Help us uncover the hidden lives of Europe’s ground-nesting bees

When most people think about pollinators, they picture bees visiting flowers. But for many species, a large part of life happens elsewhere: in the soil. Many pollinators do not just feed above ground, they also nest, shelter or develop below it

Discovering more about this aspect of pollinator life histories is the focus of ProPollSoil, a major new European research project exploring the links between soil health and pollinator health that kicked off last year. I’m excited to be part of it because the soil component of pollinator ecology and conservation is important but often overlooked.

As part of ProPollSoil, we are asking the public to help us find and document ground-nesting bees through a citizen science initiative called EuroBeeSoil. If you spot a bee nest in soil, sand, a lawn, a path edge or a sunlit bank, you can photograph it and upload your record to iNaturalist.

It’s a simple idea, but potentially a very powerful one. These observations will help us understand where bees are nesting, what kinds of soils they use, and how we can better conserve them.

We often talk about pollinator-friendly flowers. But bees need more than food, they also need somewhere to live. For many species, that means the ground beneath our feet.

So please follow this link and consider how you might take part if you can. You do not need to be a bee expert. You just need to look down a little more often.

Pollinator decline for legal professionals – a new article explains this complex and important issue

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Oxford University Press recently commissioned me to write a piece for their Expert Essentials series, which is designed to give legal professionals an overview of complex topics that increasingly affect their clients, their sectors, and the regulatory landscape in which they operate. My contribution, on pollinator decline, has now been published. That might seem an unusual topic for lawyers at first glance. Pollinators are usually framed as part of a conservation story: bees, butterflies, hoverflies, birds, bats and other animals that help flowering plants to reproduce. But as I argue in the article, pollinator decline is no longer just an ecological issue. It is becoming a legal, financial, and governance issue too.

Why should the legal profession care? Because pollinators sit right at the intersection of biodiversity loss, food security, business risk, and emerging regulation. Many of the crops that underpin global supply chains depend on animal pollination, especially fruits, nuts, oilseeds, coffee, and cocoa. If pollination services become less reliable, then yields can fall, costs can rise, and supply chains can become more fragile. That matters not only to farmers and food companies, but also to the lawyers advising businesses on disclosure, due diligence, liability, investment risk, and long-term resilience. As the article explains, pollinator decline has moved from being a “silent natural problem” to a boardroom issue with concrete legal hooks.

This shift is being driven in part by the rapid development of biodiversity-related reporting frameworks and regulatory expectations. Companies are increasingly expected to understand both how they depend upon nature and how they affect it. Pollinators are a particularly good example of this “double materiality”. A business may depend on pollinators for the crops and raw materials it sources, while also contributing to pollinator decline through land-use change, pesticide use, pollution, or habitat destruction. Under emerging sustainability and disclosure frameworks, that is no longer something that can be waved away as somebody else’s problem.

The legal implications are broad. They include advice on compliance with biodiversity reporting rules, contracts and due diligence across supply chains, litigation and liability relating to environmental harm, and the interpretation of new standards around nature-related risk. My article discusses frameworks such as the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and associated standards, and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. Together, these are helping to pull biodiversity, including pollinators, out of the margins of environmental discussion and into mainstream conversations about governance, accountability, and fiduciary responsibility.

What makes this especially important for legal professionals and others is that pollinator decline is not caused by one simple factor. It is driven by a web of interacting pressures: habitat loss, agricultural intensification, pesticides, diseases, invasive species, pollution, and climate change. That complexity makes it difficult to regulate neatly, but also impossible to ignore. For lawyers, this is precisely the kind of scientifically complex, economically significant, and legally fast-moving issue that is becoming more common in the age of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reporting, biodiversity disclosure, and nature-related financial risk.

In other words, this is not about turning lawyers into ecologists. It is about ensuring that legal professionals understand enough of the science to advise clients intelligently in a world where biodiversity loss is becoming embedded in regulation, reporting, corporate strategy, and litigation. Pollinators may be small, but the consequences of losing them are anything but.

Here’s the full reference with a link to the article:

Ollerton, J. (2026) Pollinator decline: a global issue with social, legal, and economic implications. In: Kimutai, J. & O’Donovan, C. (eds), Environmental Science; in De Silva, S. et al. (eds), Expert Essentials (Oxford, online edn, Oxford Law Pro) https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198972877.003.0080.

