Crop-eating moths will flourish as climate warms

Volker Rudolf (Photo by Jeff Fitlow) - Warmer climate will make diamondback moths more widespread, harder to control Climate change in this century will allow one of the world's costliest agricultural pests, the diamondback moth , to both thrive year-round and rapidly evolve resistance to pesticides in large parts of the United States, Europe and China where it previously died each winter, according to a study by U.S. and Chinese researchers. The moth, Plutella xylostella, which is also known as the cabbage moth, already causes more than $4 billion in damage worldwide each year to broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, mustard, radishes, turnips, watercress, Brussels sprouts and other crops. It is also one the world's most pesticide-resistant species, with a documented resistance to at least 97 insecticides. In a first-of-its-kind study published in the open-access , researchers from Rice University and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences combined results from years of laboratory and field experiments, computer simulations of future climate warming scenarios and a meta-analysis of decades of prior moth research. "It's well-documented that climate change is shifting the distribution and ranges of species, but the challenge is trying to predict where species will go,” said study co-author Volker Rudolf , an ecologist, evolutionary biologist and professor of biosciences at Rice University. Rudolf said the team, which was led by co-lead authors Chun-Sen Ma and Wei Zhang , began with laboratory experiments aimed at isolating a specific mechanism that could be used to accurately predict how the range of diamondback moths would evolve in response to climate change.