Near City Streets, an Insect Cleaning Crew

Drop a bite of your sandwich? Don’t worry, it won’t go to waste—at least not in the city. In work published this week in the journal Global Change Biology, insect ecologist Elsa Youngsteadt and colleagues tested the ability of urban scavengers to sweep up discarded food such as potato chips, cookies, and chunks of hot dog from alongside busy streets in New York City, and from urban parks. They found that scavenging insects—especially ants—can rapidly remove food scraps from the urban environment, leaving less food waste to attract vertebrate species such as rats and pigeons. The researchers estimate that arthropods alone could remove over four kilograms of food each year from a single street median.