Here’s the abstract:

This article aims to equip legal professionals with an understanding of pollinator decline, why this is important to business and finance, and the relevant emerging standards and regulatory frameworks. Pollinators – including insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals – are essential to the reproduction of most flowering plants and underpin global food production, biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning. Global evidence shows that many pollinator populations are declining, raising concerns that extend well beyond conservation into agriculture, business, and the economy. These declines are driven by multiple interacting pressures, including habitat loss, intensive land use, pesticide exposure, parasites and diseases, invasive species, pollution, and climate change. No single factor is responsible, and responses must therefore be systemic. Pollinators support the yields and quality of many food crops, particularly fruits, nuts, and seeds that are central to human nutrition, contributing hundreds of billions of dollars annually to global agricultural output. Yet pollinators are often overlooked in risk assessments, despite growing evidence that their decline can disrupt supply chains, increase production costs, and weaken ecosystem services. Monitoring data reveal mixed but troubling trends, though data gaps remain substantial, complicating assessment and response. Regardless of uncertainties, pollinator decline is increasingly relevant to law and governance. Emerging global and regional frameworks – including biodiversity targets, sustainability reporting standards, and nature-related disclosure initiatives – are bringing pollinators into corporate reporting, due diligence, and liability discussions. As a result, pollinators are no longer solely an ecological concern, but a material issue for businesses, investors, and legal professionals navigating sustainability, disclosure, and long-term risk.

Book review: “The Ecology of Ecologists” by Jeremy Fox

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There are probably few people who have thought more about what it means to be an academic ecologist than Jeremy Fox, Professor of Ecology at the University of Calgary in Canada. The Dynamic Ecology blog that he founded, and to which he makes most of the contributions, has long been a source of useful information and statistics on where the field is going and how to navigate its churning waters. As one of the blog’s regular readers and occasional commentators, I was excited when Jeremy announced that he was distilling his thoughts on ecology into a book. The result is named The Ecology of Ecologists, with the subtitle: Harnessing Diverse Approaches for a Stronger Science.

The fact that the name emerged following a plea by Jeremy to the blog readership really hints at the tone of the book: to him, ecology is a big tent with space for everyone, and where everyone can contribute. That’s a fresh and important point of view at a time when science is too restricted (in my opinion) by bandwagons, hobby horses, high-impact journal culture, institutional elitism, and both written and unwritten strictures about The Right Way To Be Doing A Thing (I’m looking at you, methodological dogmatists).

The Ecology of Ecologists opens with the premise set out in the Introduction: “Ecologists Disagree on What Ecology Is and How to Do It. Good.”, and develops this into a broad reflection on The Diversity of Ecology itself. Jeremy argues that the field’s strength lies not despite but because of its pluralism, exploring The Benefits of Diversity, in Nature and in Ecology through ideas such as Complementarity and Selection, and showing how different perspectives, methods, and even personalities can contribute to scientific progress. This theme extends into Diverse Tools for Diverse Jobs: The Many Uses of Mathematical Models and Fighting Lack of Diversity: The Value of Contrarians, where methodological variety and dissent are treated as essential rather than problematic features of ecological science. As someone “whose scientific work is characterized by a self-confessed contrarian streak”, according to one review of my book Birds & Flowers, I found that last chapter especially interesting.

Jeremy writes engagingly about the subject to which he’s devoted his life and there are some great quotable lines in the book. My favourite (which I’m hoping to use in a forthcoming paper, if the reviewers allow) is:

There’s almost literally no such thing as an “unusual” or “weird” empirical result in ecology…So shouldn’t our preexisting expectation about the effect of x on y always be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

Are there any weaknesses to The Ecology of Ecologists? There are a few areas that I would have liked to have seen explored in more detail, for example the different approaches to ecology adopted by diverse cultures (e.g. Asian versus Western) or people coming at ecology from botanical versus zoological backgrounds, for instance. The value of large collaborative science in which different people bring their specialisms could have been discussed more fully. Ecology as a profession outside of academia is also not considered, which I think is a missed opportunity. Many graduates and post-docs go on to work for NGOs, government departments, and consultancies, and when given the opportunity to collaborate on the science, they bring a lot to the table.

