New Study Shows Insects Provide Protection and Shelter for Animals Beyond Just Food

Insects do much more than serve as food for animals, providing vital functions like protection, sanitation, and shelter across global ecosystems. A new study published on Wednesday in Nature Reviews Biodiversity highlights how vertebrates—including birds, bats, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals—depend on insects in ways that go far beyond the predator-prey dynamic. Nearly three-quarters of land and freshwater vertebrates eat invertebrates, but the paper details dozens of other ways these creatures rely on the estimated 14 million to 30 million insect species on Earth.

Roles and Relationships

Led by Eliza Grames, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University, State University of New York, the research highlights multiple examples. Chimpanzees use insects to treat open wounds, and more than 200 bird species use ants to remove parasites. Birds, reptiles, and mammals also use termite mounds and ant nests for stable temperatures and humidity, while white-throated round-eared bats carve out roosts in termite mounds. Other insects act as cleaners, such as dung beetles that remove animal waste and reduce parasite survival. Moths in bird nests consume debris, and ancient beetles even fed on feathers in dinosaur nests during the Cretaceous period, which lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago. Other interactions include beetles removing parasites from rodents, snakes eating firefly larvae for defensive toxins, and sloths trading a place for moths to lay eggs in exchange for nitrogen and algae growth in their fur.

Conservation Concerns

Grames called the study a wake-up call for the biodiversity crisis, noting that protecting insects is essential because other species rely on them for habitat maintenance and disease reduction. Co-author Chris Elphick, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at the University of Connecticut, said that designing effective conservation strategies requires focusing on insect preservation.

Context

Insects form the base of many food webs and drive essential processes like decomposition and nutrient recycling across natural landscapes. Human land use changes and habitat destruction continue to put pressure on global insect populations, which poses broader risks to the animals and plants that depend on them.