Monthly Archives: March 2018

Advice to students: choose your email address carefully (and think about changing it)

At symbol

Some years ago a first year undergraduate emailed me from his personal email address which began “iwillrapeyou@xxxxx”. I’m sure the student and his mates thought this was hilarious when he set up his first email account as a young teenager. I politely suggested to him that maybe now, as a grown-up interacting with other grown-ups who were supporting his education, it might be time to change it. “Do you really intend to submit applications for jobs using that address?” I asked.

To his credit he agreed and did change it. That’s the only time I’ve said to a student that they probably ought to change their personal email address, but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that students need to consider what their email addresses are saying about them to the wider world. However it’s not a topic I see discussed very often

Looking at the addresses of some recent students I see things such as “buttercup123@xxxx”, “reds360@xxxx”, “halilulyah247@xxxx”, “canadiankckrz@xxxx”, “MAXSAMJAM@xxxx”, “beaniethemanmusic96@xxxx”, “iamwoody22@xxxx”, “SAVETHEPANDAS@xxxx”. Now none of these addresses are as obnoxious or inflammatory as the first example I gave, but all of them say something about the person behind the email address, whether they are aware of it or not. These addresses tell the wider world that the person who sent an email is a football fan, or an environmentalist, or a music fan, or has a wacky nickname, etc. And it’s fine to be all of those things. But what they lack is any kind of professionalism, they all sound like they are emails from teenagers, not grown ups.

So my advice to all students (undergraduate and postgraduate) would be: think carefully about your email address and what it is saying about you, and consider whether that’s the perception you wish to give to prospective employers.

And while you’re at it you might also want to reconsider including your birth year in the address: that’s an important piece of personal information that could be of use to unscrupulous cyber criminals.

Trait evolution, resource specialization and vulnerability to plant extinctions among Antillean hummingbirds – a new study just published

2 Replies

Hummingbird bowl from BM

Hummingbirds are fascinating creatures and important pollinators for a wide range of plants in the New World (and, historically, possibly in the Old World – see this post from 2014: There were hummingbirds over the White Cliffs of Dover). During the last decade I have been involved in some hummingbird-related research with several colleagues, particularly Dr Bo Dalsgaard and Dr Stella Watts, and it’s generated some really interesting findings about the biogeography, macroecology, and interactions with plants of these most elegant of birds.

The latest installment of this work is a test of some ideas relating to the vulnerability of hummingbirds on islands to the extinction of their plant partners. It’s just been published and the reference is:

Dalsgaard B., Kennedy J.D., Simmons B.I., Baquero A.C., Martín González A.M., Timmermann A., Maruyama P.K., McGuire J.A., Ollerton J., Sutherland W.J. & Rahbek C. (2018) Trait evolution, resource specialization and vulnerability to plant extinctions among Antillean hummingbirds. Proceedings of the Royal Society series B (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Species traits are thought to predict feeding specialization and the vulnerability of a species to extinctions of interaction partners, but the context in which a species evolved and currently inhabits may also matter. Notably, the predictive power of traits may require that traits evolved to fit interaction partners. Furthermore, local abiotic and biotic conditions may be important. On islands, for instance, specialized and vulnerable species are predicted to be found mainly in mountains, whereas species in lowlands should be generalized and less vulnerable. We evaluated these predictions for hummingbirds and their nectar-food plants on Antillean islands. Our results suggest that the rates of hummingbird trait divergence were higher among ancestral mainland forms before the colonization of the Antilles. In correspondence with the limited trait evolution that occurred within the Antilles, local abiotic and biotic conditions—not species traits—correlate with hummingbird resource specialization and the vulnerability of hummingbirds to extinctions of their floral resources. Specifically, hummingbirds were more specialized and vulnerable in conditions with high topographical complexity, high rainfall, low temperatures and high floral resource richness, which characterize the Antillean Mountains. These findings show that resource specialization and species vulnerability to extinctions of interaction partners are highly context-dependent.

As always I’m happy to send a PDF to anyone who drops me an email.

Can pollinators survive sudden changes in the weather?

10 Replies

Snow-Warm garden comparison

Just how pollinators cope with sudden changes in the weather early in the season is a bit of a mystery. Take 2018 as an example; my wife Karin spotted the first queen bumblebee in the garden on 6^th January, investigating a camellia flower just outside the kitchen. Over the course of the next few weeks I saw a few more at various sites, plus occasional hibernating butterflies such as the red admiral. The various social media outlets were reporting similar things, it looked as though we were going to have an early spring.