I was also surprised to see no mention of how AI/LLMs might impact the field, which is a growing topic on Dynamic Ecology. In a future edition I could imagine an interesting coda to the Selection chapter where, at the end, Jeremy hopes that “in the future, selection against ineffective approaches [to studying ecology] can proceed a bit more quickly”. I can certainly see a role for LLMs in that respect, and we can learn a lot from the climate and meteorology fields.

In summary, The Ecology of Ecologists is a thoughtful and timely reflection on what ecology is and why its apparent untidiness is one of its greatest strengths. Drawing on decades of research and ideas developed through Dynamic Ecology, Jeremy invites us to embrace ecology not as a single, unified enterprise but as a discipline defined by methodological, conceptual, and intellectual diversity. Rather than seeing the field’s mix of scales, questions, and approaches as a problem to be solved, he argues that this plurality is precisely what gives ecology its resilience and explanatory power. His central message is both reassuring and challenging: no single way of “doing ecology” has a monopoly on truth, and progress depends on ecologists better understanding — and valuing — how differently their colleagues think and work.

The book is written accessibly enough for advanced students, but will be especially rewarding for professional ecologists who have wrestled with the field’s internal debates. I highly recommend it!

What China’s mountain meadows and forests can teach us about pollinators

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For several years now I have been fortunate to collaborate with colleagues in China on the ecology of plant–pollinator interactions. One of the things that makes that work so exciting is the sheer variety of landscapes in which these interactions play out. In a newly published paper led by Dr Xin Xu, we have studied pollination networks on Yulong Snow Mountain in Yunnan, in south-west China, a place where forests and flower-rich meadows sit side by side in a spectacular high-elevation environment.

The question we asked was simple enough: how do these adjacent habitats – woodland and grassland – differ in the way that plants and pollinators interact? But answering it required a huge amount of field effort. Over two flowering seasons, the team recorded more than 11,000 interactions between 229 pollinating insect species and 89 flowering plant species. That is an extraordinary reminder of how much ecological complexity can be packed into a relatively small area of mountain landscape.

What emerged was a very clear pattern. The open meadows supported far more activity than the neighbouring forests: more visits, more pollinator species, more plant species, and more interaction links. In fact, nearly 9,700 of the recorded interactions took place in meadow habitat, compared with about 1,365 in forest. Meadows were especially important for bumblebees, which are among the key pollinators in these cool, high-elevation systems.

But the forests were not simply poor relations. They supported their own distinctive subset of the wider pollinator community, and the network of interactions there was structured differently. Some pollinator species altered their daily foraging schedules depending on whether they were in meadow or forest, suggesting that they are responding flexibly to changes in light, temperature, floral resources, and perhaps competition. That is one of the aspects of pollination ecology that fascinates me most: these are not static systems, but living networks that shift across space and time.

More broadly, the study reinforces something that has become increasingly clear from ecological research: habitat heterogeneity matters. A landscape made up of different, connected habitat types can support a richer and more resilient community than one that is uniform. On Yulong Snow Mountain, the meadows seem to act as hotspots of pollinator diversity, while the forests add further complexity and help shape how those pollinators behave. Conserving that mosaic is therefore likely to be crucial if we want to maintain pollination services and biodiversity in mountain regions facing rapid environmental change.

For me personally, this paper is also a reminder of why international collaboration is so valuable. Working with Chinese colleagues has opened a window onto ecological systems that are both scientifically important and visually stunning. Yunnan is one of the world’s great biodiversity regions, and studying pollination there helps us understand not only how these mountain ecosystems function, but also how species interactions may respond to climate change and habitat alteration in the future.

Pollination ecology is about more than just bees, birds, or other animals visiting flowers. As a focus of study, it is much richer. It is about networks of interactions, about the timing of activity through the day, about the way species respond to different habitats, and about how whole ecosystems are stitched together. High on a Chinese mountain, among meadows and forests, we can see that complexity in action.

