Category Archives: Pollination

“These things aren’t to study. They’re to turn up very loud and say, hey, once upon a time, everything was just as easy as this”

The title of this brief post is a quote by Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, from an interview that the BBC reported just this morning, regarding the forthcoming release of previously unheard Zeppelin material. You can read the story and hear the interview here.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m not averse to sprinkling musical references into my posts, and this was a great quote that seemed to chime with something else I read this morning. Over at the Small Pond Science blog, evolutionary ecologist Amy Parachnowitsch has a thought provoking post entitled “Save the bees, but maybe not this way“. I’ll let you read it for yourself, but in a nutshell Amy is concerned about the scientific legitimacy of a “Save the Bees” campaign being crowd funded by online activist network Avaaz.org.

I share this concern and it worries me that whoever is organising the campaign is exploiting the genuine desire by people to “do something for the bees” without any regard for what exactly it is that’s “being done”. It seems to me to be purely a campaign fund-raiser by people who don’t understand the issues or how science works, the message being: “These things aren’t to study. They’re to turn up very loud and say, hey, once upon a time, everything was just as easy as this”.

The organisers promise “the world’s first large scale, grass-roots supported, totally independent study of what’s killing our bees that decisively challenges the junk science of big pharma”. As Amy notes, this is hugely offensive to independent scientists who are working on bee conservation issues (such as myself). But without ever actually saying what they are going to do with the money, they’ve already had pledges of money from over 78,000 people! If only raising funds for real research was that easy!

To reiterate what I said in the comments to Amy’s post, something that really worries me is that over-emphasis on pesticides and honey bees as single issues affecting “pollinator conservation” deflects attention from other factors which are at least as important, such as habitat loss. Colleagues and I have a manuscript in preparation at the moment showing that native bee and flower-visiting wasp extinctions in Britain began in the mid-19th century and reached their highest rate during the period 1929-1959, during a time of rapid agricultural intensification (but prior to the introduction of neonicotinoid pesticides that is currently exercising many people). Loss of pollinator diversity is an issue that has deep roots.

In actual fact, although wild bee diversity is declining in the UK, overall abundance seems to be stable as some species are doing extremely well, including a new natural colonist, the Tree Bumblebee (Bombus hypnorum) which is spreading fast and is locally common. But clearly greater diversity provides us with future insurance against losses of other species.

There are positive things that can be done for pollinator populations by every citizen, beyond giving money to crappy, pseudo-scientific campaigns, as I talked about in a recent post of mine. So please don’t contribute to this Avaaz.org request, and use the money you save to buy some wild flower seeds and/or the Led Zeppelin reissues. It will make the world a better place.

Book review: “Pollination and Floral Ecology” by Pat Willmer

2 Replies

Review of “Pollination and Floral Ecology” by Pat Willmer (2011) Princeton University Press. £65. pp. 832.

Some backstory: In early 2012 I was asked by the review editor of the journal Annals of Botany to review this book, and I jumped at the chance as it’s the first major single-author overview of the field of pollination ecology for a number of years, by a well respected academic in the field. Unfortunately the review took a lot longer than I expected, in part because I was also coordinating my department’s Research Excellence Framework submission, on top of other teaching, research and admin duties, and it was taking up quite a bit of my time.

In addition I had mixed feelings about the book and wanted my review to do it justice, not be over-critical but at the same time highlight what I saw as flaws. In the words of the Fairport Convention song, Who Knows Where the Time Goes? – my review was only completed last Christmas and duly submitted. Turns out that the journal has a backlog of book reviews to publish and the editor asked that, given it’s been a couple of years since the book was published, would I mind if the review was posted on the Annals of Botany blog rather than in the printed journal. I happily agreed as it’s likely to get more readers on the blog, and said I’d also post it on my own blog. So here it is:

Any text book that tries to assess and summarise the whole of a multidisciplinary research field such as pollination ecology and floral biology is required to be four things: (1) comprehensive in its scope; (2) up to date in its coverage of the literature; (3) accurate in its assessment of the current state of the field; and (4) authoritative in the conclusions it presents.

