It’s World Bee Day and what better way to celebrate it than to help a bee species that’s close to extinction – watch this video about Australia’s Green Carpenter Bee and please donate to the cause:
And while you’re at it, here’s another couple of recent bee-related videos to watch:
And here’s one that doesn’t seem to want to embed – it’s Kit Prendergast from Curtin University.
UPDATE: turns out the figure I cited for number of bee species is out of date so I’ve corrected it below. Thanks to John Ascher for pointing this out.
Publication of my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society by Pelagic Publishing has been pushed back until the end of this year or early in 2021. The current pandemic has created problems for the printing and distribution sectors, as it has for so many industries. Therefore, to celebrate World Bee Day, here’s a preview of the bee section from Chapter 2 which is entitled (ironically enough) “More than just bees – the diversity of pollinators”.
2.3 Bees, wasps and sawflies (Hymenoptera)
The bees and their relatives rank only third in terms of overall pollinator diversity. Within this taxonomic Order, bees are not especially species rich (17,000 or so described species, perhaps 20,000 in total) – over 20,400 (see: https://www.catalogueoflife.org/col/details/database/id/67) compared with the other 50,000 social and solitary wasps, sawflies, and so forth. But what they lack in diversity the bees make up for in importance as pollinators of both wild and agricultural plants, and in their cultural significance. The general notion of what a bee is, and how it behaves, looks to the honeybee (Apis mellifera) as a model: social, with a hierarchy, a queen, and a large nest (termed a hive for colonies in captivity). In fact, this view of bee-ness, though long embedded within our psyche, is far removed from the biology of the average bee: most of them have no social structure at all, and a fair proportion of those are parasitic. In Britain we have about 270 species of bees, give or take (Falk 2015) though there have been extinctions and additions to this fauna (see Chapters 10 and 11). These species provide a reasonable sample of the different lifestyles adopted by bees globally. They can be divided into four broad groups.
Honeybees include several highly social species and subspecies of Apis, of which the ubiquitous western honeybee (A. mellifera) is the most familiar. Most colonies are found in managed hives, though persistent feral colonies can be found in hollow trees, wall cavities, and other suitable spaces. They are widely introduced into parts of the world where they are not native (e.g. the Americas, Australia, New Zealand) and there is some debate as to whether they are truly native to Britain and northern Europe, with supporting evidence and arguments on both sides. Colonies can be enormous and contain thousands of individuals, mostly female workers, with a single queen. Unmated queens and males (drones) are produced by the colony later in the season.
Bumblebees (Bombus spp.) are typically also social, though their nests are much smaller (tens to hundreds of individuals). Depending upon the species these nests can be in long grass, rodent holes, or cavities in buildings and trees. Twenty-seven of the more than 250 species have been recorded in the UK, but six of these are not strictly social; they are parasitic and belong to the subgenus Psithyrus which will be described below.
The so-called solitary bees are by far the largest group in Britain (about 170 species) and worldwide (more than 90% of all species). In the UK they belong to 15 genera, including Andrena, Anthophora, Osmia, Megachile, etc. The females of most of these bees, once they have mated, construct nests that they alone provision with pollen for their developing young. Nesting sites can be genus- or species-specific, and include soil, cavities in stone or wood, and snail shells. Some species are not strictly solitary at all and may produce colonies with varying levels of social structure, though without a queen or a strict caste system; we term them “primitively eusocial”. In fact sociality has evolved and been lost numerous times in the bees and in the rest of the Hymenoptera (Danforth 2002, Hughes et al. 2008, Danforth et al. 2019). It’s also been lost in some groups that have reverted back to a solitary lifestyle, and even within a single genus it can vary; for example in the carpenter bee genus Ceratina (Apidae: Xylocopinae) tropical species are more often social than temperate species (Groom & Rehan 2018).
The final group is termed the cuckoo bees and, like their avian namesake, they parasitise the nests of both social and solitary bees (though never, interestingly, honeybees). There are about 70 species in 7 genera, including the bumblebee subgenus, Psithyrus. Other genera include Melecta, Nomada and Sphecodes. In some cases the parasitic species are closely related evolutionarily to their hosts and may resemble them, for example some Psithyrus species. In other cases they may be only distantly related and in fact look more like wasps, e.g. Nomada species. Some genera of cuckoo bees are restricted to parasitising only a single genus of bees, others are parasites of a range of genera (Figure 2.4).