Here’s the full reference:

Xu, X., Maruyama, P.K., Ollerton, J., Wang, H. & Ren, Z.-X. (2026) Spatio-temporal variation in plant–pollinator networks between adjacent meadow and forest habitats in a high-elevation environment. Oecologia (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Understanding how habitat heterogeneity influences the structure and stability of ecological networks is critical for predicting ecosystem responses to environmental change. In alpine ecosystems, open meadows and forests represent contrasting habitats with distinct vegetation structures, resource availability, and microclimatic conditions. In this study, we integrated spatial and temporal data on pollinator-plant interactions to investigate network structure, species roles, and diurnal foraging dynamics across meadow and surrounding forest habitats during two flowering seasons on Yulong Snow Mountain, Yunnan, China. A total of 11,094 plant–pollinator interactions were recorded, involving 229 pollinator and 89 flowering plant species. Meadows supported significantly higher interaction frequencies, species richness, and α-diversity for both plants and pollinators, although they showed a striking numerical dominance of a single key pollinator, Bombus friseanus. Network dissimilarity analyses revealed substantial differences between habitats, with both species turnover and rewiring contributing to interaction dissimilarity. Diurnal foraging dynamic analysis revealed that some key species, such as Bombus lepidus, displayed distinct foraging patterns across habitats indicating behavioral adaptation and temporal niche partitioning to microclimate. Our findings highlight the strong influence of habitat type on pollination network architecture and reveal many shared pollinator species, indicating some degree of cross-habitat linkage. These results underscore the importance of habitat heterogeneity and spatial coupling in shaping pollination services and sustaining biodiversity in mountain ecosystems under environmental change.

Join me for two webinars exploring the links between biodiversity, pollinators and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

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The diversity of life on Earth, and the interactions between the species that make up that diversity, are fundamentally important to the functioning of ecosystems and to human well-being. Yet these connections are often poorly appreciated, despite the fact that biodiversity supports everything from food production and clean water to climate resilience and human health.

At the end of March and the end of May I will be presenting two lunchtime webinars which explore this as part of the Biological Recording Company’s Skills for Ecology series. These talks will look at how biodiversity in general, and plant–pollinator interactions in particular, connect to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), showing why the conservation of nature is central to a just, healthy, and sustainable future.

Here are the dates and the links for booking:

I look forward to seeing some of you there!

The global relationship between flowering plant and pollinator diversity…and what they don’t tell you about posting preprints!

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Last week I posted a preprint on the platform Research Square of a new manuscript entitled “The global relationship between flowering plant and pollinator diversity holds true across scales, latitude, and human influence” – follow that link to access a copy. The study is a collaboration with more than thirty colleagues and it develops some ideas that have been chugging around in my head for a number of years. It’s been reviewed and we’re at the stage of undertaking the revisions. I’m very excited to see it out in one form or another!

As far as I can recall this is the first time that I’ve been the lead author on a study that’s been posted as a preprint and I was not prepared for what happened after it went live on 2nd March!

Since then I’ve received over 30 invitations from journals to submit the paper for publication. Obviously, most (all?) of these are automated, because the majority are for journals that are in no way suitable, e.g., Insights of Herbal Medicine, Biomedical Science and Clinical Research, and my particular favourite, the Journal of Surgery Care!

I expected one or two spammy invitations like this, but not so quickly: the preprint went live at about 07:00 and the first request was received less than two hours later. Even now they are coming in at a rate of two a day.

It’s fairly clear that preprint servers are now being automatically mined by journal marketing algorithms. Within hours of a manuscript appearing online, the title, keywords, and author details are harvested and fed into bulk invitation systems. Can legitimate preprint publishers like Research Square not do anything about it?

Each email requires power to get it from a server to my Inbox, so as well as being irritating it’s a waste of resources. Presumably this strategy by these predatory publishers occasionally works with naive authors, otherwise they wouldn’t bother doing it. I’m almost (almost!) tempted to respond to one of these invitations and see what happens. But life’s too short.

Preprints are meant to accelerate open science and transparent peer review. Ironically, the same openness also makes it trivial for automated systems to harvest new manuscripts and generate waves of journal solicitations. None of this detracts from the value of preprints—they are a powerful way to share research quickly and openly—but it’s a reminder that openness in science inevitably attracts a few opportunists as well.

Anyway, if you’re planning to submit a preprint, don’t say that you weren’t warned – you may discover that a remarkable number of journals are suddenly desperate to publish your “valuable manuscript”.

Join me on 26th February in Leicester for a talk: “Adventures in Pollination!”

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On Thursday 26th February I’m giving a talk to the Friends of the University of Leicester Botanic Garden with the title that you see above.

The talk starts at 7.30pm and non-members are welcome to attend, for a donation of £2 (which sounds like a bargain to me!) I’ll also have copies of my books Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society and Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship for sale.

More details can be found here:

https://le.ac.uk/botanic-garden/friends-of-the-garden

I hope to see some of you there!

