SINGAPORE – While one might think of them as the half-ignored siblings of butterflies, moths play a role in the Singapore ecosystem that has not been adequately understood.Moths are critical in helping to pollinate plants and flowers at night, taking over the role played by butterflies and bees during the day, said Associate Professor Eleanor Slade of NTU’s Asian School of the Environment .
With the help of artificial intelligence, the moth species can then be identified in real time, said Prof Slade, who runs ASE’s Tropical Ecology and Entomology Lab. There are between 400 and 1,000 moth species in Singapore, but since most of them are active at night, they are not very well studied, said Ms Nicole Su-Yin Dorville, who is doing her PhD in novel methods for monitoring the response of biodiversity to environmental change.
However, light pollution could disorient the moths away from their food sources or refuge – moths congregating around street lamps are exposed to predators. As part of the Amber Project, as it is called, a network of 40 monitoring systems will be deployed in places that are biodiversity hot spots, including Singapore, Kenya, Costa Rica, Japan and Thailand, said Dr Jenna Lawson, an ecological network manager at the CEH.