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Missing Mayflies

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Mayfly
Photo by Phil Stepanian
June 3, 2020

Missing Mayflies

Mayfly
Photo by Phil Stepanian

As the name suggests, mayflies typically begin hatching in May, but you might be seeing less around than in previous years. Increasingly, research is documenting the effect of climate change on grasshopper and other insect populations. Now, rising temperatures may also be a reason for a nearly 50% decrease in a mayfly population studied by OU researchers.

An NSF-funded study awarded to Jeff Kelly, Corix Chair in the Department of Biology, and Djordje Mirkovic of the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies in Norman, along with researchers at the University of Notre Dame and Virginia Tech, applied radar technology to quantify the number of mayflies that emerged from the Upper Mississippi River and the Western Lake Erie Basin.

Mayflies
Photo by Phil Stepanian

In a story published by NSF, the goal of the research was to characterize the size of the swarms, using the same technique a meteorologist would use to quantify the amount of precipitation that falls from a cloud. What the researchers found is striking, a decrease of more than 50% in mayfly populations from 2012 to 2019 hatching from these two bodies of water. 

The researchers suggest that mayflies may be canaries in the coal mine signaling potentially greater disruptions to the ecosystem.

“Mayflies have unusual biology that allows us to use radars to measure their declines in ways that are not possible for other insects,” Kelly said. “We suspect that what we have learned about mayflies indicates broader declines in the quality of these aquatic ecosystems. Other research suggests that factors likely contributing to these declines include increasing water temperatures driven by climate warming, algal blooms owing to fertilizer runoff, and neonictinoid pesticides accumulating among insects. These insecticides in particular have been linked to declines in birds and bats that specialize on eating insects.” 

The researchers findings are published in the February issue of the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.