It’s been a couple of years since I last did a talk or workshop for the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire & Northamptonshire. But I’m pleased to say that they’ve invited me back and you can join me tomorrow evening for an online introductory talk about pollinators and pollination in the UK.
The talk starts at 7pm UK time and full details of how to sign up are in the link below:
I look forward to seeing some of you there!
Over the years, gardening has featured heavily on this blog and some of the observations that I made in the garden that Karin and I developed in Northampton appeared in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society. At the same time that I was writing this, Karin was writing her first book – The Essential Companion to Talking Therapy – and we often discussed the links between nature, gardening, mental health and relationships between couples.
Fast forward a couple of years to last August. While we were in Kenya teaching on the Tropical Biology Association Field Course, Karin was interviewed by BBC Gardeners’ World presenter Adam Frost for his podcast series about gardening and health. In the interview Karin and Adam chat about how gardens and gardening together can positively affect relationships in couples. The interview has just been released and despite the fact that at the time Karin was recovering from COVID I think that she did very well! Here’s the link to the podcast: https://www.gardenersworld.com/podcast/adam-frosts-gardening-for-health-building-relationships/
Karin has also posted some thoughts about this, in her own inimitable way, on her blog at Medium.
The significance of the photo that accompanies this post is that it’s Karin sitting in front of the tent that we shared in Kenya, enjoying some watermelon, which was just about all she could manage to eat when she had COVID!
During the 25 years that I spent at the University of Northampton (and its predecessor institutions) I had a number of official roles, including heading up research within a faculty, chairing committees, and so forth. One of the most fulfilling of these was developing and leading the generic training programme that all postgraduate researchers across the university had to undertake.
These workshops covered a wide range of skills including strategies for literature searching, maintaining momentum in the middle stages of the journey, different approaches to writing and structuring a thesis, preparing for the oral defence, writing for different audiences, and dealing with different expectations and conflicts with supervisors. The last of these was run by Karin who brought to bear her skills as a relationship therapist and trainer.
Over the past few months I’ve been asked by a couple of universities to run my “Developing an online profile as a researcher” workshop virtually, most recently yesterday for Hartpury University. In this session I get the postgraduate researchers to think about their motivations for having an online profile, the different kinds of platforms that are available, the distinction between “shops window” and “market stall” approaches, and suggest a strategy and rules of engagement for using social media professionally. All of this is based on my own experiences from the last 20+ years of using online systems to promote and disseminate research to peers and to wider society.
If this is of interest and you’d like to discuss having me run this workshop (or indeed any of the others) for your graduate school or department, please use my Contact page to get in touch.
It’s been quite a while since I posted about the Chequered Skipper Reintroduction Project – see my earlier posts here and here. But my involvement has continued, albeit geographically removed from Northamptonshire, and I thought I’d give a brief update with two good news stories.
The headline story is, of course, the success of the project. Since its reintroduction in summer 2018, the Chequered Skipper population has thrived and grown and is now the first self-sustaining population in England since it went extinct there in 1976. Not only that, but the management within Rockingham Forest that was designed to improve the habitat for this butterfly has also benefitted a range of other species, including plants, insects and birds.
How do we know this? Well, the situation on the ground is being intensively monitored by the project team and the passionate volunteers who are helping to count butterflies and other species every year. The data collected from these activities has fed into Jamie Wildman’s PhD thesis where he’s collated and analysed the results. And that’s the second item of good news: yesterday Jamie successfully defended his PhD thesis and was awarded a pass with very minor corrections!
I’m actually not surprised because it’s a great thesis with some fascinating results that not only document this reintroduction but also rewrite the history of the decline and extinction of the English populations of Chequered Skipper. The first paper from that is out – see this post – and there’s more to follow shortly.
Once again, huge congratulations to Jamie and thanks to the project team and the other supervisors for their hard work. Here’s my favourite photo of Jamie, second from the left and just starting out on his PhD journey back in 2018.
It’s been an interesting start to the year in the world of pollinators and pollination. The European Union has revised its 2018 initiative for pollinator conservation with an update called “A New Deal for Pollinators“. At the same time the UK Government has released its plans for Post-Brexit farm subsidies, many of which focus on environmental action that can support pollinators, such as planting hedgerows. I think that it’s fair to say that there’s been a mixed response to these planned subsidies. There’s also mixed news in Butterfly Conservation’s State of the UK’s Butterflies 2022 report. The headline figure is that 80% of butterflies in the UK have decreased since the 1970s. However there are enough positive conservation stories in that report to demonstrate that this decline does not have to be irreversible, we can turn things around.
