Project lead: Hannah Anderson
Insect pollinators are vital in agroecosystems for pollinating crops and wild plants. Most of what we know about pollination is on daytime pollinators like bees, which largely overlooks pollination at night. Moths are the most well-known and important nocturnal pollinators for wild plants, but their role in agriculture is likely under-recognized.
To assess whether moths are pollinators of berry agroecosystems, we sampled nocturnal moths at strawberry and blueberry farms in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, and analyzed the pollen moths carried on their bodies. We identified several moth species, previously unknown to be pollinators, carrying pollen from a variety of plants including blueberry. These findings suggest that nocturnal moths likely pollinate in berry agroecosystems, and provide further support to the importance of moths as pollinators and stress the need to include nocturnal insects in future pollination studies.
The next steps in this research are to conduct pollination exclusion experiments in pollinator-dependent crops to determine the relative contributions of moth pollination to crops. We also plan to begin a project in 2025 investigating the behavioural and morphological changes of moths across land cover gradients of agricultural, perennial, and restored habitats.
Project collaborators: Eva Burghardt, Carly McGregor
Photo by Juli Carrillo