Then at the end of February “The Beast from the East” hit the UK, a weather system from Siberia that brought some of the coldest weather and heaviest snow the country had experienced for several years. That persisted for over a week then things got much milder. On 16^th March I was in the garden and spotted the first male hairy-footed flower bee of the year, plus a mining bee (Andrena sp.), and a brimstone butterfly, and a queen bumblebee, and a red admiral. Great I thought, spring really is here! The next day it snowed. A “Mini Beast From the East” had arrived, rapidly: the two pictures above making up the composite view of our garden were taken two days apart.

What happened to all of those insects I saw? Were they killed by the cold weather? Or did they survive? We have no firm data to answer that question – as far as I’m aware no one has ever tagged early emerging pollinators and followed their progress (I could be wrong – please let me know if I am). It would make an interesting, though labour intensive, project but could be done using non-toxic paint of various colours to mark the insects.

I suspect that some of the pollinators I saw were killed, but most were not and simply went back into hibernation for a short period, hunkering down in safe, sheltered spots. That makes much more evolutionary sense: any insects in the UK that cannot survive sudden changes in the weather would have gone extinct long ago. Another clue to support this idea is the fact that plants in flower early in the season, and in some cases the flowers themselves, usually survive the cold weather and come back as if nothing had happened. If the flowers can do it, and they have to stay where they are, surely the mobile pollinators can also do it?

As always I’d be interested in your thoughts on this topic, feel free to comment. And while we wait for the UK to thaw, here’s some topical and rather catchy music to listen to – The Beelievers singing “Mr Gove”.

Mini Bee Symposium – University of Northampton – 13th March 2018

5 Replies

All speakers 20180313_172553_preview

No, not a symposium about tiny Anthophila, but a small get together to discuss bee-related research. One of the pleasures of my job is hosting visiting scientists from around the world and at the moment I am playing host to three colleagues here in Northampton. Dr Pablo Gorostiague from the National University of Salta in Argentina is working with me as a visiting postdoc for six months, whilst from the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences we have Prof. Chao-Dong “CD” Zhu and Dr Michael Orr here for three days.

So in honour of these visitors, and to introduce them to a wider range of UK bee researchers (some of whom they had corresponded with but never met) I thought it would be fun to organise an informal symposium where people who are (reasonably) nearby could come and present recent bee -related research.

So it was that yesterday a group of about 20 of us spent a great afternoon together listening to 10 short talks. Here are the presenters and a short description of their presentations:

Steven Falk (independent consultant) discussed “Breaking down barriers to bee identification in Britain” and explained the philosophy behind the structure of his recent Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland.

Stella Watts (Universities of Northampton and Haifa) described her work as a postdoc in Israel examining the structure of plant-pollinator networks centred around some endemic irises.

Chris O’Toole (University of Oxford) dealt with an intriguing phenomenon of what appears to be age-related senility in some Osmia spp.

Pablo Gorostiague told us about his work on bee (and other) pollinators of cacti in his native Argentina.

Ratheesh Kallivalappil (University of Lincoln) discussed his PhD work looking at the decline of global pollinator biodiversity in the Anthropocene.

After a tea break, Stephanie Maher (Anglia Ruskin University) described her PhD work on the nesting ecology of solitary bees in the UK, including a very successful citizen science project. She argued persuasively for a national database of bee nesting sites.

CD Zhu discussed how modern omics approaches could be integrated into research programmes for understanding the phylogenies and interactions of large clades of species.

Michael Orr talked about the nesting behaviour of some solitary bees of SW North America, and I was surprised to learn that some species can remain in their nests for up to four years before emerging.

In a spontaneous, unscheduled talk Sam Gandy (Universities of Aberdeen and Sussex) told us about research he was involved with that aimed to assess competition between honey bees and bumblebees foraging on lavender. He did a great job considering he’d not seen the presentation previously, it was emailed to him during the tea break!

Finally I talked about some of our ongoing work assessing the spatio-temporal stability of pollination of an endemic plant by endemic bees in Tenerife.

Following a photo call for all the speakers (see above) we decamped to a local hostelry for beer and food. Al-in-all a great day of science and networking. Thanks to all of the speakers and the audience for taking part!

Here are a few more images from the day:

Michael Orr 2018-03-13 16.08.15_preview

Michael Orr in action (I helped to cut that hair!)

Chris OToole 2018-03-13 13.44.37_preview

Chris O’Toole and some of his senile bees

Stella 2018-03-13 13.24.34_preview Stella Watts is a blur when presenting her work!

There’s a lot more images on Twitter if you search for #MiniBeeSymposium