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Jeremy Chan

Lights from buildings high in the sky can disorient birds. Noise from boats and oil exploration deep in the ocean can deafen whales.

And animals that depend on their noses? Pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes is hampering their sense of smell, with potentially dire consequences for the fruits and vegetables we eat that depend on pollinators.

In a study published Thursday, a team of researchers has shown how air pollution is altering the sweet smell of flowers and disrupting the cues nocturnal pollinators use to find nectar.

The research, published in the journal Science, is the first to show how pollution is causing a chemical chain reaction that degrades the scents upon which nocturnal insects depend to find flowers. While light and noise pollution are well-understood, the work illustrates the little-known but detrimental effect humans are having on wildlife that rely on scent to make sense of the world.

“There’s increasing interest in sensory pollution,” said Jeff Riffell, a University of Washington biologist who co-wrote the study. Air pollution, he added, “could be having widespread effects on a variety of different ecological processes.”

Odor brings order to much of the animal kingdom. Dogs greet each other with their snouts. Salmon return to the streams of their birth to spawn by following their scent. Ants and other insects navigate by leaving trails of pheromones on the ground.

Trapped in our own sensory bubble, people are largely unaware of all of this. “We are visual and auditory animals,” Riffell said.

A kind of insect called a hawk moth,<b> </b>which Riffell and his colleagues studied, uses antennae to sniff out the scent of flowers from over a kilometer away. Once they reach a patch of wildflowers, the moths beat their wings so fast to hover in midair and suck up nectar that they are often mistaken for hummingbirds.

One of their favorites is the pale evening primrose, a ghostly white flower that blooms at night. In the field in eastern Washington state, the research team bagged the flowers to sample their scent. In the lab, they isolated the individual chemicals that made up the bouquet.

Up close, “it’s an intense smell,” said Joel Thornton, another University of Washington researcher who worked with Riffell on the research. But the moths are able to detect it from afar.

“It’s just totally fascinating that they can detect such low concentrations,” Thornton said. Atmospheric chemists like himself build expensive pieces of equipment to detect tiny concentrations of scent compounds, but “biology has done it already,” he said.

Pollution, however, can disrupt that spectacular sense of smell.

The team found that certain scent chemicals that moths found attractive degrade in the presence of NO3, a potent pollutant that is formed from the emissions of cars, coal plants and other industrial sources. NO3 <a href="https://research.noaa.gov/2023/02/02/scientists-peer-into-the-dark-for-insights-on-daytime-air-pollution/" target=_blank>builds up</a> in the air at night because it is destroyed by sunlight.

In lab experiments, two moth species — the white-lined sphinx and the tobacco hawk moth — struggled to fly to the primrose scent when subjected to NO3 levels typically seen at night in cities. When the researchers went back into the field and treated the scent from both real and odor-emitting artificial flowers with NO3, wild moth visitation dropped by about 70 percent.

“The flowers only bloom once per night,” Riffell said. “Without their pollinators, there can be a huge change in the plant community.”

Robbie Girling, a chemical ecologist at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia who was not involved in the research, said the study is “first in this area” of nighttime pollution’s effects on pollinators.

“It’s really exciting and also a bit scary to see the results,” he said.

Charles Hedgcock

In his <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220119194035.htm" target=_blank>own experiments</a>, Girling found that filling a field with diesel exhaust and ozone reduced the number of times bees and other daytime pollinators visited black mustard flowers.

Noting that the moth study involved only a handful of species, “how you extrapolate that out more widely, you have to be very cautious,” Girling said. But he added it’s likely air pollution “could have wider-spread impacts” on ecosystems around the world.

“We’re at a very early stage of really understanding how big a deal it is,” Girling said.

Columbia University, BA in economics and political science

Columbia University, MA in science journalism

Dino Grandoni is a reporter covering wildlife, biodiversity and other climate and environmental issues. He is the author of Animalia, a column exploring the strange and fascinating world of animals.

Dino Grandoni

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