December 3, 2014
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
New York has a secret weapon when it comes to dealing with refuse on city streets, according to a new study: ants, spiders and insects
that consume over one ton of discarded junk food annually along the Broadway/West Street corridor alone!
that consume over one ton of discarded junk food annually along the Broadway/West Street corridor alone!
Dr. Elsa Youngsteadt, a research associate at North Carolina State University and lead author of a new paper published Tuesday in the journal Global Change Biology, said that she and her colleagues calculated that arthropods in that area alone devour over 2,100 pounds of waste products – equal to roughly 60,000 hot dogs – each year.
It could even be more than that, Dr. Youngsteadt explained. The researchers are assuming that the creatures take a break during the wintertime. Lest you think this is just a useless fun fact, the entomologist said in a statement that the research “highlights a very real service that these arthropods provide. They effectively dispose of our trash for us.”
She and her colleagues were working on a long-term study of urban insects when Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in 2012, and the following spring, they expanded their work to investigate if the storm had any effect on the behavior of those bug populations. The authors sampled arthropods in street medians and parks in Manhattan to measure the biodiversity at those sites, then set out to determine how much garbage they consumed.
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