime pollinators are smaller and less complicated than those for moths.

The research team discovered that while moths interacted with plants that were less frequently visited by bees, butterflies, and hoverflies, they also transported pollen from a significant percentage of those plants, as per ScienceDaily

The study also demonstrated that pollen is more frequently transported on the ventral thorax (chest) of the moth than on the proboscis (tongue), which makes it simpler for it to spread to adjacent plants.

The study's lead author, Dr. Richard Walton of UCL Geography, said that nocturnal moths play an essential but underappreciated ecological role in maintaining the diversity and abundance of plant populations as well as providing natural biodiversity backup.

Without them, many more plant species and the animals that depend on them for food, such as birds and bats, would be in danger.

However, settling moths sit on the flower while feeding, with their frequently noticeably hairy bodies touching the flower's reproductive organs.

This fortunate incident makes it easier for pollen to travel when people visit flowers in the future.

The proboscis of settling moths was the subject of earlier investigations on pollen movement.

This important work is released at a time when moth populations are declining rapidly all around the world, raising concerns that we could be losing vital pollination services just as we are starting to understand them.

Once a month, surveys were conducted to determine which plants nocturnal moth communities and daytime pollinators frequented.

381 moths (45.5%) of the 838 moths swabbed were found to carry pollen.

A total of 47 different plant species' pollen was found, including at least 7 that bees, hoverflies, and butterflies almost ever visit.

The ventral thorax of the moths contained 57% of the pollen carried by them.

Comparatively, 45 plant species were visited by a network of 632 bees, wasps, hoverflies, and butterflies during the day, while 46 plant species were visited by 1,548 social bees.

The research sheds light on a little-known world of nocturnal plant-insect interactions that might be crucial to the look and smell of people's precious countryside and to the crops that they grow, even though moths may seem to be less effective pollinators in comparison due to their high diversity and abundance.