Haze smoke impacts survival and development of butterflies

The Southeast Asian transboundary haze contains a mixture of gases and particles from forest fires and negatively impacts people’s health and local economies. However, the effect of the haze on organisms other than humans has not yet been sufficiently studied. Insects are important members of food webs and environmental disturbances that affect insects may impact whole ecosystems. Here we studied how haze directly and indirectly affects the survival, growth, and development of insects by rearing Bicyclus anynana butterflies under artificially generated smoke as well as reared in clean air but fed on plants previously exposed to smoke. Direct haze exposure significantly increased the mortality of caterpillars, increased larval development time, and decreased pupal weight, while indirect haze exposure, via ingestion of haze-exposed food plants, also affected development time and pupal weight. No smoke particles were found in the tracheae of subjects from the smoke treatment suggesting that the increase in development time and mortality of B. anynana under smoke conditions might be due to toxic smoke gases and toxic food, rather than particulate matter. These results document significant deleterious effect of haze smoke to the development, adult size, and survival of insects, key players in food-webs.