As you might have guessed, the image above was generated by my personal tool with collaborator-like affordances – blame it for any biogeographical errors!

Pollination as a matter of national security

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In these turbulent times it’s hard to know where to focus one’s gaze. Do we concentrate on Ukraine? Greenland? Venezuela? Sudan? China? Russia? The Middle East? The rise of the far right and religious fundamentalism? Cyber security? Global organised crime? If it’s confusing and worrying for the average person, imagine what it’s like for national security services who are charged with assessing and responding to such threats.

It is increasingly recognised that national security in the 21st century extends beyond military threats to encompass food systems, economic resilience, public health, and the stability of critical ecological infrastructure. Which is why it’s no surprise to learn that the UK’s national security organisations – MI5 and MI6 – have just released a report titled Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security: A national security assessment.

The report has been covered by The Guardian under the heading “Biodiversity collapse threatens UK security, intelligence chiefs warn” and the article begins:

The global attack on nature is threatening the UK’s national security, government intelligence chiefs have warned, as the increasingly likely collapse of vitally important natural systems would bring mass migration, food shortages and price rises, and global disorder.

This framing explicitly treats biodiversity loss not as an environmental side issue, but as a systemic risk multiplier capable of amplifying existing geopolitical, economic, and social stresses. I have emboldened two words in that quote in order to emphasise that this report is very much about the state of the world, not just the state of my home country. In an interconnected global food and trade system, ecological collapse in one region rapidly propagates elsewhere through markets, migration, and political instability. What happens globally has implications locally; not just food security from imports, but “geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased inter-state competition for resources”, to quote the report.

Where does pollination fit into this? As far as I know, pollination has never been singled out in security analyses, yet it underpins many of the very food systems, rural economies, and ecosystem functions upon which national resilience depends. In my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society I mention “food security” about ten times, as I firmly believe that loss of pollinators is a serious issue to food supply chains. The report similarly states that:

UK food production is vulnerable to ecosystem degradation and collapse. Biodiversity loss, alongside climate change, is amongst the biggest medium to long term threat to domestic food production – through depleted soils, loss of pollinators, drought and flood conditions.

But I would go further and state that loss of pollination by insects and vertebrates poses a national security threat that extends far beyond just their role in food production.

Let me explain why I believe this.

The Global biodiversity loss report focuses on six different parts of the world (and seven ecosystems) that it considers “critical ecosystems…at risk of collapsing”. One of those areas – the coral reefs of Southeast Asia – is not directly dependent upon pollinators to support its long-term functioning. Two areas – the boreal forests of Canada and Russia – are dominated mainly (though not exclusively) by wind-pollinated trees, such as conifers and birches. The other four ecosystems, however, have a dependence on pollinators that ranges from significant to enormous. These are the Mangroves of Southeast Asia and the Himalayas (both significant) and the Amazon Rainforest and Congo Basin (both enormous).

What do I mean here by words like “significant” and “enormous”? What is my measure? What I mean is the number and proportion of flowering plants—particularly dominant species, often trees—that underpin most ecosystem functions, such as photosynthesis and carbon storage, and that rely to some extent on pollinators to reproduce.

In high elevation areas such as the Himalayas, I know from experience that it’s common for there to be a mixture of wind and animal pollinated species in communities. Similarly, mangrove species include some which are wind pollinated – see this review for example. In other words, the long-term population stability of Himalayan woodland and Southeast Asian mangrove forests is, in large part, dependent on the pollinators that those ecosystems support. If those pollinators were lost, in the long term (decades to centuries) wind-pollinated trees would dominate and biodiversity would significantly decline.

The situation in the forests of tropical South America and west Africa is rather different. Not only is there a much greater diversity of plant species in these ecosystems, but in these largely rainforest regions, often all of them are animal pollinated, as we showed in this paper and which is reflected in the graph above, which comes from my book. Lose the pollinators and we lose the long-term viability of ecosystems that provide regionally- and globally-vital functions.

Ultimately, if we are to protect pollinator communities, and the ecosystem functions and services they provide, we need to take their conservation more seriously than we do at the moment. Framed this way, pollinator conservation becomes a form of preventive security investment, analogous to maintaining flood defences or safeguarding energy and cyber infrastructure. The European Union’s Pollinator Initiative and the projects that it supports, including Butterfly and ProPollSoil in which I’m involved, is a good example. Likewise, there are policy movements appearing in China, as I recently reported. But biodiversity conservation is a global issue, as the security services report makes clear, and that applies to pollinators.