Against this wider backdrop of pollinator actions, I was pleased to have a new research paper published this week, which is an output from the SURPASS2 project with which I’ve been involved. Led by Brazilian researcher Nicolay Leme da Cunha, this paper assess the variability of soybean dependence on pollinators. Although soybean is one of the most widely grown crops globally, there’s still much that we don’t understand about which of the many different varieties have improved yields when visited by bees, and which are purely self-pollinating. One of our main findings was that for some varieties, especially in the tropics, an absence of pollinators results in a decline in yield of about 50%.
The paper is open access and you can download a copy by following the link in the reference:
Here’s the abstract:
Identifying large-scale patterns of variation in pollinator dependence (PD) in crops is important from both basic and applied perspectives. Evidence from wild plants indicates that this variation can be structured latitudinally. Individuals from populations at high latitudes may be more selfed and less dependent on pollinators due to higher environmental instability and overall lower temperatures, environmental conditions that may affect pollinator availability. However, whether this pattern is similarly present in crops remains unknown. Soybean (Glycine max), one of the most important crops globally, is partially self-pollinated and autogamous, exhibiting large variation in the extent of PD (from a 0 to ∼50% decrease in yield in the absence of animal pollination). We examined latitudinal variation in soybean’s PD using data from 28 independent studies distributed along a wide latitudinal gradient (4–43 degrees). We estimated PD by comparing yields between open-pollinated and pollinator-excluded plants. In the absence of pollinators, soybean yield was found to decrease by an average of ∼30%. However, PD decreases abruptly at high latitudes, suggesting a relative increase in autogamous seed production. Pollinator supplementation does not seem to increase seed production at any latitude. We propose that latitudinal variation in PD in soybean may be driven by temperature and photoperiod affecting the expression of cleistogamy and androsterility. Therefore, an adaptive mating response to an unpredictable pollinator environment apparently common in wild plants can also be imprinted in highly domesticated and genetically-modified crops
This is a guest post by Dr Annemarie Heiduk about a new species that she’s recently described.
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In an earlier blog post about the discovery of a novel Ceropegia species, Jeff’s finishing sentence was: “I wonder what else is still waiting to be discovered in the stunning grasslands of South Africa?”
I am happy to provide a first answer to this question: Ceropegia stylesii.
This new species does not have the tubular kettle-trap flowers typical of Ceropegia, which temporarily trap pollinators, but open-rotate corollas where the gynostegium (fused male and female reproductive organs) is freely accessible to pollinators. So, in the traditional sense, C. stylesii is not a Ceropegia. This needs some explanation here!
Ceropegia is a genus in the plant family Apocynaceae (Jeff’s favourite family of plants!) and therein the genus is placed in the subfamily Asclepiadoideae which originally was a family on its own (“Asclepiadaceae”).
Within this subfamily, the genus Ceropegia belongs to the Stapeliinae – a subtribe which comprises ca. 720 species. About 220 species thereof have exciting looking and very cleverly designed kettle-trap flowers which attract small flies as pollinators via deceptive strategies (see http://plantlifesouthafrica.blogspot.com/2019/07/plantlife-sa-volume-473-july-2019.html). The remaining species in Stapeliinae are the well-known stem-succulent stapeliads (ca. 355 species in >30 genera) and ca. 140 species known as Brachystelma.
With increasingly better molecular methods to study the evolutionary relationships of species in Stapeliinae, the traditional grouping of the species was illuminated as being artificial, i.e., species with kettle-trap flowers are not actually a natural group and Brachystelma species are scattered among them; the stapeliads are also nested in Ceropegia but as a single (monophyletic) group. These results based on DNA-sequence similarities are not compatible with the traditional generic concept in Stapeliinae, and as a result, changes were instigated.
Some colleagues wish to see all 720 species of Ceropegia, Brachystelma and the stapeliads merged into one single large genus Ceropegia, a solution which would entail more than 400 new name combinations. Others prefer to adopt a less dramatic change of concept and only include Brachystelma in an enlarged Ceropegia while keeping the stapeliads separate based on their monophyly and distinct vegetative features. This pragmatic solution considers both taxonomic and phylogenetic facts and reduces the previously multiple cases of paraphyly to a single case. More importantly, it avoids hundreds of name changes in the group. Both concepts are correct in their own right and justified, so it is a personal decision which one to follow.
