Kailen Mooney of UC Irvine has published a study that estimates that birds, lizards, and bats combined eat enough insects that would otherwise damage plants that the plants grow, on average, fourteen percent more, thereby sucking up more carbon dioxide. Now that right there is a great reason to encourage conservation! Though, to be honest, the idiotic comments on the linked article do not fill me with hope…
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.
Very few news sites or popular public blogs have comments worth reading at all. They just frustrate me. My husband actually put a greasemonkey script in his firefox browser to hide all comments on youtube, because they made him want to stab the commenters with blunt pencils.
Drill baby Drill!
This is ridiculous. The ecology in that study is really cool, but that paper has nothing to do with global climate change and does not mention it. The link to global warming by carbon sequestration is just speculation in the news article. The fact that the presence of vertebrate insectivores increases plant growth by 14% is really cool from the ecological perspective, but it makes no sense as a tool to curb climate change because where, realistically, is there ever going to be a total lack of insectivores? It is a non-problem.
For anyone interested, the paper can be downloaded from the Mooney Lab website under Pubs:
http://www.tritrophic.org/
Mooney et al 2010 Interactions among predators and the cascading effects of vertebrate insectivores on arthropod communities and plants. PNAS
Based on the title of the article, I thought there was going to be a calculation like this:
T = B*WB*cepwb
Where:
T – Total amount of energy cooled by birds
B – number of birds in the world
WB = avg number of wingbeats per bird
cepwb – cooling energy per wing beat