Editorial : The effects of diet on health in insects

Abstract

Global change brings about a number of new challenges to insects. Urbanisation and landscape transformation, increasing temperatures, and frequent droughts will not only affect the species itself but also has knock-on effects throughout the trophic levels of a network. Plants might flower earlier and leave the previously default pollinator in a situation where it must look for a suitable alternative or starve. Long cold weather periods in spring after an early onset of flowering might starve both solitary and social insects in the beginning of the season. The increasing human food demand is resulting in agricultural intensification and an increase in monocultures, thereby reducing the diversity of floral nectar and pollen (1). Predatory and herbivore insects are similarly affected, with their favourite diet becoming desynchronised from their phenology, either temporally or spatially, due to changes in land use and the loss in connectivity linking favourable habitats.