Study Says Caterpillars Are Cause Of Unknown Carbon Emissions

Illustration of a caterpillar. (Wikimedia Commons/Vinayaraj)

JAKARTA - Scientists at the University of Cambridge, England studied a mass outbreak of leaf-eating caterpillars and found that these caterpillars have harmful effects on the environment.

The little creature is known to be 'hungry' (as popular children's books say) and it turns out to be very accurate. They can eat large amounts of food during this stage of the life cycle which usually lasts several weeks. Some are able to consume 27,000 times their body weight during their lifetime.

But the problem is, caterpillars eat so many leaves that they reduce the number of plants available to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.

And that's not all. In addition to their habit of chewing leaves, their droppings give off carbon dioxide-releasing bacteria as soon as the leaf comes out of the other end, so it's a double hit.

Many caterpillars live on the shores of lakes and when their manure or "frass" (the technical term for caterpillar droppings) gets into the water, it acts as fertilizer for certain microbes that release carbon dioxide into the air.

"These insects are essentially tiny machines that turn carbon-rich leaves into nitrogen-rich manure. The droppings fall into the lake, not the leaves, and this significantly changes the chemistry of the water," said the paper's senior author, Professor Andrew Tanentzap, in the University of Cambridge's Department of Plant Sciences. , citing Euronews November 8.

Caterpillar illustration. (Wikimedia Commons/Ian Kirk)

"We think it will increase the extent to which lakes are a source of greenhouse gases."

The study, published in the science journal Nature, found that in the few years with insect outbreaks, forest leaf area was reduced by an average of 22 percent. At the same time, nearby lakes contain 112 percent more dissolved nitrogen.

To obtain their results, the researchers combined 32 years of government data from surveys of insect outbreaks and lake water chemistry in 12 lake catchments in Ontario, Canada.

This is believed to be the most extensive study ever conducted of how insect outbreaks impact freshwater carbon and nitrogen dynamics.

"It's amazing how these insects can have such a noticeable effect on water quality," said Sam Woodman, a researcher in the University of Cambridge's Department of Plant Science and first author of the report.

"From a climate perspective, they are very bad, but they are completely ignored in climate models," he concluded.