Category Archives: Moths

Pesticides and pollinators: please sign this petition!

As part of our roles as ambassadors of the new conservation organisation Restore (more of which later this year), several of us including Dave Goulson, George McGavin, and myself, are promoting this online petition to get the government to take the issue of neonicotinoid pesticides seriously. Here’s some text from Dave explaining the situation with a link to a petition that you can sign:

“For three years in a row our government has granted farmers special permission to use banned neonicotinoid pesticides on sugar beet. This is contrary to the expert advice of their own Expert Committee on Pesticides, who specifically recommended that permission should not be granted. It also flies in the face of a huge body of scientific evidence showing that these chemicals are phenomenally toxic to all insect life, and that their use on any crop contaminates soils, hedgerow plants, and nearby streams and ponds for years to come. We are in a crisis, with insect populations in freefall. It is about time our government woke up to this, and acted accordingly. This petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/631948 is a necessary means of holding the government to account. Please sign and share, as signing will ensure the issue is debated in Parliament.”

This petition now has more than 15,000 signatures which ensures that it gets a response from the Government. If it reaches 100,000 mark, it will trigger a debate in Parliament. Please sign and promote this important initiative!

Are cactus pollination systems more specialised in the tropics? A new study suggests yes…and no!

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The question of whether interactions between different species are more specialised in tropical environments (as theory predicts) has intrigued me for a couple of decades. In fact it’s just occurred to me that August 2022 was the 20th anniversary of my paper in Oikos co-authored with Louise Cranmer entitled: Latitudinal trends in plant-pollinator interactions: are tropical plants more specialised? That paper was one of the first to seriously challenge an idea that was long-embedded in the scientific and (especially) popular literature, that tropical ecology was in a sense “special” and that the ways in which species parasitised, consumed, or engaged in mutualistic relationships in the tropics was different to what was happening in the subtropics and temperate zones.

Since then I’ve written about this subject in a number of publications, most recently in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society and it’s inspired some other researchers to address the topic.

One of the real challenges with asking questions about how plant-pollinator relationships change over large geographical areas is obtaining good, robust data to analyse. It’s a challenge to convince science funding agencies to give money to spend many years travelling the world and collecting the kind of data that are needed. However we can gain some idea of the patterns, and potential processes, that drive the macroecology of plant-pollinator interactions by piecing together databases of interactions for particular taxa, gleaned from published and unpublished sources.

That’s what we have done for the family Cactaceae in a new study led by Pablo Gorostiague from the Universidad Nacional de Salta in Argentina. This collaboration started when Pablo visited Northampton back in 2018 and spent some time with my research group, including helping out with field work in Tenerife. Since then the usual issues (work, COVID, etc.) have delayed publication of our paper, but now it’s finally out. Amongst other results we find that, yes, tropical cacti are pollinated by fewer species on average (though it’s hugely variable – see the figure above) but that functional specialisation (i.e. the number of pollinator guilds that are used by species) is no different in the tropics compared to the extra-tropics (that’s the figure at the end of this post).

The full reference with a link to the paper is below; if anyone wants a PDF, please send me a message via the Contact page:

Gorostiague, P., Ollerton, J. and Ortega-Baes, P. (2022) Latitudinal gradients in biotic interactions: Are cacti pollination systems more specialized in the tropics? Plant Biology https://doi.org/10.1111/plb.13450

Here’s the abstract:

Biotic interactions are said to be more specialized in the tropics, and this was also proposed for the pollination systems of columnar cacti from North America. However, this has not yet been tested for a wider set of cactus species. Here, we use the available information about pollination in the Cactaceae to explore the geographic patterns of this mutualistic interaction, and test if there is a latitudinal gradient in its degree of specialization.

We performed a bibliographic search of all publications on the pollination of cacti species and summarized the information to build a database. We used generalized linear models to evaluate if the degree of specialization in cacti pollination systems is affected by latitude, using two different measures: the number of pollinator guilds (functional specialization) and the number of pollinator species (ecological specialization).