This volume by Professor Pat Willmer of the University of St Andrews certainly ticks the first box. It’s a huge book, and covers everything relating to the evolution of flower attraction and reward systems, ecological interactions with pollinators, biochemistry, physiology, agriculture and conservation; all in 29 chapters split into three sections, with 87 pages of references. The literature extends to 2010, which is impressive for a book published in 2011 (though see my comments below about completeness of the literature). Specialist terms are highlighted in bold to direct the reader to the glossary at the back, a useful device even if there are a few inaccuracies, which I’ll mention later.

So far so good, and the author is to be congratulated on putting together such a comprehensive, not to mention timely, single-author book. It’s clearly the summation of a career devoted to studying pollinators and flowers, and the author’s passion for her subject is apparent throughout.

However when we come to points 3 and 4, things are less straightforward. There are some issues with accuracy that are troubling in a book aimed at newcomers to the field as well as established researchers. To give just a few examples:

– on p.18 we are told that asclepiads have “one stamen” (they have five); on p.169 and in the glossary that asclepiad pollinia are the pollen grains from one anther (they are the contents of half an anther); and on p.170 that the pollinaria are “glued” to pollinators (they actually clip on).

– in the glossary, tree ferns are referred to as “cycads”, an error that is repeated on p.89.

– on p.88 there is a statement suggesting that tree fern spores were dispersed by “animal fur” 300 million years ago, long before the evolution of mammals, and that this (and dispersal of spores of fungi and mosses) is the equivalent of pollination: it is not, it equates to seed dispersal.

These are troubling errors of basic botany that are forgivable in an early draft of the book (everyone makes mistakes) but not in the final published version, after it’s been read, reviewed, checked and edited. If the book goes to a second edition I hope that these (and other) mistakes will be fixed. But they do hint at a fundamental problem with a book (and a field) as large and complex as this: a single author is arguably unlikely to be able to do justice to all of the subject matter.

There are parts of the book where it is unclear (to me at least) what the author is actually saying. For example, on p.96 there is a graph which, it is suggested, demonstrates that pollination by animals is “technically uncommon when assessed in terms of the numbers of broad taxonomic groups that use it”, though the legend to the figure claims that “most orders of plants have no families” that possess wind pollination. This is confusing: what is to be concluded by someone new to the field? Is animal pollination common or rare? Likewise, on p.91 we are told that the “first angiosperms…would probably have had their pollen moved mainly by wind…”, but then on p.92 that “an element of insect pollination could be regarded as almost ancestral”. Which is correct?

There are other aspects to the book that are simply out of date; for example the linear, rather deterministic schemes set out in Figures 4.6 and 4.8 showing that Cretaceous flowers were open and radially symmetrical, and only later evolved into complex, bilateral flowers in the Tertiary, ignores fossil discoveries showing that orchids evolved in the Cretaceous (Ramírez et al., 2007). Likewise, discussion of “counterproductive” crypsis in flowers (p.124) neglects recent findings of cryptic, wasp-pollinated plants in South Africa (e.g. Shuttleworth & Johnson, 2009).

There is a theme emerging here: some of the botany that the book presents is inaccurate, confused or out-dated. Fortunately the zoological aspects of the book are much better, as one might hope from a Professor of Zoology.

The final criterion, that the book should be “authoritative in the conclusions it presents”, is however, in my view, the main weakness of this volume. The author is unhappy with recent developments in the field, particularly as they relate to community-scale assessments of plant–pollinator interactions, in terms of network analyses and predictive utility of pollination syndromes. Clearly Professor Willmer is on a mission to rebalance what she perceives as failings within some of the current trends in studying pollination. A book review is not the place for a technical dissection of the author’s arguments, which is best left to the peer-reviewed literature (though I would argue that that’s also the place to present some of the criticisms the author introduces, rather than into a text book such as this). I could focus the whole of this review on these topics because: (a) they take up a large proportion of the book, about one-third of the text pages; and (b) they are highlighted on the cover as being one of the main contributions of the book; specifically, that the author provides a critique of previous work that does not distinguish between “casual visitors and true pollinators” that can in turn result in “misleading conclusions about flower evolution and animal-flower mutualism”. Unfortunately her targets are straw men, and one – I believe quite telling – example will suffice.