Although we often think of bees, overall, as being the most important pollinators, in fact species vary hugely in their importance. Pollinating ability depends upon factors such as abundance, hairiness, behaviour, body size, and visitation rate to flowers (Figure 2.1). Size is especially important for three reasons. First of all, larger animals can pick up more pollen on their bodies, all other things being equal. Secondly, in order to bridge the gap between picking up pollen and depositing it, flower visitors must be at least as large as the distance between anthers and stigma, unless they visit the stigma for other reasons. Finally, larger bee species tend to forage over longer distances on average (Greenleaf et al. 2007) thus increasing the movement of pollen between plants. However, most of the world’s bees are relatively small as we can see from the analysis of British bees in Figure 2.5. Many species have a maximum forewing length of only 4 or 5 mm, and the majority of species are smaller than honeybees. Remember also that these are maximum sizes measured from a sample; individual bees can vary a lot within populations and even (in the case of Bombus spp.) within nests (Goulson et al. 2002). So the assumption that all bees are good pollinators needs to be tempered by an acknowledgement that some are much better than others.
Figure 2.5: The sizes of British bees. Forewing length is a good measure of overall body size and the data are maximum lengths recorded for species, except for the social bumblebees and honeybee I have used maximum size of workers (queens are often much larger). The blue line indicates the honeybee (Apis mellifera). The biggest bee in this data set is the Violet Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa violacea) which, whilst not generally considered a native species (yet), has bred in Britain in the past. Data taken from Falk (2015).
Last week, during one of my lockdown garden pollinator surveys, I spotted a bee visiting Germander Speedwell (Veronica chamaedrys) in the garden that I didn’t recognise. It initially confused me as it looked superficially like a Blood Bee in the genus Sphecodes. However the bee was clearly collecting pollen, which Sphecodes spp., being cleptoparasites, don’t do. A quick check in Steven Falk’s Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland and a look at Steven’s Flickr site, suggested that it was almost certainly the Red-girdled Mining Bee (Andrena labiata), which is frequently associated with Germander Speedwell.
I posted this video on Twitter and Steven kindly confirmed my identification:
The Red-girdled Mining Bee is considered “Nationally Scarce” and it has a scattered and southerly distribution, as you can see from the map above, which is from the National Biodiversity Network Atlas account for the species. It’s only recorded from about half a dozen sites in Northamptonshire according to Ryan Clark, the County Bee Recorder. However Steven tells me that it’s being seen more and more frequently in gardens, and indeed just the other day Sarah Arnold, who is also carrying out surveys, emailed me to say that she had spotted it in her garden in Kent.
So this is a bee that’s definitely one to look out for, especially if you have Germander Speedwell growing.
UPDATE: I should of course have also given a link to the BWARS account for this species, and mentioned that confirmed or suspected observations can be uploaded to iRecord.
The network of pollination ecologists and insect specialists who have confirmed that they are surveying plant-pollinator networks in their gardens now stands at 50. As the map above shows, most are in the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe, but the Americas are also becoming well represented, we have a couple of people surveying in North Africa, and three in Australia. An x-y plot of the coordinates of the gardens shows the spread a little better:
Some people have started to send me data already, which is great; if you’re surveying and haven’t let me know your latitude and longitude, please do so, preferably decimalised – you can convert degrees/minutes/seconds to decimal here: https://www.latlong.net/degrees-minutes-seconds-to-decimal-degrees
I’ve managed 13 formal 15 minute surveys so far, plus have a few ad hoc observations that I am keeping separate, and I will be continuing my data collection for the foreseeable future. I’ve started playing with the data as you can see below. This is a plot made using the bipartite package in R, with plants to the left and pollinators to the right. The size of the bars is proportional to the number of pollinators/plants a taxon connects to. In the plants you can immediately see the dominance of apple (Malus domestica) and greengage (Prunus domestica), which attract a wide variety of insects to their flowers. Of the pollinators, the hairy-footed flower bee (Anthophora plumipes) and dark-edged beefly (Bombylius major) are especially common and generalist in their flower visits. It will be really interesting to see how this changes over the season, and how our fruit and vegetables are connected into the wider network via pollinators that they share with the ornamental and native plants.