Our database contained information about the pollination of 148 species. The most frequent pollinator guilds were bees, birds, moths and bats. There was no apparent effect of latitude on the number of guilds that pollinate a cactus species. However, latitude had a small but significant effect on the number of pollinator species that service a given cactus species.

Bees are found as pollinators of most cactus species, along a wide latitudinal gradient. Bat and bird pollination is more common in the tropics than in the extra-tropics. The available information suggests that cacti pollination systems are slightly more ecologically specialized in the tropics, but it does not support any trend with regard to functional specialization.

Published today: a new children’s book about bees and other pollinators!

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One of the projects with which I’ve been involved over the last year has been advising on a new book for children about bees and other pollinators, called Can We Really Help The Bees? Written by Katie Daynes and wonderfully illustrated by Róisín Hahessy, it tells the story of what happens when a swarm of bees comes to the window to let a group of children know that they, and their friends the other pollinators, are in trouble. Can they help? Yes they can!

It’s been a real pleasure working with Katie and Róisín on this project for Usborne Publishing and seeing the ideas, text, and illustrations evolve over time. I’ve written a short post over at the Usborne blog with some ideas about how to get children involved in helping the pollinators, and I think that it’s worth repeating one of the things that I wrote: everyone can make a difference to the wildlife around us and no one is too young to be involved!

Because of my involvement with Can We Really Help The Bees? I wasn’t able to include it on my curated list of the best books about bees and other pollinators at the Shepherd site. But it definitely should be on there and is highly recommended!

A new study shows that even short-tubed flowers can specialise on hawkmoths as pollinators

Listen to an interview with me on the Environmental Professional’s Radio podcast!

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I was recently invited to chat about careers and writing and pollinators and pollination with the folks from National Association of Environmental Professionals for their Environmental Professional’s Radio podcast. You can listen to it here:

https://www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/

We covered a lot of ground and it was great fun – thanks for having me!

Global effects of land-use intensity on pollinator biodiversity: a new study just published

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Humans affect the land on which they live in many different ways, and this in turn influences local biodiversity. Sometimes this has positive effects on local wildlife: consider the diversity of birds to be found in well-managed suburban gardens, for example. But often the effect is negative, especially when the land is intensively managed or habitats are destroyed, for example via deforestation or urban development.

This is not a new phenomenon – according to a recent study, most of the habitable parts of the planet have been shaped by humans for at least 12,000 years (see Ellis et al. 2021). What is new, however, is the scale and the speed with which land-use is changing, which are far greater than they have been historically. An important question is the extent to which this change in land-use intensity is affecting pollinator diversity in different parts of the world. Over the past 18 months I’ve been collaborating on a project led by Joe Millard (as part of his PhD) and Tim Newbold which uses the Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (PREDICTS) database to address that very question.

A paper from that collaboration is published today in the journal Nature Communications; it’s open access and can be downloaded by following this link.

The study was global in scale and used data from 12,170 sites to assess the affect of land-use intensity on 4502 pollinating species. The findings are really fascinating; highlights include:

In comparison to natural vegetation, low levels of land-use intensity can have a positive effect on the diversity of pollinators.
For most land categories, greater intensity of land-use results in significant reductions in diversity and abundance of pollinators, however. For example, for urban sites there’s a 43% drop in number of species and a drop in 62% pollinator abundance from the least to the most intensive urban sites.
On cropland, strong negative responses of pollinators to increasing intensity are only found in tropical areas, although different taxonomic groups vary in their responses.
The latter finding is especially concerning given that: (i) most pollinator diversity is found in the tropics; (ii) the majority of tropical crops are insect pollinated; and (3) tropical agriculture is becoming increasingly intensive and land use is likely to rapidly change in the coming decades.