On p.447 there is a criticism of the use by Waser et al. (1996) of Charles Robertson’s historical data set, and specifically that the analyses they present “…did not distinguish visitors from pollinators even though Robertson’s database did include information on this”. However Waser et al. clearly state (p.1045 of their paper) that only pollinators were included in the analyses, not all flower visitors, and that “visitation is not a synonym for pollination…non-pollinating visitors are excluded (as in Robertson 1928)” (p.1048).

Why should Professor Willmer make a statement to the contrary? Evidently she wishes to impress upon her readers that (in her opinion) there are fundamental problems in current approaches to studying pollination at a community level. But even if that were the case (and I don’t believe it is) misrepresenting previous studies to suit an argument is poor scholarship at best.

Regardless of whether some of her criticism is well founded, the author does not seem to appreciate that plant–flower visitor interaction networks are ecologically important regardless of whether or not a flower visitor acts as a pollinator. More fundamentally, true pollination networks possess similar attributes to flower visitor networks, for example a nested pattern of interactions, and arguments about level of generalisation of species are a matter of scale, not category (Ollerton et al., 2003).

At the end of her Preface, Professor Willmer reveals to us quite a lot about her personal attitude to research when she states that some readers might find her approach “too traditional” in an “era where ecological modelers [might be claimed to] have more to tell us than old-style field workers”. What the author fails to appreciate is that this is a grossly false dichotomy and that most of the pollination ecologists who have embraced new analytical methodologies for understanding plant–pollinator interactions are also “old-style field workers” with considerable experience of studying the ecology of flowers and their pollinators beyond the computer screen.

In summary this is a book that, for all its good qualities of comprehensiveness and (mostly) up to date coverage, should be read with caution: parts of it are neither as accurate nor as authorative as the field of pollination and floral ecology deserves.

LITERATURE CITED

Ollerton J, Johnson SD, Cranmer L, Kellie, S. 2003. The pollination ecology of an assemblage of grassland asclepiads in South Africa. Annals of Botany 92: 807-834.

Ramírez SR, Gravendeel B, Singer RB, Marshall CR, Pierce NE. 2007. Dating the origin of the Orchidaceae from a fossil orchid with its pollinator. Nature 448: 1042-1045.

Shuttleworth A, Johnson SD. 2009. The importance of scent and nectar filters in a specialized wasp-pollination system. Functional Ecology 23: 931-940.

Waser NM, Chittka L, Price MV, Williams N, Ollerton J. 1996. Generalization in pollination systems, and why it matters. Ecology 77: 1043-1060.

What are YOU doing for our pollinators this year? (reduce, reuse, recycle part 6)

4 Replies

Earlier this year I was asked to write a short article by my former PhD student, and still a current collaborator, Dr Sam Tarrant. Sam works for the RSPB as the CEMEX UK-funded Biodiversity Advisor, and wanted something on pollinator conservation that could be circulated in the CEMEX company’s e-newsletter. In the spirit of reworking and reusing odd bits of writing, I thought I’d post it here too.

Insects are vital for our country’s economy. Don’t believe me? Then read on….

Beneath a large black mulberry tree near the University of Northampton’s Newton Building there is a plaque that commemorates its planting “On Shakespeare Commemoration Day, 3^rd May 1916”. Despite its age this tree annually produces large crops of succulent berries, aided by the fact that wind eddies are sufficient to disperse its pollen, ensuring pollination and fruit set. Each year it’s a scramble between students, lecturers and birds, to see who can eat the most.