If you are experienced at surveying pollinators and want to get involved, follow that first link and check out the protocol and FAQs, and please do email me: jeff.ollerton [at] northampton.ac.uk
The review of the biodiversity of pollinators that I published in 2017 estimated that on average about 18% of animal-pollinated plants within natural communities are specialised on bees. Bees also contribute to the reproduction of many of the plants that have generalist pollination systems, which account for perhaps 50% of plant species on average. But that stills leaves a significant fraction (maybe one third) that are specialised on the “other” pollinators, including flies, beetles, birds, bats, and so forth. There is growing awareness of how important these pollinators are for wild plant and crop pollination, but bees still hog most of the pollinator-related media.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been sent links to videos that focus on these other pollinators so I thought I’d compile a list that show us something of the true diversity of animals that act as pollen vectors. Please add your own suggestions in the comments:
Elephant shrews, lizards, cockroaches*, crustaceans, and biting midges are covered in this SciShow video (HT Steve Hawkins)
Opossum pollination of a Brazilian plant is featured in this video (HT Felipe Amorim)
Here’s a recorded webinar on bird pollination by Dan Scheiman from Audubon Arkansas
A few videos on bat pollination by Jim Wolfe can be found here and here and here, and this is a short one that’s a supplement to a recent Journal of Applied Ecology paper on cactus pollination by Constance J. Tremlett et al.
The fascinating ecology of skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), including fly and possibly beetle pollination, is the topic of this video.
Fly pollination is also highlighted in this short piece by the Natural History Museum, and this one deals with drone flies as managed pollinators for agriculture in New Zealand.
Enjoy!
*Watch out for my report on a newly discovered cockroach-pollinated plant….hopefully coming later this year…..
Podcasts are an increasingly popular way of keeping up with recent developments and stories across a diverse range of topics, from music (I’ve been enjoying the David Crosby Freak Flag Flying and Robert Plant Digging Deep series) to serial killers and the machinations of the American big cat-keeping community. Recently a call went out on the EAUC (Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges) email list for examples of sustainability and conservation podcasts. The request came from Dr Sandra Lee who leads the Social Impact Team at the University of Leicester and she has kindly allowed me to share the set of podcasts she’s collated. Feel free to add your own favourite examples in the comments.
Here’s the list that Sandra compiled: with the exception of In Defense of Plants (which I suggested) the accompanying text comes either from Sandra or from the original submissions by EAUC members. I’ve not listened to all of them so can’t comment on the quality or factual accuracy of the podcasts.
General
More specialist
UPDATE: Feedspot rank and overview sustainability themed podcasts:
https://blog.feedspot.com/sustainability_podcasts/
(HT Michelle Morley, Environmental Sustainability Manager, Oxford Brookes University)
UPDATE: After I posted this piece I shared it on a couple of Facebook guitar groups. On the Parlor Acoustic Guitar Lovers Group one of the members, Mario Burgani, suggested that in fact the guitar might be Italian, made in Catania in Sicily. I’ve done some searching online and I think that he’s correct. Some of the features that I am seeing on Catania guitars on various websites are identical to mine, in particular the way the back of the guitar has been shaped to cover the heel of the neck, and the shape and design of the floating bridge, with the bone side pieces. My thanks to Mario for pointing this out.
I have now corrected the post and removed mentions of German manufacture.
This post IS about biodiversity, eventually, but I need to give some background first….
Guitar-based music is a big part of my life, and has been since my teens. However it wasn’t until I was about 20 that I first started playing guitar. That’s late, and I wish I’d begun earlier, but neither of my parents were musical and there wasn’t the influence or encouragement. It wasn’t until I finally left home for university, aged 22, that I started taking it in any way seriously and bought a half decent guitar (a 1986 Washburn D-12N, if you’re interested – I still have it and I’m very fond of it). Before I started my PhD, in 1989, I played quite a lot and was involved with the local music scene in Oxford, working stage crew for bands. It was a lot of fun and for a while I considered dropping my PhD and doing it full time. Some of the guys I worked with went on to become part of Radiohead’s crew and have had careers in the music industry. But, you know, life, kids, and science got in the way, the frequency of my playing became less and less, and for a long time I hardly picked up a guitar.
But in the past couple of years I’ve started to get back into it and am enjoying playing again. A few things have prompted this. The kids have all left home now, so I have more time. I’m finding it relaxes me and it’s a good way to get away from work and social media and screens. Also, there are many short “how to play” videos on YouTube, it’s like having a whole set of guitar tutors with different styles and approaches. It’s not just about the music though: I have a fascination with taking apart guitars and fiddling with them, which leads me on to the point of this post.
