Pesky insects play the vital role in ecology

Getting rid of pesky insects may be fraught with adverse consequences, depriving plants of their taste and high yield, suggest a new study.

It showed that evening primroses grown in insecticide treated plots quickly lost, through evolution, defensive traits that helped protect them from plant eating moths.

These results indicate that once the plants no longer needed their anti-insect defences, they lost these.What’s more, they did so quickly — in only three of four generations, the journal Science reported.

The professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, who led the study, explained:

“We demonstrated that when you take moths out of the environment, certain varieties of evening primrose were particularly successful.”

Subsequently, the evening primroses seemingly stopped investing energy in their anti-insect defences, which disappeared through natural selection, according to Cornell statement.