Bats protect young trees from insect damage, with three times fewer bugs
Phys.Org
by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Bats help keep forests growing. Without bats to hold their populations in check, insects that munch on tree seedlings go wild, doing three to nine times more damage than when bats are on the scene. That's according to a new study from the University of Illinois. The article, "Bats reduce insect density and defoliation in temperate forests: an exclusion experiment," is published inEcology.
"A lot of folks associate bats with caves. But as it turns out, the habitat you could really associate with almost every bat species in North America is forest. And this is true globally. Forests are just really important to bats," says Joy O'Keefe, study co-author and assistant professor and wildlife extension specialist in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at Illinois. "We wanted to ask the question: Are bats important to forests? And in this study, we've demonstrated they are."
Read on: https://phys.org/news/2022-11-young-trees-insect-bugs.html