Moths live in increasingly urban environments. As a group, moths are involved in a variety of ecological interactions: prey-predator, plant-herbivore, and plant-pollinator, and these interactions are likely influenced by the effects of urbanization. Pollination is an important ecological function for the persistence and maintenance of biodiversity. Despite its importance, a significant portion of plant visitors have been largely omitted from pollination research: nocturnal pollinators. This thesis expands the literature on nocturnal pollination in urban environments, with an emphasis on moths, which are speciose and abundant in terrestrial ecosystems. In Chapter One, I introduce and review key concepts in moth biology, pollination, and urban ecology, which are central for the subsequent chapters. In Chapter Two, I outline the creation of a moth-pollen transport network, which revealed that an abundance of moths in the surveyed urban gardens carried pollen on their mouthparts. This two-year study indicated that moths were frequent, generalist plant visitors with the capacity to move pollen throughout their environment. In Chapter Three, I broaden my view to compare nocturnal pollinators as a community to diurnal pollinators also utilizing urban garden habitats. Combined with a selective pollinator exclusion experiment, this research demonstrated significant differences among pollinator communities and visitation behaviors between day and night, yet showed that both groups contributed significantly to plant reproduction. Diurnal floral visits tended to be very frequent, but short in duration compared to nocturnal floral visits, which were less frequent. I note that increased visitation frequency may increase exposure to pollinators, but that there can also be an increase in antagonistic visitors, influencing the overall effectiveness of floral visitor communities. Finally, in Chapter Four, I describe an elementary education project which takes the study of urban moths into the classroom, using a low-cost, easy to use moth trap to teach students about ecological research through the lens of moth biology. As scientists, one of the most important actions we can take is sharing our research with the broader community. As cities continue to expand, and we find new and improved ways to support biodiverse, functional ecosystems within these novel urban habitats, it is worth getting to know our unique, pollinating neighbors.
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