Pollination Isn't Just for the Bees

不只蜜蜂在授粉

Flies, beetles, butterflies and moths may account for some 40 percent of the world’s pollination. Christopher Intagliata reports

苍蝇，甲虫，蝴蝶与飞蛾参与了全球约40%的授粉工作。

撰文\播音 克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔（Christopher Intagliata）

翻译 Meatle

审校 邰伦玥

The widespread death of honeybees has some farmers fretting: if honeybees disappear, who will pollinate their crops? "Almost any kind of insect you can think of." Margie Mayfield, an ecologist at The University of Queensland in Australia. "Globally speaking flies are probably the second largest group of crop pollinators. In particular a group called hoverflies, or syrphidflies. And these are these large-eyed flies that if you take a hike you sometimes see them hovering in front of your face." 

一些农民对蜜蜂的大范围死亡感到焦虑：如果蜜蜂从此消失，谁来帮他们的作物授粉？“几乎所有你能想到的昆虫都能授粉。”来自澳大利亚昆士兰州大学的生态学家，玛姬·梅菲尔德如是说，“从全球的范围来看，苍蝇可能是第二大的为作物授粉的群体。尤其是被称为食蚜蝇的种群。如果你去登山，这些大眼苍蝇有时候会在你的面前绕来绕去。”

Along with hoverflies, the army of under-appreciated pollinators includes butterflies, moths, beetles, ants and wasps. Mayfield and her colleagues analyzed more than three dozen studies on pollination, covering 17 crop plants grown on five continents. And they found that these underdog insects accounted for some 40 percent of the flower visits. Some of the crops in their review--especially tropical ones like mangoes and custard apples--did not rely on honeybees at all. Even commodities like canola did fine without bees. The meta-analysis is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Romina Rader et al, Non-bee insects are important contributors to global crop pollination]

与食蚜蝇一样，未被人们知晓的授粉“大军”还包括了蝴蝶、飞蛾、甲虫、蚂蚁和黄蜂。梅菲尔德和她的同僚分析了囊括在五大洲种植的17种作物的36项授粉方面的研究。她们发现这些不起眼的昆虫竟占了40%的授粉工作。一些他们所研究的作物——特别是那些热带作物，比如芒果、释迦果——完全不依赖蜜蜂进行授粉。甚至大宗作物，如油菜，在没有蜜蜂的参与下也能完成授粉。这个综合研究发表在《美国国家科学院院刊》上。

Mayfield says part of the difficulty in gauging the importance of bees starts with the research methods: a third of the studies they initially considered, for example, ignored everything but bees. "You know the European honeybee is obviously from Europe, so there's a lot of focus on the European honeybee there." Another issue, she says, is raising awareness among farmers. "I've encountered farmers in California and in South Africa and in Australia who spray their pesticides largely at night, because that's when the bees have gone back to their hives. And they do that with the idea that we'll spare our pollinators and control our pests. But that very much takes the assumption that only bees are important pollinators." Of course we should still do our best to save honeybees--the celebrity pollinators. But agricultural practices should consider the rest of these tiny farm workers, too.

梅菲尔德说，要判断蜜蜂授粉的重要性，其困难部分源于所采用的研究方法：例如，她们所分析的三分一的研究，在一开始就只考虑蜜蜂的作用，而忽略了其他所有的变量。“你知道欧洲蜜蜂显然是来自欧洲的，所以在这些研究中，很大一部分精力就集中于欧洲蜜蜂上。”另一方面，她说，这个问题需要引起农民们的注意。“我接触过加利福尼亚的、南非的和澳大利亚的农民。他们一般都在晚上喷洒杀虫剂，那时蜜蜂已经回巢了。他们这样做是因为他们认为这样可以杀死田里的害虫，同时不伤害协助授粉的蜜蜂。然而这种想法是建立在‘只有蜜蜂才是重要的授粉者’的假设上的。”当然，我们仍会尽我们所能去拯救蜜蜂——这种名声显赫的授粉者。但是，农业实践中也要考虑剩下的那些默默耕耘的小工人们。