The newly described species C. stylesii would traditionally have been placed in Brachystelma as it is lacking tubular kettle-trap flowers. After the inclusion of Brachystelma into Ceropegia, C. stylesii is placed within section Bowkerianae – a group comprising species both with and without tubular kettle-trap flowers. With the description of C. stylesii, the section now has 15 members of which 10 have open-rotate flowers. Among these, C. stylesii appears to be most closely related to C. gerrardii from which it can only readily be distinguished when in flower (see the lower most image above).
The flowers of C. stylesii superficially look like miniature versions of a dark-flowered form of C. gerrardii, which growths in the same habitat. C. stylesii flowers are only about 6 mm in size whereas those of C. gerrardii are about three times larger. While C. gerrardii occurs in grasslands throughout eastern South Africa, C. stylesii is believed to be endemic to Ngome, where it is known from two localities with a total of less than 10 plants. After the recent discovery of C. heidukiae at Ngome, the area revealed another outstanding member of this amazing plant group, and thereby once again proves its conservation importance.
C. stylesii is named for David Gordon Alexander Styles, botanical explorer and collector, to honour his valuable contribution to botanical knowledge in South Africa. David is renowned for “…his daring nature to go leaps and bounds for the specimen he is interested in” (see Chetty 2021), a statement I can readily confirm based on personal experience. Many of David’s collections (by now well over 6000 specimens donated to various herbaria) are novelties awaiting to be described. With C. stylesii, a total of five plant species bear his name. I am delighted that eventually a Ceropegia species could be named for him as David’s knowledge on the distribution and habitats of these special plants is of great value to my research on this plant group.
On Sunday Karin and I rode our bicycles down to the local beach at Nordstrand. It was a chilly day, maybe 4C, with a raw coastal wind that made it feel that much colder. Our local bit of shallow ocean – the Kattegat – is normally quite calm but there was a swell bringing in seaweed and the (very) occasional item of rubbish. I collected a golf ball but otherwise the beach was free of plastic. That’s the usual state of affairs here, despite it being a popular tourist destination in the summer. If only beaches elsewhere in the world were as clean.
As we walked Karin and I chatted about some of our plans for the coming year. We’re both working on our next books and relishing the process of swapping chapters to read out loud to the writer. The occasional hardy soul, also enjoying being out in the elements, passed us by and we nodded in acknowledgement. Above us the gulls were wheeling and calling, a constant reminder that they were here before us and will remain when we are gone. Moving from the strand line into the sand dunes we found a convenient bench to sit, drink from our water bottles, scoff some nuts and raisins, and admire the view until the cold wind won the argument and moved us on.
Walking back to the bikes we paused to look at the verdant moss growing on the steep faces of the dunes. Small seedlings had germinated in these planty blankets, a promise of growth and flowers during the year to come. Here and there birds had torn out sections in their constant search for insect larvae. Life goes on even in these cold days.
On our ride back through the neat summerhouses that are settled within the nearby pine woodland, male Great Tits were voicing their claims to territory. Spring is surely just round the corner, we hope.
The other day Karin bought a Miltonia orchid to add to the ever-expanding collection of orchids she’s accumulating. It’s nowhere near as large as the collection she accumulated in our old place in the UK – part of it is pictured in this old post of mine – but it’s only a matter of time. This morning I showed her how to extract orchid pollen from the flower and her squeals of delight were something to hear!
As you can see in the image above, these orchids package their pollen into discrete structures that we term “pollinia” – two of them in this case, though the form and number of pollinia vary between different groups of orchids. The pollinia plus the sticky organ that attaches them to a pollinator is collectively termed a “pollinarium”. The only other plants that present their pollen in this way are my beloved asclepiads in the family Apocynaceae. The orchids and the asclepiads are only very distantly related to each other so this is a clear example of convergent evolution, where both plant groups have come up with the same solution to a problem. In this case, the problem is probably that bees collect a lot of pollen which has a reproductive cost for plants. Packaging the pollen in this way prevents bees from stealing it, amongst other advantages.
If you want to look at this yourself, you’ll find the pollinaria tucked under the front of the central “column” of the flower, which comprises the fused male and female reproductive parts. Just take a fine needle and gently stroke the underside of the column. In the image below, taken just after we extracted the pollinarium, you can see the “anther cap” which covered them lying just below the column.