Back in late September I was looking at vintage acoustic guitars on eBay and salivating over the Martins that were for sale, when a guitar caught my eye. It was an old “parlour” guitar in pretty poor condition, and a steal at £50. Parlour guitars are small-bodied instruments that were popular in homes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the guitars with big bodies, such as the Dreadnought models, became the vogue. They were the sorts of instruments used by early blues players – check out the photograph of Blind Lemon Jefferson on his Wikipedia page and you’ll see what I mean.
I was intrigued by the idea of having an old guitar with an authentic bluesy sound and also having a project to work on, restoring this instrument back to playable condition. The seller was based in Bedford, not far from Northampton, so Karin and I drove down there one Friday evening to pick it up.
Here’s a shot of the guitar as I bought it:
The body was sound and undamaged. The neck had a bit of a curve to it, but the brass frets were in good condition, though due to the fret board drying out over time their ends were protruding a little either side. However the bone nut at the top of the neck was broken, the pressed metal tailpiece was quite scratched, the tuning heads rusty and a little bent, plus there were a few other dings and dents. Here are some close-ups:
Someone has strung it with nylon strings which is probably not what was intended for this instrument. The point of a metal tailpiece like this is that it allows the guitar to have metal strings, which are under greater tension, without the need for more complex x-bracing under the soundboard to prevent it from warping or cracking:
It was clearly not the most expensive of guitars when it was first made, but the marquetry around the sound hole is in perfect condition and nicely executed:
There’s no manufacturer’s name or label in the guitar, no serial number or anything like that. So I did a little research online. It’s not the best quality guitar, as evidenced by the metal tailpiece which, as I mention, is designed to take the strain off the sound board when using metal strings. The alternative is to have a fixed bridge but that requires more elaborate (= expensive) bracing under the soundboard. However it’s clear that the guitar was handmade, probably in Sicily, by a local luthier, possibly in the 1920s, but certainly somewhere between 1900 and 1940: so it could be more than 100 years old.
The restoration of the guitar was fairly straightforward, the most complex part being the carving of a new bone nut from a blank that I bought online. The machine heads were removed, cleaned and oiled, then re-fitted; I could have replaced them but they were in decent condition given their age and I wanted to retain as much authenticity to the guitar as possible. The frets were filed and a neighbour who is a metal worker polished up the tailpiece. Most of the other work was fairly cosmetic – I didn’t want to touch the original finish.
Now we get to biodiversity. A lot of wood goes into the construction of acoustic guitars. In the case of this instrument, the soundboard is solid European spruce (Picea abies) that has aged to a beautiful golden colour. When I took off the tailpiece its original colour was revealed; that tailpiece has probably never been removed before:
That spruce top is book-matched: the two sides of the soundboard are symmetrical down the mid-line of the guitar, showing that they were split from the same board. Book-matching is a common technique used by luthiers, both for aesthetic reasons and because it’s harder to get a single piece of tonally-acceptable wood of that width. The tree from which it was cut was probably grown in a plantation; most old growth forest in Europe had been cut by the time this tree started growing. If you count the number of growth lines across one half of the soundboard there’s about 60, which gives an indication of the minimum age of the tree at harvest, i.e. it was at least 60 years old when it was felled. If the guitar was made in around 1925, and given that the wood from the tree would have to season for at least a couple of years, perhaps longer, before it was used, it means that the tree started growing some time in the mid-19th century. So the tree that contributed the soundboard has lived through summers and winters of profound historical change in Europe.
The sides, back and neck of the guitar are mahogany, as is the bridge I think. Nowadays “mahogany” can refer to a range of unrelated tropical trees – see this website for details. But when this guitar was made, mahogany usually referred to wood from species in the genus Swietenia, which naturally grow in Central and northern South America, and the Caribbean. So the tree that donated the wood was cut out of pristine, or at least long-established, tropical rainforest. One possible source is Belize which was exporting a lot of mahogany to Britain during this period, which may then have been exported all over Europe.
The fret board is probably Brazilian rosewood (Dalbergia nigra) judging by the black streaks or “spider webbing” in the timber. Brazil banned exports of the wood in the 1960s but there’s still much illegal harvesting going on of these and other trees. This species, and the three in the genus Swietenia, are in the IUCN categories “Vulnerable” or “Endangered” due to their over-exploitation, and are CITES-listed.
