The flowers, the bees, and the tractor: a true story

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Yesterday I was up and out early with colleagues and students to carry out the first of this season’s spring bird surveys of the University of Northampton’s new Waterside Campus – see my previous post on this topic. We had finished one stretch of the survey and were walking back along the path next to Midsummer Meadow when I spotted a huge expanse of Red Dead-Nettle (Lamium purpureum), mixed in with some While Dead-Nettle (Lamium album):

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Both species produce a lot of nectar; as kids we would often suck it from the flowers of White Dead-Nettle, and they are just as attractive to bees and other pollinators:

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Sure enough, a quick survey showed that there were at least two species of bee working the flowers, Common Carder Bees (Bombus pascuorum), and male and female Hairy-footed Flower Bees (Anthophora plumipes) – here’s a shot of the female:

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Suddenly there was an exclamation from one of my colleagues: whilst I was focused on the bees he’d seen a tractor pulling a grass cutter coming towards us:

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It got closer…:

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…and closer…:

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…and we were sure it was going to mow this beautiful patch of wild flowers, and the bees, into oblivion:

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But it didn’t! The driver carefully mowed round the patch and headed back the way he’d come:

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A big relief!

Urban recreational grasslands like this clearly need to be managed by regular cutting, but this should be done strategically as these sorts of wild flower patches are important nectar and pollen sources for urban pollinators. They are especially critical at this time of year when resources are needed to build up colony numbers in the social species like Common Carder Bee. I don’t know who manages Midsummer Meadow – presumably contractors working on behalf of Northampton Borough Council? But I hope that this is a conscious strategy by them to conduct “smart mowing” whereby they cut around flower patches like this even when they are not planted. The bees (and I) thank you for it.

What to do with plastic plant labels? Here’s one idea.

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This spring Karin and I are continuing to develop our garden which I have previously talked about in relation to the Big Garden Birdwatch and Renovating a Front Garden, for instance, as well as various posts about the pollinators I’m recording (search the blog for “garden pollinators” and you’ll see what I mean).

The main task over the past couple of weeks has been to demolish the old chicken run and plant it as a mixed border that will give interest all year round. We’ve put in some plants that have been hanging around in pots for a few years waiting for a space to open up, plus bought clearance-area bulbs and perennials such as crocuses, narcissi, hyacinths and hellebores at knock-down prices (they look a bit scrappy at the moment but will be great next year). Plus we’ve spent a bit of money on some nice flowering shrubs and small fruit trees.

The plants we’ve bought invariably come in a plastic pot which we re-use for propagating and giving plants away to friends. However they usually also come with a plastic label that tells us at least the name of the species and variety, plus often cultivation details and a colour image. The question is: what to do with these labels? The obvious thing is to leave them on the plant or push them into the ground next to it to remind us what it is. The problem with this is that (in my experience) the labels never last more than a year or two before the ink fades. Over time the plastic starts to break down and you end up with fragments of the label in the soil. There’s a lot of discussion online about how harmful different types of plastic can be, but there’s no doubt that some types can release toxins into the soil. Regardless, it seems to us a bad idea to allow these plastic labels to disintegrate in the garden. It also feels like a waste of resources: those labels took oil and energy to produce.

This year the BBC’s Gardeners’ World series is looking at ways to reduce the use of plastic in the garden, which is a good idea and another reason why I love the programme, as I’ve previously written about on the blog. That got me thinking about the best way to deal with plastic plant labels, what else can you do with them other than leave them in the garden?

I suspect that if we put them out with the weekly plastic recycling they’ll just be landfilled, so that’s not an option. However, like a lot of gardeners we keep a log book of what we’ve been planting, but we’re a bit lazy about keeping it up to date. So we’ve taken to slipping those labels between the pages of the log book to remind us of what we have put into the garden. The book is one of those with an elasticated retainer to keep it closed, so the labels don’t fall out when we move it on and off the shelf. Hopefully the labels will last for years in there away from damp and light, and be a useful source of information for us in the future.

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If you’ve curious, here’s how that part of the garden looked before we started working on it; everything you see here has been re-used or recycled in one way or another:

And this is what it looks like now; we still have more plants to add and hopefully the border will fill out come the summer:

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

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At symbol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hummingbird bowl from BM

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

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

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

Here’s the abstract:

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

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

Can pollinators survive sudden changes in the weather?

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Snow-Warm garden comparison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are a few more images from the day:

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

Chris OToole 2018-03-13 13.44.37_preview

Chris O’Toole and some of his senile bees

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

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

Plant-pollinator networks in the tropics: a new review just published.

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As an ecologist who has carried out field work in the temperate zone (UK), the subtropics (Tenerife and South Africa) and the tropics (parts of South America, Africa and Australia) I’ve always found the idea that the study of ecology can be divided into “tropical” and “non-tropical” a bit odd. It’s as if the way that the natural world works somehow changes at about 23 degrees north or south of the equator, making things “different” around the equator. The tropics are a very special, diverse place, it’s true, but so are many places outside the tropics.