In contrast, the old apple trees in the grounds possess a different strategy – pollination by insects that move from flower to flower each spring. This form of pollination is both more sophisticated and less reliable than wind pollination, and is currently under considerable threat: whilst there will never be a shortage of wind currents in Britain, insect pollinators are in decline.

The apples trees are not alone in requiring insects to pollinate them, so to do other farm and garden crops, including oil seed rape, field beans, courgettes, runner beans, and strawberries and other soft fruit. It’s worth at least £440 million annually to the British economy, and most of it is done by wild bees and hoverflies, rather than managed hives of honey bees.

But all is not well with these insects in Britain – they are in decline. Although the extent of the “pollination crisis” is debated by scientists, long term records show us that these insects are under pressure: 23 species of bee and flower-visiting wasp have gone extinct since the mid 1800s, as have 18 species of butterflies. Less obviously, other species have considerably reduced in abundance so that they are now found in only a small part of their previous distribution.

There are lots of gardeners who want to “do something” for the pollinators, and keeping honey bees is often mentioned. By all means, if you wish to help the honey bees (which are suffering their own problems) then keep a hive or two. That will not, however, help our wild, native pollinators; the analogy I use is that it’s the equivalent of trying to help our declining songbirds by opening a chicken farm!

If you want to make a real difference for pollinators in your own garden, here are a few ideas:

start by planting nectar and pollen rich flowers; there’s a useful list on the Royal Horticultural Society’s website (see below).
allow plants such as clover and dandelion to flower in your lawn, bees love them.
as well as food, pollinators also need nest and egg laying sites, so you could help by allowing some of the far corners of your plot to run a little wild.
wait until late Spring to cut back hollow stemmed perennials as they are used as hibernating places by some of our bees.
allow mason bees to nest in old walls and don’t worry about them, the wall won’t fall down.
And finally, stop using pesticides!

Changing some of our gardening habits can help a group of insects on which we rely and which supports our economy in a very real way.

Further reading and information:

Bees Wasps and Ants Recording Society: http://www.bwars.com/

Bumblebee Conservation Trust: http://www.bumblebeeconservation.org.uk/

Butterfly Conservation: http://www.butterfly-conservation.org/

Hoverfly Recording Scheme: http://www.hoverfly.org.uk/

Royal Horticultural Society’s list of plants for pollinators: http://www.rhs.org.uk/Gardening/Sustainable-gardening/Plants-for-pollinators

Ménage à trois mutualism

17 Replies

Relationships involving a “household of three” hold a fascination that is part prurient and part wonderment: prurient for perhaps obvious reasons, and wonderment as it’s sometimes hard enough to make a ménage à deux work! Historically this domestic arrangement has been the lifestyle of choice of a surprisingly large and diverse set of influential thinkers and creative individuals, including Aldous Huxley, Lord Nelson, Carl Jung, Erwin Schrödinger, and Hattie Jacques. Indeed, one of my favourite musicians, David Crosby, wrote a song about such relationships (Triad) which got him kicked out of The Byrds.

In nature, ménage à trois are occasionally encountered and may be more common than we think, and have been on my mind because this week I’ve been talking about mutualistic relationships with my first year undergraduates. Mutualisms are interactions between species in which both benefit, as opposed to exploitative relationships such as predation or parasitism in which one of the partners is at a disadvantage (being eaten is a great disadvantage….) Mutualistic interactions are common and important, and include many (but not all) plant-pollinator interactions, seed dispersal by birds and other animals, mycorrhizal relationships between plants and fungi, and many more. As well as studying plant-pollinator interactions, I’ve a long-standing interest in the full breadth of these examples of “biological barter“, in all their varied forms.

