Over a period of six days, a team from North Carolina State University dropped hot dogs, cookies and potato chips around a 150-block section of New York City to study how much food-waste scavengers could eat in 24 hours.
They found that arthropods — invertebrates with an exoskeleton, including insects and spiders — act as a rapid trash-clearance service. Pavement ants in particular are voracious consumers of food waste and together with other arthropods are capable of eating up to 6.5 kilograms (about 14 pounds) of waste per block per year. This chomping adds up to 60,000 hotdogs, 200,000 cookies or 600,000 potato chips across Broadway and West Street. The study was published December 2 in Global Change Biology.
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