Some other, so far unidentified, woods were used in the construction of the guitar, in the marquetry around the sound hole, in the binding around the top, and in the end strap button. The latter may be ebony from one of several species in the genus Diospyros, which are likewise protected.
The timber used to make these old guitars is a legacy of an age when rapacious exploitation of the world’s natural resources was considered almost a public duty. There was little or no consideration for the ecosystems that were exploited, or how deforestation affected both wildlife and indigenous peoples. To some extent the situation has improved and there are global efforts to conserve the old growth forest that remains, albeit with variable results. But we are far from giving these forests the protection and restoration that they deserve. Modern guitar makers need to take responsibility for sourcing their materials ethically and sustainably, which some are and some are not. There’s a really interesting set of articles about this in the series Building a Sustainable Guitar at the Forest Legality website. At the other extreme the Gibson guitar company pleaded guilty in 2012 to knowingly using timber that was harvested illegally in Madagascar, a trade that Pete Lowry of the Missouri Botanical Garden is quoted as calling the “equivalent of Africa’s blood diamonds”.
Old musical instruments, furniture, and other artifacts have history as well as carbon locked into their timbers. Therefore I think that it’s incumbent upon us to cherish and use them and not consign the wood to the bonfire or to landfill. If that sounds too sentimental, then so be it. But there’s a practical side to this too: they are often better quality than more modern instruments and can be much cheaper.
All of my guitars have names that reflect something of their history. During the drive down to pick up the guitar from Bedford there was the most incredible rain storm, water lashing across the road and windscreen wipers on full blast. So I’ve named this guitar The Rainmaker. You can see the finished result of the restoration in the images at the top of this post. I’m pleased with it and I hope it lasts another 100 years at least.
One final thing: how does the guitar play and sound? Well, as I said, the neck has a bit of a curve to it and there’s no truss rod to adjust it, so re-setting it would be a major job. This means that the action (the distance between the strings and the frets) is very high, especially close to the body. So I’ve tuned the guitar to an open E chord, have invested in a glass bottleneck, and am using it to learn to play blues slide guitar. And it sounds pretty good, with a warm, mellow, and (yes) bluesy sound.
UPDATE: Following conversations with a couple of the participants of the garden surveys, we’ve changed the protocol slightly to make Survey type A more quantitative and to take into account when we get large numbers of individuals all visiting the same plant at the same time – it’s crazy to have a single line for each individual. Details are in the new spreadsheet which you can down load from here: Ollerton garden surveys 2020
The additions should be self explanatory. If you are not able to go back to retro-fit the additional data, that’s fine, just use the new spreadsheet format for future surveys: all data are going to be useful!
In the present format the data will be useful for modelling using GLMMs etc., in order to test predictions about which plants, and in which contexts, support the most pollinators. The data format will need tweaking slightly to make it analysable in bipartite, but that should be fairly straightforward.
If you are taking part in the surveys it would be really useful if you could email me your latitude and longitude as I’d like to start creating a map of where the surveys are happening.
Any questions, send me an email or ask in the comments.
Following up from my last post about ecologists using their gardens to collect standardised data, I’ve had a huge response from pollination ecologists all over the world wanting to get involved. So to streamline the process I thought that I would put the protocol and updates on my blog. Just to reiterate, this is really is designed for those who already have some experience of surveying pollinators and flowers. I didn’t intend this to be a citizen science project, there are plenty of those around at the moment for inexperienced people who want to contribute, for example:
The Pollinator Monitoring Scheme’s FIT (Flower-Insect Timed) counts: https://www.ceh.ac.uk/our-science/projects/pollinator-monitoring
Kit Prendergast’s “bee hotels” survey: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Beesintheburbs/announcements
If anyone wants me to publicise others, let me have the link in the comments below or send me an email.
OK, for those ecologists wanting to survey pollinators and the flowers they are visiting (or not visiting) in their gardens, here’s the protocol:
Here are some Frequently Asked Questions – I will update FAQs as they come in:
Q: What’s going to happen to all of the data?
