Abstract
Since its accidental introduction in 2003 in France, the yellow-legged Asian hornetVespa velutina nigrithoraxis rapidly spreading through France and Europe. Economic assessments regarding the costs of invasive species often reveal important costs from required control measures or damages. Despite the rapid invasion of the Asian yellow-legged hornet in Europe and potential damage to apiculture and pollination services, the costs of its invasion have not been evaluated yet. Here we aimed at studying the costs arising from the Asian yellow-legged hornet invasion by providing the first estimate of the control cost. Today, the invasion of the Asian yellow-legged hornet is mostly controlled by nest destruction. We estimated that nest destruction cost €23 million between 2006 and 2015 in France. The yearly cost is increasing as the species keeps spreading and could reach €11.9 million in France, €9.0 million in Italy and €8.6 million in the United Kingdom if the species fills its current climatically suitable distribution. Although more work will be needed to estimate the cost of the Asian yellow-legged hornet on apiculture and pollination services, they likely exceed the current costs of control with nest destruction. It could thus be worth increasing control efforts by aiming at destroying a higher percentage of nests.
Highlights
Invasive species are one of the greatest threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Bellard et al 2016) and part of global environmental change (Simberloff et al 2013; Lewis and Maslin 2015)
If the species has been accidently introduced into the countries that have not yet been invaded, the yearly cost of nest destruction could be important in some countries, such as the USA (€26.9M), Australia (€3.6M), Turkey (€3.5M), Argentina (€2.6M) and Brazil (€1.8M) (Fig. 3 and Table 1)
Even though European parasitic flies or nematodes can infect V. velutina nigrithorax (Darrouzet et al 2014; Villemant et al 2015), they seem to have a limited impact on the species colony survival (Villemant et al 2015)
Summary
Invasive species are one of the greatest threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (Bellard et al 2016) and part of global environmental change (Simberloff et al 2013; Lewis and Maslin 2015). Invasive species can be very costly to goods and services such as agriculture (Paini et al 2016), forestry (Aukema et al 2010), aquaculture, tourism, recreation and infrastructure (Su 2002), and to human health (Gubler 1998). Categorising and estimating these costs is not an easy task, so frameworks have been developed to categorise them, especially in ecology (Bradshaw et al 2016). Amongst the invasive species for which no cost has been estimated yet, the yellow-legged hornet Vespa velutina nigrithorax, the invasive sub-species of the Asian hornet, is considered an important threat to both biodiversity and apiculture and the importance of the damage it causes is regularly invoked in the media
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