A new study has proven that, in the city that never sleeps, even the bugs are up all night working: it seems that insects in NYC garbage play a substantial role in how the city naturally disposes of trash.
According to Science Daily, a new study from North Carolina State University has found that insects in NYC garbage are absolutely vital for the way trash is disposed of in the Big Apple of New York City. It seems that this is a peculiarity of insects and other different arthropods; while mostly remaining unseen, they're still there and hard at work.
The study regarding insects in NYC garbage, called "Habitat and species identity, not diversity, predict the extent of refuse consumption by urban arthropods" and published in Global Change Biology this month, studies the way different insects behave in the big city, taking New York as an example but potentially being able to extend it to other great urban areas of the United States and other countries.
For the investigation, researchers sampled different arthropods in different streets and parks of Manhattan, testing out the insect biodiversity of the famous island. Besides seeing how many types of insects they had on the city, but they also wanted to see how much insects in NYC garbage there were, by testing how much trash they consumed.
On a very interesting experiment regarding insects in NYC garbage, the NC researchers left previously measured amounts of junk food (such as hot dogs, cookies and potato chips) on the street, and then went back to the sits to measure just how much insects had eaten after 24 hours. They wanted to see just how much insects such as roaches, waterbugs, millipedes, and ants would consume of the trash, according to CBS New York.
"We calculate that the arthropods on medians down the Broadway/West Street corridor alone could consume more than 2,100 pounds of discarded junk food, the equivalent of 60,000 hot dogs, every year - assuming they take a break in the winter," said Dr. Elsa Youngsteadt, the lead author of the paper, regarding their study on insects in NYC garbage.