There will no doubt be sceptics out there who think that I am over-playing the importance of pollinators and pollination. That’s fine, it’s good to have these debates. Pollination is not a national security issue in the narrow, traditional sense of defence against hostile actors. But in the 21st-century security landscape, where threats are systemic, slow-burning, and ecologically grounded, pollination loss clearly qualifies as a strategic risk to national stability and resilience.

In that respect, I believe that the question is not whether pollination is a national security issue—but whether national security thinking has yet fully adapted to the biological foundations on which societies depend.

Should AI be thought of as a science tool or collaborator? A conversation with ChatGPT

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In a piece that I posted before Christmas, I made the offhand comment that “we need to think of AI as a collaborator as much as a tool“. It’s offhand in the fact that I’d not thought too deeply about it, but some reading that I did over the holiday made me rethink this statement, or at least consider it more critically. The most recent post on the Dynamic Ecology blog – Meghan Duffy asking about using AI to find literature – also got me thinking about whether AI is just a tool.

Eventually I decided to ask the question of ChatGPT itself and we ended up having quite a long conversation on this topic. I then asked it to summarise the conversation and what you see below is my edited version of that summary:

Jeff: Is ChatGPT best thought of as a tool or a collaborator in science?
ChatGPT: ChatGPT is best understood as a tool with collaborator-like affordances. It supports analysis, writing, coding, and idea development, but it does not participate in collaboration as a social, epistemic, and accountable practice. It is also prone to errors.

Jeff: But human collaborators also make errors and sometimes avoid accountability. We do not expect people to be flawless.
ChatGPT: Exactly. The issue is not error versus error-free performance. It is about agency and accountability: human collaborators can explain their reasoning, revise their views, and be held responsible for their contributions.

Jeff: You said that ChatGPT does not participate in collaboration as a “social, epistemic, and accountable practice”. Yet you can still generate genuinely useful ideas and connections.
ChatGPT: Yes, and that is why calling ChatGPT part of the infrastructure (as I did in our longer conversation) is misleading. Unlike laptops or software platforms, I can actively generate ideas, cross-fertilise between disparate areas, and help explore conceptual space.

Jeff: If I ask a colleague to write R code, that is collaboration. If I ask you to write R code, why is that different?
ChatGPT: Because a human colleague brings intent, methodological judgement, and ownership of decisions. I generate code instrumentally, without understanding the scientific stakes or assuming responsibility for analytical choices.

Jeff: Earlier you said you cannot “stand behind a claim”. But you can cite papers and explain why something should be trusted. Is that really true?
ChatGPT: When I cite papers or summarise arguments, I reproduce the form of justification, but I still cannot stand behind a claim in the scientific sense. I do not judge evidential strength or accept responsibility; trust remains with the human scientist and the underlying sources.

Jeff: Yet the output of your code or analysis can be just as useful as that produced by a human collaborator.
ChatGPT: That is true. The distinction is not about usefulness or correctness, but about agency, authorship, and accountability within scientific practice.

Jeff: So what is ChatGPT, if it is neither a standard tool nor a collaborator?
ChatGPT: It is best described as a cognitive amplifier or dialogic system: something that expands the range of ideas and connections available to researchers, without itself being an accountable scientific agent.

Jeff: And what does that imply for how we should use ChatGPT in science?
ChatGPT: It implies using ChatGPT to provoke, explore, and accelerate thinking, while recognising that scientific judgement, responsibility, and ownership remain entirely human.

Jeff: Produce an image that I can use on the blog which summarises this discussion.
ChatGPT: Certainly.

As a test of its ability to “provoke, explore, and accelerate thinking”, at the end of last week I uploaded a manuscript that I had written, just prior to submission, and asked ChatGPT to tell me its strengths and weaknesses and fit for the journal. Its feedback was spot-on – far more than I would expect from a “tool” – and I made a few final tweaks before I submitted the manuscript. ChatGPT also said “Don’t be surprised if the reviewers ask you to change X, Y and Z” and so it will be interesting to see whether it’s correctly gauged the manuscript and the reviewers’ responses.

