Flying vertebrates such as birds and bats are well known as providers of pest control in agriculture. However, being insectivores, they may prey not only on pest insects, but also on other arthropods, like spiders, acting as natural enemies too. In this article, we tackle this issue by combining DNA-metabarcoding from dietary samples of birds, bats and spiders and ecological network analysis. We seek to understand the complexity of tri-trophic interactions between vertebrate top-predators, invertebrate mesopredators and pest insect prey on apple and blueberry orchards in Asturias (northern Spain). We found numerous crop pest species on faecal samples of birds and bats and spider gut samples, but also spiders on vertebrate samples. Interaction networks of apple and blueberry orchards were highly modular, with birds and bats occupying distinct modules feeding on different prey. Bats tended to be more directly connected
to pests than birds, which were more frequently involved in intraguild predation with predatory spiders. Even so, the high direct predation of birds on pests compensates the ecological disservice of intraguild predation, rendering effective pest control effects. Bats and birds provide, thus, complementary services of pest control in both fruit crop types. Read the whole paper in Journal of Applied Ecology!