Global Warming will Make Insects Hungrier, Eating up Key Crops

AFP - Researchers have found a new way that global warming is bad for the planet: more hungry bugs.

Rising temperatures will stimulate insects' appetites -- and make some prone to reproducing more quickly -- spelling danger for key staples like wheat, corn and rice which feed billions of people, researchers said Thursday.

And since these three crops account for 42 percent of the calories people eat worldwide, any uptick in scarcity could give rise to food insecurity and conflict, particularly in poorer parts of the globe.

"When it gets warmer, pest metabolism increases," said Scott Merrill, a researcher at the University of Vermont and co-author of the study in the journal Science.

"And when pest metabolism increases, insect pests eat more food, which is not good for crops."

Prior studies have already warned of climate change's harmful effects on food staples, whether by making water scarce for irrigation or sapping nutritious content from cereal grains.

The latest study adds to that body of research by focusing on the boosted appetites of pests like aphids and borers.

To find out just how bad it could get, researchers ran simulations to track temperature-driven changes in metabolism and growth rates for 38 insect species from different latitudes.

Results varied by region, with cooler zones more likely to see a boost in voracious pests, and tropical areas expected to see some relief.

Overall, "global yield losses of these grains are projected to increase by 10 to 25 percent per degree of global mean surface warming," said the report.

"In France or the northern United States, most of those insects will have a faster population growth if the temperature warms up a bit," lead author Curtis Deutsch told AFP.<...