With this in mind I was pleased when I was asked by some of my Brazilian colleagues to contribute to a chapter in a new book entitled Ecological Networks in the Tropics. It was an opportunity to review what is known about plant-pollinator networks in the tropics and the ways in which they are very similar to such networks at lower latitudes. Here’s the details of the chapter, followed by the abstract. If anyone wants a copy please drop me an email:

Vizentin-Bugoni J, PKM Maruyama, CS Souza, J Ollerton, AR Rech, M Sazima. (2018) Plant-pollinator networks in the tropics: a review. pp 73-91 In Dáttilo W & V. Rico-Gray. Ecological networks in the Tropics. Springer.

Abstract:

Most tropical plants rely on animals for pollination, thus engaging in complex interaction networks. Here, we present a global overview of pollination networks and point out research gaps and emerging differences between tropical and non-tropical areas. Our review highlights an uneven global distribution of studies biased towards non-tropical areas. Moreover, within the tropics, there is a bias towards the Neotropical region where partial networks represent 70.1% of the published studies. Additionally, most networks sampled so far (95.6%) were assembled by inferring interactions by surveying plants (a phytocentric approach). These biases may limit accurate global comparisons of the structure and dynamics of tropical and non-tropical pollination networks. Noteworthy differences of tropical networks (in comparison to the non-tropical ones) include higher species richness which, in turn, promotes lower connectance but higher modularity due to both the higher diversity as well as the integration of more vertebrate pollinators. These interaction patterns are influenced by several ecological, evolutionary, and historical processes, and also sampling artifacts. We propose a neutral–niche continuum model for interactions in pollination systems. This is, arguably, supported by evidence that a high diversity of functional traits promotes greater importance of niche-based processes (i.e., forbidden links caused by morphological mismatching and phenological non-overlap) in determining which interactions occur, rather than random chance of encounter based on abundances (neutrality). We conclude by discussing the possible existence and direction of a latitudinal gradient of specialization in pollination networks.

XI International Symposium on Pollination, Berlin, April 16th -20th, 2018

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From the organisers:

Dear Pollination Biologists,

The International Commission for Pollinator-Plant Relationships (ICPPR) invites you to attend, and possibly submit abstracts for. the XI International Symposium on Pollination TO BE HELD IN BERLIN, GERMANY, APRIL 16-20 2018.

Please take advantage of the early-bird registration opportunity.

The deadline for Abstract submissions is MARCH 1ST, 2018

MORE DETAILS AT:

http://www.icppr.com/xi-international-symposium-on-pollination.html

I HOPE TO SEE YOU IN BERLIN!

Carlos H. Vergara

CHAIR OF THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Metaphors in oak: my Images of Research entry for 2018

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The Annual University of Northampton “Images of Research” competition has been running for 5 years and this year’s event has seen a bumper entry of 38 images with accompanying text in fewer than 150 words (including one from our Vice Chancellor).

I think that I’ve entered an image every year – this is from 2016 – and you can see my entry from this year above. It’s called “Metaphors in oak” and here’s my 150 words – perhaps a little fanciful in retrospect, but it’s what the photo said to me at the time:

“This photograph was taken on a recent field trip to Cannock Chase in Staffordshire. I was drawn to the colours and textures of this fallen oak branch as a piece of natural art, but also to its ecological significance. The bark has been attacked by insects then decomposed by fungi and bacteria, leaving behind the wooden core of the branch, which has subsequently been colonised by lichens and mosses. Decay, recycling, colonisation, biodiversity: fundamental ecological patterns and processes. But, with a little imagination, there are also metaphors for research to be seen in this picture. The growth patterns of the wood seem to flow, and in it we can envision a journey of both smooth waters and turbulent times. The diversity of organisms captured in the image reminds us of the varied experiences we can expect during research, not all positive, but all adding to the colour and texture of our lives. What does this image say, and what metaphors does it reveal, to you?”

Here’s a link to the exhibition catalogue and to the online voting system – well worth browsing through to see the range and diversity of research being carried out at our university.

Big Garden Birdwatch – our first six years of data

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Big garden bird watch

This morning I spent an hour gazing out of our bedroom window with a coffee, a notebook, and a pair of binoculars. Not sure what the neighbours opposite us thought I was doing but I was happy – this weekend is the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch! I’ve taken part in it every year since Karin and I moved into our present house in February 2012, and I thought it was time to show the results to date.

As you can see in the graph above, for the first couple of years there were relatively few birds (only 6 species in 2013, 8 in 2014). Then in 2015 it jumped to 15 species, including some that I’ve not recorded in the garden since such as Lesser redpoll. Two reasons for this sudden increase I think. First of all, January 2015 was particualrly cold which meant that more birds were moving into urban areas looking for food and a little more warmth. But secondly, and the reason why higher bird diversity has been maintained since then, is that we’ve been developing the garden and planting more shrubs, small trees, etc.

So since 2012 we’ve gone from this:

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To this:

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This planting and development of the garden has been good for other wildlife including bees, butterflies and other pollinators, as I’ve recounted a number of times. So here’s a close up from last summer just to remind us that, on this grey, drizzly January day, spring is not so far away:

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Of course you don’t need to have a garden to take part in the Big Garden Birdwatch – the RSPB also accepts data from surveys of public parks and green space. In fact tomorrow morning I’m leading a group of residents around our local park, The Racecourse, to do just such a survey.

Right, must go and upload this years data to the RSPB’s site.