In most cases mutualistic relationships involve pairs of species (for example a plant and a pollinator) although these species pairs are embedded within a larger network of interactions: that plant may have many pollinators, and those pollinators may service other plants. In this sense it requires just two partners to make the interaction work – a “household of two”. More rarely, research on the biodiversity of species interactions throws up examples of “households” involving three species, and a fascinating case has recently been worked out and published by Jonathan Pauli and colleagues. This involves three-toed sloths and their relationship with the algae and moths that colonise the sloth’s fur – you can read the abstract here. In summary, the algae benefit from nutrients provided by the moths living in the fur; the sloths eat the algae to supplement a restricted diet of leaves; the moths benefit from the sloths transporting them to defecation sites where they lay their eggs, then recolonise the sloths. This slothy ménage à trois is a wonderful instance of interdependency within nature.

The other case of a three-part mutualism with which I’m familiar is that between anemonefish, and sea anemones and the algae which are housed in their tentacles. The fish and the anemones provide mutual defence of one another, whilst the algae photosynthesise and provide carbohydrates to the anemone, and benefit from the nitrogenous waste produced by the fish. It’s a system that I’ve done a little work on with marine biologist colleagues, specifically the broad scale biogeography of the interaction and its local assemblage structure, but we’ve not studied the whole three-part system.

What other three-part examples are there in nature? I’d be very interested to hear about any of which you’re aware.

It begs a question as to whether three is an upper limit to the number of species that can engage in such relationships? Are there any four- or five-part mutualisms? Or are these too unstable over evolutionary time, because if one species goes extinct it could cause the extinction of other species? Interesting questions about fascinating interactions!

Thank the insects for Christmas (REBLOG)

9 Replies

It’s become a tradition (ok, only for the past two years, but a tradition has to start somewhere!) for me to post a version of this festive blog entry. I’ve updated the stats for 2013. Hope you enjoy it.

Christmas! A time to relax and enjoy ourselves, to share time with family and friends, and to unwind during the cold and gloom of winter. Whatever your faith, or lack of it, Christmas should be about taking a break and reflecting on the year that has passed. We’re helped in that respect by the ceremonial seasonal trimmings: the Christmas tree, strings of flashing lights, baubles and tinsel. So while you’re kissing a loved one under the mistletoe, admiring that glossy holly wreath, or tucking into your Christmas dinner, spare a thought for the insects.

“What in Saint Nicholas’s name” you are asking ”have insects got to do with Christmas?!” Well, like the turkey, we’d be stuffed without them: they play an essential part in providing us with the things we associate with Christmas. If we had no flies, wasps, bees and other bugs acting as pollinators there’d be no berries on your mistletoe or your holly. Kissing and admiring would be a less festive affair and that’s just for starters. These insects also pollinate many of the vegetables, herbs and spices on your plate, as well as some of the forage that went to fatten your roast bird or tender joint of meat. Not to forget much of what went into the nut roast that’s feeding the vegetarian relatives.

The economic value of insect pollination in the UK was estimated by the recent National Ecosystem Assessment to be about £430 million per year. In fact this is a huge under valuation because the labour costs alone of paying people to hand pollinate those crops would run into billions of pounds. This sounds far fetched but it’s already happening to fruit crops in parts of China. The answer is to encourage wild insects, not artificially managed honey bees, because collectively the former are far more abundant, and often more effective, as pollinators. Their diversity is an insurance against losing any one species in the future. The NEA’s valuation is also too low because it only deals with commercial edible crops, and does not include those we grow in our gardens and allotments. It also does not take account of ornamental crops such as mistletoe and holly, both of which are dioecious species, which is to say that individuals are either male or female, rather than hermaphrodite as are most plants. This means that the plants cannot self pollinate and insects are absolutely vital to their reproduction and to the production of the decorative berries we so value (a holly wreath without berries is just a big spiky doughnut, in my opinion).

Whilst researching the economic value of the annual mistletoe and holly crops for this blog posting last year I had a conversation with Jonathan Briggs over at Mistletoe Matters and he told me that “the mistletoe trade in Britain is entirely unregulated and not documented in any tangible way”, and the same is true of holly. We therefore have no idea what the economic value of these non-food crops actually is. But some back-of-the-red-and-gold-Christmas-lunch-napkin calculations can at least give us an insight. Auction reports for 2013 show that on average the best quality berried holly was selling for £2.50 per kg whilst equivalent quality holly without berries sold for only 80p per kg. In other words, pollination by insects increases the value of that crop by more than 300%! Similarly the high quality mistletoe averaged £1.20 per kg, whilst the second grade stuff was only 40p per kg. And the best holly wreaths (presumably with berries!) were averaging £7.00 each.

