Insect-Eating Birds Consume 400-500 Million Metric Tons of Prey Annually
Jul 10, 2018 by News Staff / Source
World’s insectivorous birds eat 400 to 500 million metric tons of beetles, flies, ants, moths, aphids, grasshoppers, crickets and other arthropods per year, according to a review of 103 previous studies.
An European bee-eater (Merops apiaster) with an insect. Image credit: Antonios Tsaknakis / CC BY-SA 4.0.
Birds, represented by nearly 10,700 species, are found across the world in all major land ecosystems. They exhibit a large variety of life styles and foraging behaviors.
While some birds depend mainly on plant diets, such as seeds, fruits, and nectar, others feed as carnivores on animal prey, or as omnivores on a mixed diet of plant/animal matter. Most bird species (more than 6,000 species) are insectivores that depend for the most part on insects as prey.
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/insect-eating-birds-06181.html