It’s possible to learn a lot about botany from studying even common houseplants such as these!
There’s currently a lot of interest in ChatGPT and over the past week, like many others, I have been playing around with this artificial intelligence (AI) system and testing its knowledge and creative powers. The latter are really very impressive: I asked it to write a couple of limericks about Karin and my professions, and about our move to Denmark, and it produced a decent stab at those.
I also probed its knowledge about topics with which I’m familiar, mainly pollinators and pollination of course, and it produced some good answers. When I highlighted some errors it had made, ChatGPT went back and revised its answers, and politely thanked me in the process. If I were a student I would not rely on it to write accurate essays, but so far so good(ish).
This morning, however, I had a very odd experience. I was trying to track down something attributed to Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) and I asked ChatGPT: “What did Erasmus Darwin say about birds visiting flowers?”
This is the answer that came back:
Erasmus Darwin was a naturalist, physician, and poet who wrote about a wide range of topics, including birds and flowers. In his 1794 poem “The Loves of the Plants,” he describes how different species of birds visit flowers in search of nectar:
“Birds of each hue, from the gay parrot’s beak
To the goldfinch, painted in tiny streak,
Sip nectar from the cups that bloom and bow
With every breeze, and nod and dance below.”
Now, the first part of this, about Erasmus’s life, is true. It’s also true that he wrote a poem with that title, though it was published in 1791, not 1794.
But, when I double-checked those attributed lines against the published version of the poem that’s on Project Gutenberg, I discovered that they did not exist. ChatGPT had made them up!
As I said, this AI is pretty creative and will certainly write a poem for you on any topic you care to request. But I didn’t ask it for that, I had made a factual query. And ChatGPT had just invented some poetry and claimed it as fact, unless of course those really are Erasmus’s lines and I’ve missed their source (please correct me if I have).
Now as a scientist and writer I try to be rigorous when quoting and citing sources, and if I hadn’t double-checked this I might have taken it at face value. And one could argue that my initial question – “What did Erasmus Darwin say…?” – was a little ambiguous. But nonetheless, I was not expecting an AI to try to pass off something it had created as fact.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this when using ChatGPT? It’s a fun, creative tool. But as far as I can tell, it also has a very human ability to lie.
Yesterday, Karin and I took a winter walk through one of the local woodlands, our feet crunching on the iced-over crust which is all that remains of last week’s snowfall. No doubt more snow is on its way as we approach the deepest part of winter here in Denmark. But seeing this holly tree reminded us that some parts of the woodland might remain snow-free no matter what the conditions.
Although I’m no meteorologist (and any who are reading this can correct me if I’m wrong), I suspect that two things are going on here. Firstly, the tree is sheltering the ground and reducing the amount of snow that falls below it. That umbrella effect is fairly obvious. But secondly, and more subtly, the small amount of warmth that there is in the soil is being prevented from radiating off into space by the presence of the holly leaves. So the warmer soil and surface layer of vegetation melts any snow that manages to make it through or under the holly’s canopy.
In both of these ways, the evergreen holly is affecting the microclimate of this part of the woodland. That in turn adds to the ecological heterogeneity of the habitat, proving greater access to food for animals, affecting the phenology of the ground flora, reducing local soil moisture, and so forth. All of these, in turn, will potentially lead to greater diversity of species with the local area.
On this blog and in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society I’ve often written about evergreen trees, shrubs and climbers such as ivy, holly and mistletoe, including both their cultural associations (especially with Christmas) and their ecological importance. As so often is the case, the English poet John Clare thought about all of this two centuries ago. The quote I used in the title of this post is from his poem Winter Walk:
The holly bush, a sober lump of green,
John Clare (1793-1864)
Shines through the leafless shrubs all brown and grey,
And smiles at winter be it e’er so keen
With all the leafy luxury of May.
And O it is delicious, when the day
In winter’s loaded garment keenly blows
And turns her back on sudden falling snows,
To go where gravel pathways creep between
Arches of evergreen that scarce let through
A single feather of the driving storm;
And in the bitterest day that ever blew
The walk will find some places still and warm
Where dead leaves rustle sweet and give alarm
To little birds that flirt and start away
This might be my last post of the year, and so it only remains for me to wish a Glædelig Jul and Merry Christmas to all of my readers!
Prof. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author 