I think that’s for the pollinator research community to decide. My feeling at the moment is that in the first instance there should be a data paper that summarises the results and makes the data freely available to everyone. That would include all data contributors as co-authors, probably under a project name rather than individually. After that it’s up to individuals and groups to work with the data to address their own research questions. I know that in the UK there are several PhD researchers who are worried about not being able to collect data this year and who want to contribute to this initiative and use it in their theses. I’m sure that there are others elsewhere. As a community it would be great to support these young researchers.
Q: I am not based in the UK, can I still take part?
A: Yes, of course, though check in your local networks to see if anyone is coordinating local efforts.
Q: How do I calculate “Total floral cover” for survey Type B?
A: The idea is to estimate the area covered by all of the patches of the plant in flower across the whole garden, and then add it up to get a total area covered. It is always going to be a rough estimate, but it at least gives us a sense of how abundant the flowers are in your garden.
Q: How do I classify “floral units” for survey Type B?
A: Use the UK POMS approach:
Q: Should I collect weather data?
A: You can certainly add data to another sheet on the spreadsheet if you want to, but the plan is to use data from local weather stations to capture standardised weather information.
Q: Should I collect nectar and/or pollen and/or pollinator behaviour data?
A: Again, collect any data that you have the time and equipment for and add it to a different sheet
Q: My garden has very few flowers and pollinators – can I still take part?
A: Yes, absolutely, we need a range of garden types, from the very large and florally diverse to small window boxes or lawns with just daisies and dandelions..
Q: How long should I survey for, and how many surveys should I do.
A: Try to aim for what you think is a representative assessment of the plant-flower visitor network in your garden. The idea is that people do as many surveys as they can, as often as they can, given their personal time constraints. I don’t want to dictate to people how to use their time, this needs to be enjoyable as well as useful. As long as we know the sampling effort and floral diversity within the gardens, we should be able to take account of sampling effort in any analyses.
In the current lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of ecologists are stuck at home: universities and research institutes are closed and it’s not possible to get out and do field work. Staring out of the window into our garden the other day I had a bright idea and I sent out this email to my network of colleagues in the UK who work on pollinator ecology:
Hi everyone,
I hope you’re all keeping well and safe during this difficult time. Given that we’re all supposed to be socially isolating as much as possible I wondered if we could use the time to generate some interesting data and keep ourselves sane in the process. The idea I had was for as many UK & Irish pollination ecologists as possible to carry out standardised garden surveys of insect-flower visitor interactions over the coming weeks. Combined with information about location, size of garden, floral diversity, etc. etc., it could give us some useful information about early spring plant-visitor garden networks along latitudinal and longitudinal gradients.
For those with kids at home it might be a good way of getting them out into fresh air and giving them something to do.
The response has been phenomenal and a lot of colleagues have agreed to take part. We’ve worked out a protocol and we are starting to collect data. If anyone (in the UK or elsewhere in the world) with the requisite pollinator and plant identification skills and experience wants to get involved, please send me an email: jeff.ollerton [at] northampton.ac.uk
Of course others who are less experienced can still help out by taking part in the Pollinator Monitoring Scheme’s FIT (Flower-Insect Timed) counts: https://www.ceh.ac.uk/our-science/projects/pollinator-monitoring
However, it also struck me that there are plenty of other ecologists who could use their gardens, and networks of colleagues, to collect a large amount of useful data, in a standard way, across a wide geographical area, e.g. plant-herbivore interactions, bird behaviour, earthworm counts, etc. etc.
Let’s get away from our computers and into the fresh air and start generating results!
There’s a lot of crap floating around online about COVID-19: conspiracy theories, unreliable reports, racist claptrap, and so on. As scientists and educators I think it’s important that we share the reliable sources as far and wide as possible. Here’s some very good videos and lectures that explain some of the medical science about the pandemic. If you know of others please post them in the comments below.
If you are experiencing symptoms or want to know what to look out for, here the NHS’s advice site which is regularly updated: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/
How can we control the coronavirus pandemic? | Adam Kucharski TED Q & A:
Some background to vaccines and the search for one for COVID-19:
Why COVID-19 is hitting us now — and how to prepare for the next outbreak – a TED Talk:
Really interesting talk on the link between the wildlife trade and COVID-19. Makes a very important point: “The majority of the people in China do NOT eat wildlife animals. Those people who consume these wildlife animals are the rich and the powerful –a small minority”:
Most of what I’ve found has been in English, but here’s some talks that are in other languages:
Prof. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author 