Economic Importance of Bats in Agriculture

Boyles, Justin G.; Cryan, Paul M.; McCracken, Gary F.; Kunz, Thomas

doi:10.1126/science.1201366

Cited by 668 publications

(494 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Cleveland et al (2006) estimate that Mexican free-tailed bats (T. brasiliensis) feeding on the cotton bollworm moth in Texas provide pest limitation services worth roughly US $183 per ha and year to cotton growers. Extending these estimates to agricultural areas throughout the USA suggests that bat predation could have a value of nearly US $23 billion annually (Boyles et al 2011). These benefits hold for both conventional and transgenic cotton (Federico et al 2008), although the introduction of Bt cotton (a genetically modified organism whose tissues produce an insecticide derived from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis), coupled with reduced area in cotton cultivation, has led to a decline in the overall value of this pest limitation service (Lopez-Hoffman et al 2014).…”

Section: Insectivorous Bats and Pest Limitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bats in the Anthropogenic Matrix: Challenges and Opportunities for the Conservation of Chiroptera and Their Ecosystem Services in Agricultural Landscapes

Williams‐Guillén

Olimpi

Maas

et al. 2015

Bats in the Anthropocene: Conservation of Bats in a Changing World

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Intensification in land-use and farming practices has had largely negative effects on bats, leading to population declines and concomitant losses of ecosystem services. Current trends in land-use change suggest that agricultural areas will further expand, while production systems may either experience further intensification (particularly in developing nations) or become more environmentally friendly (especially in Europe). In this chapter, we review the existing literature

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Section: Insectivorous Bats and Pest Limitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bats in the Anthropogenic Matrix: Challenges and Opportunities for the Conservation of Chiroptera and Their Ecosystem Services in Agricultural Landscapes

Williams‐Guillén

Olimpi

Maas

et al. 2015

Bats in the Anthropocene: Conservation of Bats in a Changing World

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“…21), thus leaving open the possibility that inferences are biased by nonindependent comparisons (25). In addition, all tests of the EFS hypothesis have focused on predatory insects (predatory wasps, ants, and hemipterans), and it is unknown whether dietary specialization provides EFS from generalist vertebrate predators such as insectivorous birds, bats, and lizards; these vertebrates are important consumers of plant-feeding insects and are known to indirectly benefit plants (26)(27)(28). Finally, past empirical work has been limited to predation trials in which herbivores are presented to predators divorced from the full context of their host plants or habitat, thus preventing herbivores from fully using their host plant for EFS.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Herbivore diet breadth mediates the cascading effects of carnivores in food webs

Singer

Lichter‐Marck

Farkas

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

113

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Predicting the impact of carnivores on plants has challenged community and food web ecologists for decades. At the same time, the role of predators in the evolution of herbivore dietary specialization has been an unresolved issue in evolutionary ecology. Here, we integrate these perspectives by testing the role of herbivore diet breadth as a predictor of top-down effects of avian predators on herbivores and plants in a forest food web. Using experimental bird exclosures to study a complex community of trees, caterpillars, and birds, we found a robust positive association between caterpillar diet breadth (phylodiversity of host plants used) and the strength of bird predation across 41 caterpillar and eight tree species. Dietary specialization was associated with increased enemy-free space for both camouflaged (n = 33) and warningly signaled (n = 8) caterpillar species. Furthermore, dietary specialization was associated with increased crypsis (camouflaged species only) and more stereotyped resting poses (camouflaged and warningly signaled species), but was unrelated to caterpillar body size. These dynamics in turn cascaded down to plants: a metaanalysis (n = 15 tree species) showed the beneficial effect of birds on trees (i.e., reduced leaf damage) decreased with the proportion of dietary specialist taxa composing a tree species' herbivore fauna. We conclude that herbivore diet breadth is a key functional trait underlying the trophic effects of carnivores on both herbivores and plants.ecological specialization | host specificity | plant-herbivore interactions | tritrophic interactions | trophic cascade P redicting the strength of trophic interactions is a major goal in ecology. Because most natural ecosystems contain numerous coexisting species at each trophic level, achieving this goal necessarily involves the integration of theory in evolutionary, community, and food web ecology. In this context, evolutionary ecology explains how traits of organisms adapt them to a fundamental trade-off between resource acquisition and mortality risk from natural enemies (1, 2); community ecology theory links the many patterns and consequences of species interactions to the diversity of traits of those species (2); and food web ecology subsumes this diversity into patterns of trophic structure and dynamics, such as a trophic cascade (3). The recognition that functional traits of species can drive the indirect positive effect of carnivores on plant biomass [trophic cascades broadly defined (4, 5)] provides important insight into the causes of variation in these dynamics (1,6). An emerging understanding of the functional traits mediating trophic cascade strength includes traits of herbivores that facilitate predator avoidance (7-10), or provide constitutive (11, 12) or induced resistance to predation (13). These examples identify antipredator traits of herbivores as an important mediator of top-down effects on plants within individual tritrophic food chains. However, the role of antipredator (or other) traits of herbivores is curr...

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“…WNS was first observed in 2006 in Schoharie County, NY, and within 2 years spread to 15 counties within a B230 km radius 4 . The speed of this spread, together with early reports of mass mortality in infected caves, has generated concern about massive depletion of currently common bat species, attendant loss of economic services, and transmission to vulnerable populations of threatened and endangered species 5,[8][9][10] . Although WNS has now been reported in 20 states and up to B2,220 km from its North American origin, the ecological and environmental determinants of these epidemiological dynamics are poorly understood.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spread of white-nose syndrome on a network regulated by geography and climate

et al. 2012

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Wildlife and plant diseases can reduce biodiversity, disrupt ecosystem services and threaten human health. Emerging pathogens have displayed a variety of spatial spread patterns due to differences in host ecology, including diffusive spread from an epicentre (West Nile virus), jump dispersal on a network (foot-and-mouth disease), or a combination of these (Sudden oak death). White-nose syndrome is a highly pathogenic infectious disease of bats currently spreading across North America. Understanding how bat ecology influences this spread is crucial to management of infected and vulnerable populations. Here we show that white-nose syndrome spread is not diffusive but rather mediated by patchily distributed habitat and large-scale gradients in winter climate. Simulations predict rapid expansion and infection of most counties with caves in the contiguous United States by winter 2105-2106. Our findings show the unique pattern of white-nose syndrome spread corresponds to ecological traits of the host and suggest hypotheses for transmission mechanisms acting at the local scale.

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Economic Importance of Bats in Agriculture

Abstract: Insectivorous bat populations, adversely impacted by white-nose syndrome and wind turbines, may be worth billions of dollars to North American agriculture.

Cited by 668 publications

References 20 publications

Bats in the Anthropogenic Matrix: Challenges and Opportunities for the Conservation of Chiroptera and Their Ecosystem Services in Agricultural Landscapes

Bats in the Anthropogenic Matrix: Challenges and Opportunities for the Conservation of Chiroptera and Their Ecosystem Services in Agricultural Landscapes

Herbivore diet breadth mediates the cascading effects of carnivores in food webs

Spread of white-nose syndrome on a network regulated by geography and climate

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