ECOLOGICAL
IMPORTANCE OF
INSECTS
Objectives
• Appreciate the importance of insects.
• Identify the different roles played by insect in the ecosystem.
• Insects are keystone species
• A keystone species is an organism that plays a unique and crucial role in the
way an ecosystem functions.
• Without keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or
cease to exist altogether.
• By virtue of their huge abundance and great variety, insects are major players in
many ecosystem processes.
• They eat leaves and logs, suck nectar, pollinate flowers, bury dung, engineer the soil
and transmit diseases.
• They also eat and parasitize each other, and then they die, returning nutrients to the
soil.
• They thus perform keystone roles and largely maintain terrestrial ecosystems in the
form that would be radically different in a matter of weeks without them.
• Insect ecosystem engineers
• Some insects have a large impact on soils, especially in
arid areas.
• The Funnel ant can move some 80% of the soil to the
surface that can be moved by all soil fauna combined.
• Termites are also important engineers, and in certain
areas, their nests can even cover almost a tenth of the
land surface.
• Termites also influence the global carbon cycle and in
tropical forests they can produce 1.5% of carbon dioxide
and 15% of methane produced from all sources.
• The action of termites can be so extensive that they can
influence plant communities.
• Insects as part of food chain
• Insects are prey to many different organism.
• Loss of some of the insect has been implicated in the decline of European
birds.
• The decline of bats has been associated with intensification of agriculture
and consequent loss of nocturnal insects.
• Insect Pollinators
• The evolution of insects has driven flowers to be so diverse and complex.
• The driving force for such flower diversity has been the mutualism between
specialist insect and specialist flower.
• 80% crop pollination is by honey bees
• Many flowering plants including crop plants are threatened because their
wild pollinators are in decline.
• Insects in nutrient recycling
• by degrading or consuming animal and plant litter.
• Insects maintain community structures and compositions
• by transmission of diseases, predation and parasitism
• plant propagation through pollination and seed dispersal.
• Insects help improve the soil health.
• aerate the soil, improve its retention of rainwater.
• Increases humus level.
Case study: Dung Beetle
• Dung is a high quality resource
• Provides nutrients, water, shelter
Ecological importance: Dung beetles
• Increase soil fertility by returning organic matter and nutrients to the soil
• Nutrients are then available to soil micro-organisms
• Increase soil aeration by creating tunnels into the soil both when burying dung
and on emergence of new beetles
• Increase water infiltration into the soil
• Reduce pasture fouling
• Reduce water contamination and algal blooms
• Reduce nutrient run off into dams, streams and waterways
• Reduce fly numbers - rapid burial of dung pads removes the fly breeding habitat
• Reduce parasite loads by interrupting the life cycle of some internal parasites
Ecological importance of insects
Groups: (10 minutes)
• Identify at least two insects
• Identify their ecological importance.
• Present to the class (5 minutes/group)
