If you’ve ever snacked on raisins or enjoyed a glass of wine, you may, in part, have the extinction of the dinosaurs to thank for it. In a discovery described in the journal Nature Plants, researchers found fossil grape seeds that range from 60 to 19 million years old in Colombia, Panama, and Perú. One of these species represents the earliest known example of plants from the grape family in the Western Hemisphere. These fossil seeds help show how the grape family spread in the years following the death of the dinosaurs.

“These are the oldest grapes ever found in this part of the world, and they’re a few million years younger than the oldest ones ever found on the other side of the planet,” says Fabiany Herrera, an assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum in Chicago’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center and the lead author of the paper. “This discovery is important because it shows that after the extinction of the dinosaurs, grapes really started to spread across the world.”

It’s rare for soft tissues like fruits to be preserved as fossils, so scientists’ understanding of ancient fruits often comes from the seeds, which are more likely to fossilize. The earliest known grape seed fossils were found in India and are 66 million years old. It’s not a coincidence that grapes appeared in the fossil record 66 million years ago—that’s around when a huge asteroid hit the Earth, triggering a massive extinction that altered the course of life on the planet.

“We always think about the animals, the dinosaurs, because they were the biggest things to be affected, but the extinction event had a huge impact on plants too,” says Herrera. “The forest reset itself, in a way that changed the composition of the plants.”

Herrera and his colleagues hypothesize that the disappearance of the dinosaurs might have helped alter the forests. “Large animals, such as dinosaurs, are known to alter their surrounding ecosystems. We think that if there were large dinosaurs roaming through the forest, they were likely knocking down trees, effectively maintaining forests more open than they are today,” says Mónica Carvalho, a co-author of the paper and assistant curator at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology.

But without large dinosaurs to prune them, some tropical forests, including those in South America, became more crowded, with layers of trees forming an understory and a canopy.

These new, dense forests provided an opportunity. “In the fossil record, we start to see more plants that use vines to climb up trees, like grapes, around this time,” says Herrera. The diversification of birds and mammals in the years following the mass extinction may have also aided grapes by spreading their seeds.

In 2013, Herrera’s Ph.D. advisor and senior author of the new paper, Steven Manchester, published a paper describing the oldest known grape seed fossil, from India. While no fossil grapes had ever been found in South America, Herrera suspected that they might be there too.

“Grapes have an extensive fossil record that starts about 50 million years ago, so I wanted to discover one in South America, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Herrera. “I’ve been looking for the oldest grape in the Western Hemisphere since I was an undergrad student.”

But in 2022, Herrera and his co-author Mónica Carvalho were conducting fieldwork in the Colombian Andes when a fossil caught Carvalho’s eye. “She looked at me and said, ‘Fabiany, a grape!’ And then I looked at it, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ It was so exciting,” recalls Herrera. The fossil was in a 60-million-year-old rock, making it not only the first South American grape fossil, but among the world’s oldest grape fossils as well.

The fossil seed itself is tiny, but Herrera and Carvalho were able to identify it based on its particular shape, size, and other morphological features. Back in the lab, they conducted CT scans showing its internal structure that confirmed its identity.

The team named the fossil Lithouva susmanii, “Susman’s stone grape,” in honor of Arthur T. Susman, a supporter of South American paleobotany at the Field Museum. “This new species is also important because it supports a South American origin of the group in which the common grape vine Vitis evolved,” says co-author Gregory Stull of the National Museum of Natural History.

The team conducted further fieldwork in South and Central America, and in the Nature Plants paper, Herrera and his co-authors ultimately described nine new species of fossil grapes from Colombia, Panama, and Perú, spanning from 60 to 19 million years old. These fossilized seeds not only tell the story of grapes’ spread across the Western Hemisphere, but also of the many extinctions and dispersals the grape family has undergone.

The fossils are only distant relatives of the grapes native to the Western Hemisphere and a few, like the two species of Leea are only found in the Eastern Hemisphere today. Their places within the grape family tree indicate that their evolutionary journey has been a tumultuous one.

“The fossil record tells us that grapes are a very resilient order. They’re a group that has suffered a lot of extinction in the Central and South American region, but they also managed to adapt and survive in other parts of the world,” says Herrera.