The full reference for the study, with all authors, is:

Millard, J., Outhwaite, C.L., Kinnersley, R., Freeman, R., Gregory, R.D., Adedoja, O., Gavini, S., Kioko, E., Kuhlmann, M., Ollerton, J., Ren, Z.-X. & Newbold, T. (2021) Global effects of land-use intensity on local pollinator biodiversity. Nature Communications 12, 2902. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23228-3

The chapter titles for my book: Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society

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A few people have asked me about what’s covered in my book which is being published by Pelagic and is currently in production. Here’s the chapter titles:

Preface

1 The importance of pollinators and pollination

2 More than just bees: the diversity of pollinators

3 To be a flower

4 Fidelity and promiscuity in Darwin’s entangled bank

5 The evolution of pollination strategies

6 A matter of time: from daily cycles to climate change

7 Agricultural perspectives

8 Urban environments

9 The significance of gardens

10 The shifting fates of pollinators

11 New bees on the block

12 Managing, restoring and connecting habitats

13 The politics of pollination

14 Studying pollinators and pollination

As you can see it’s a very wide-ranging overview of the subject, and written to be accessible to both specialists and non-specialists alike. To quote what I wrote in the Preface:

“While the book is aimed at a very broad audience, and is intended to be comprehensible to anyone with an interest in science and the environment, and their intersection with human societies, I hope it will also be of interest to those dealing professionally with plants and pollinators. The subject is vast, and those working on bee or hoverfly biology, for example, or plant reproductive ecology, may learn something new about topics adjacent to their specialisms. I certainly learned a lot from writing the book.”

The book is about 100,000 words in length, lots of illustrations, and there will be an index. My copy editor reckons there’s 450 references cited, though I haven’t counted. I do know that they run to 28 pages in the manuscript, and that’s with 11pt text. All going well it will be published before Christmas.

Pollinators and pollination in the UK: an introductory workshop – 26th August

Get a 30% discount if you pre-order my new book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society

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PollinatorsandPollination-frontcover

In the next few months my new book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society will be published. As you can imagine, I’m very excited! The book is currently available to pre-order: you can find full details here at the Pelagic Publishing website. If you do pre-order it you can claim a 30% discount by using the pre-publication offer code POLLINATOR.

As with my blog, the book is aimed at a very broad audience including the interested public, gardeners, conservationists, and scientists working in the various sub-fields of pollinator and pollination research. The chapter titles are as follows:

Preface and Acknowledgements
1. The importance of pollinators and pollination
2. More than just bees: the diversity of pollinators
3. To be a flower
4. Fidelity and promiscuity in Darwin’s entangled bank
5. The evolution of pollination strategies
6. A matter of time: from daily cycles to climate change
7. Agricultural perspectives
8. Urban environments
9. The significance of gardens
10. Shifting fates of pollinators
11. New bees on the block
12. Managing, restoring and connecting habitats
13. The politics of pollination
14. Studying pollinators and pollination
References
Index

Pollination ecologists in gardens: protocol and links to other initiatives – UPDATE NUMBER 2

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Andrena bicolor

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:

There are two types of survey – please do both if possible, it would be good to compare the results from the two approaches; otherwise choose the easiest one for you.
Type A surveys involve regular walks at a steady pace around the garden, recording what insects and other flower visitors are active on particular flowers (and noting the ones they are not visiting). Make your walks a standard time, proportional to the size of the garden. For example, in our 10m x 20m garden I am doing 15 minute walks, which involves walking the same route one way, then back, pausing to record data.
Type B surveys involve 10 minute focused observations of a patch of flowers of one species, no larger than 0.5m x 0.5m, recording the number of flowers each pollinator visits.
In both cases, identify the flower visitor to the taxonomic level to which you feel confident, e.g. it’s better to use Andrena sp. 1 or Calliphoridae sp. 2 or Diptera sp. 3 rather than guessing.
Record all data plus metadata about your garden on this spreadsheet which has examples of data that I have collected so far. When you return it, please change “Ollerton” to your own surname : Ollerton garden surveys 2020
Please don’t modify the format of the survey sheets, it will make life very difficult when we collate the data.
Collect data from now until the end of April. By then we will know whether to continue further data collection.
At the end of the month, send your spreadsheets to me: jeff.ollerton [at] northampton.ac.uk I will acknowledge receipt of each one, so if you don’t get an acknowledgement it may be that our spam filter has rejected your email, in which case message me on Twitter or comment below.
Finally – please respect local/national restrictions on movements and social isolation: safe safe and keep your community safe.

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:

POMS flower heads

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.