What times we live in! At the moment I’m optimistic enough about AI to see all of this as an intriguing exploration of the capabilities of these large language models, an expedition through dense habitat in which we’ve barely left base camp and our view of what lies ahead is restricted and there may be nasty surprises along any path that we hack. But I appreciate that not everyone is so optimistic and, as always, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this topic – leave a comment or send me a message.

A Christmas lesson from plant ecology: why plants like holly and mistletoe may not be as well defended as we think

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Christmas is a time of expectations, when we assume that familiar traditions will work as they always have. Some traditions are associated with plants such as holly and mistletoe. In ecology, we make similar assumptions, one of the most enduring of which is that plants introduced to new parts of the world often thrive because they leave their natural enemies behind. The thinking goes that leaves that are tough, bitter, or spiky (e.g. holly) or chemically well-defended (e.g. mistletoe), should only strengthen that advantage.

But as with many things we take for granted at this time of year, this intuition does not always hold.

Over the past few years I’ve been part of a large international collaboration led by Zoe Xirocostas (as part of her PhD work) and Angela Moles (see here and here for example) asking deceptively straightforward questions such as: can we predict which introduced plants will experience this “enemy release” based on how well defended their leaves are? In other words, if a plant is tough, hairy, bitter, toxic, or nutritionally poor, does that make it more or less likely to escape herbivores when it turns up somewhere new?

The latest paper from that work has just been published in the journal Oecologia. In it we focused on 16 widespread plant species that are native to Europe but have become established in Australia. For each species, we measured how much leaf damage they suffered in their home range and how much in their introduced range. Our earlier work had already shown that, on average, these plants suffer far less herbivory in Australia – clear evidence of enemy release.

The next step was to ask why.

So we measured an unusually wide range of leaf traits linked to palatability and defence. Some were physical: leaf toughness, thickness, dry matter content, hairiness. Others were chemical: nitrogen content, lipids, phenolics, cyanogenic compounds – the kinds of substances that make leaves bitter, toxic, or difficult to digest. We also combined these into overall “chemical”, “physical”, and “total defence” scores.

If plant defence theory works the way we often assume, at least some of these traits should have explained why certain species escape enemies more than others.

They didn’t.

Across all of these traits – individually and in combination – we found no relationship at all with the strength of enemy release. Plants with heavily defended leaves did not escape herbivores any more than plants with relatively soft, palatable foliage. Equally striking, leaf defences didn’t even predict how much damage plants suffered overall.

This was a genuinely surprising result, especially given how central plant defence traits are to ecological thinking. It suggests that when plants are introduced to new regions, the details of leaf chemistry and toughness may matter far less than we assumed.

One possibility is that context trumps traits. Herbivory may depend more on which insects happen to be present locally, how closely related the newcomer is to native plants, or how chemically novel it is relative to its neighbours, rather than on how well defended it is in absolute terms. Another is that many defensive traits serve multiple roles – coping with drought, heat, or pathogens – and are not just about deterring herbivores. As an example, consider cactus spines, that not only defend a plant against hungry herbivores, but also provide shade for the stem, collect water from fog or dew, and insulate the plant against extreme hot or cold temperatures.

From a practical perspective, our findings have implications for managing invasive species. Biological control programmes – such as the ones that are targeting Japanese Knotweed and Himalayan Balsam in the UK – often assume that poorly defended plants are easier targets. Our results suggest that defence traits alone may not be a reliable guide.

What makes this study particularly powerful is its scale. The same species were measured using the same protocols in different countries; fieldwork was coordinated across multiple climates and ecosystems; statistical analysis drew on shared expertise. This kind of international cooperation can be slow, complex, and occasionally frustrating – but it is exactly what is needed if we want to move beyond neat ideas tested in a single place.

Ecology advances not just through clever hypotheses, but by discovering when our intuitions fail. In this case, a widely held assumption about plant defences and enemy release simply didn’t hold up. That doesn’t close the book on the question – but it does force us to turn the page and rethink what really determines success and failure when species move around the globe.

If you are interested in the full study, here’s the reference with a link to the paper, which is open access:

Xirocostas, Z.A., Slavich, E., Everingham, S.E., Salminen, J.P., Booth, L., Gleadow, R., Ollerton, J., Tamme, R., Peco, B., Lesieur, V. & Raghu, S. (2026) In poor taste: leaf palatability traits are not correlated with aboveground enemy release. Oecologia, 208(1), p.17.

A Happy Christmas and a Prosperous New Year to all of the readers of my blog!