Given the mass extinction our planet is currently facing, Herrera says that studies like this one are valuable because they reveal patterns about how biodiversity crises play out. “But the other thing I like about these fossils is that these little tiny, humble seeds can tell us so much about the evolution of the forest,” says Herrera.

This study was authored by Fabiany Herrera (Field Museum), Mónica Carvalho (University of Michigan), Gregory Stull (National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution), Carlos Jarramillo (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute), and Steven Manchester (Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida).

In a world increasingly affected by light pollution, we can take time during the shorter days and longer nights around Matariki to appreciate the superpowers of our nocturnal bugs.

As diurnal creatures, our world view is strongly biased towards a daytime perspective. We pay more attention to events happening during daylight, and sometimes overlook the fascinating world of nocturnal insects.

Human eyes are very poor at gathering enough light particles—photons—to see clearly at night. We need the light of a full moon to have much hope of navigating safely.

For millennia, then, we’ve used fire and more recently electricity to artificially light up the night. Nocturnal insects now deal with a very different nightscape than they did even a century ago.

It’s been estimated that 23% of the world’s land area is affected by light pollution. This is thought to be one of the factors contributing to insect decline worldwide.

Recent research suggests about a third of insects attracted to artificial lights will die by morning, often from exhaustion. If those insects have been prevented from mating and laying eggs, there are huge implications for population survival, as well as for ecosystem functions such as pollination and biocontrol.

Nocturnal superpowers

Many bugs are more active at night, most likely to avoid daytime predators. Some can also make their own light. New Zealand glow worms, the larvae of fungus gnats, use bioluminescence to hunt.

Elsewhere in the world, some flying beetles are commonly known as fireflies due to the fiery crackles of light they produce to confuse and ward off predators.

Moonlight is roughly one million times less intense than sunlight. But nocturnal insects can navigate, see color and detect movement with only the light from the stars and moon.

This superpower is due in part to their incredible compound eyes. These are made up of millions of tiny lenses that each capture the maximum amount of light from a small field of view, and focus it onto a bundle of photoreceptors.

The ability to make sense of very low light levels is also due to higher contrast sensitivity at the expense of detail. Moths in particular boast several adaptations that aid in navigating and perceiving in low light.

Many New Zealand moths are nocturnal, and their eyes are largely specialized for motion detection, differentiating between intensities of light rather than distinct wavelengths.

Compared with day-flying butterflies, which can perceive more detail and differentiate wavelengths as colors, moths have evolved greater perception of contrast and large-scale changes in their visual environment. But this comes at the expense of spatial sensitivity.

LED lights and moths

Contrary to myth, nocturnal insects do not fly around artificial lights because they confuse them with the moon or stars. Recent research, filming moths with high-speed cameras, found they use moonlight and starlight to differentiate between “up” and “down” as they fly.

Their erratic flight around your outside light is actually due to them trying to orientate themselves to a nonexistent horizon.

The color of artificial lights can also affect how attractive they are to nocturnal insects. In recent years, Dunedin (like many cities around the world) has been replacing old high-pressure sodium bulbs in street lights with LEDs that use less energy and have lower maintenance costs.

But this hasn’t been so great for night-flying insects. Moths can detect light wavelengths as low as 300 nanometers (invisible to human eyes) and as high as 700nm (orange-red to humans). But many have a peak sensitivity at 400nm (human blue).

The old sodium bulbs produced a warm orange or golden glow. But the brighter LEDs commonly produce a cool white light at the blue end of the spectrum, right at peak sensitivity for many moths. Warmer LED lights (with a lower color temperature) can be less attractive to flying insects, and also help reduce light pollution across the city.

Helping our night bugs

Closer to home, we can make a difference for our own backyard bugs (and other nocturnal and twilight fauna) by reducing light pollution.

Something as simple as closing curtains at night will discourage flying insects from crashing into windows—and getting inside!

Using motion-activated outside lights, rather than having them permanently on, can reduce the deaths toll in your local moth populations. And selecting warmer colored light bulbs and fairy lights will make them less attractive to nocturnal insects.

Finally, turning off your lights and venturing outside will not only give your backyard bugs a break, but also help you appreciate the wonders of the night sky at Matariki.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.