These are wholesale prices, of course; retail cost to the customer is much greater. A decent holly wreath will set you back between £15 and £30 whilst online shopping for mistletoe is in the £5 to £20 range, depending on how much you want. The national census of 2011 shows us that there are 23.4 million households in England and Wales, plus there are 2.36 million in Scotland and 0.70 million in Northern Ireland. Let’s round it down and say there’s 26 million households in the whole of the UK. Let’s also be very conservative and estimate that only 5% of those households bought one holly wreath and some mistletoe at a total cost of £20. Multiply that by the small proportion of households buying these festive crops and you arrive at a figure of about £26.5 million! And that doesn’t include non-household use in shops, offices and businesses. So there you have it: an industry worth a few tens of millions (at least) all being ultimately supported by insects.

With pollination, timing is everything, and Jonathan also made the point that spring flowering mistletoe and holly can be important early nectar sources for insects. Therefore despite the poor summer weather in 2012, that year was a good one for mistletoe berries because the pollination happened before the heavy rains began. Despite being quite common plants, rather little research has been done on either holly or mistletoe pollination in the UK and it would make for an interesting student project. The Landscape and Biodiversity Research Group here at the University has for many years been working to understand the ecology of plants and pollinators, and how to best conserve them. In this blog I’ve referred a few times to some ongoing projects researching how the wider landscape is supporting pollinators in habitats such as country house gardens (Hilary Erenler’s PhD work which she completed this year) and urban centres (ongoing PhD work by Muzafar Hussain). There’s also the work completed a few years ago by Sam Tarrant and Lutfor Rahman on pollinator (and other) biodiversity on restored landfill sites. Plus research that’s recently started by Kat Harrold on how whole landscapes support pollinators in the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area. This is all part of a broader programme of research into the conservation of biodiversity in our region and beyond, including our Biodiversity Index, a contribution to the Shared Enterprise Empowering Delivery (SEED) sustainability project.

Biodiversity matters and its importance to our society is being increasingly recognised by government, business and the public. So if you make one New Year’s resolution on the 31st December, let it be that you will put away your garden bug sprays for 2014 and learn to love the insects (even wasps!) who give us so much and help to support our economy in a very real way. It costs us nothing; all we need to give them is well managed, diverse, unpolluted habitats in which to live. Have a great Christmas everyone!

Cockroach with a hint of lemon – Brazil Diary 7

4 Replies

Hummingbirds have been a continuous feature of my travels around south-east Brazil since day one when I ticked off the Sword-tailed hummingbird from my list at FUNCAMP. Since then I’ve kept a special ear and eye out for their whirring wing beats and rapid, darting movements, partly because they are significant pollinators in these Neotropical plant communities, but also because members of our research group have a long-standing interest in their ecology. Stella Watts for example has worked on hummingbird-flower interactions in Peru, and our friend and colleague Bo Dalsgaard spent a year in Northampton during his PhD research on Caribbean hummingbirds, and we now collaborate on some macroecological questions about hummingbird specialization in relation to current and past climates. And I did some work on their role as (probable) pollinators of some forest Apocynaceae in Guyana during field work in the late 1990s, which remains unpublished. Must write up those data one day…

The bird guide I’m using for this trip lists more than 80 hummingbird species for Brazil, many of which are found within the Atlantic Forest system. Over the last few days we’ve seen several of them in the lowland rainforest around Ubatuba, which proved to be a lot drier and warmer than the montane forest I described last time. It’s been good to have Pietro Maruyama on hand to identify the birds as they flash past. Pietro’s been studying the interactions between these birds and the flowers on which they feed as part of his PhD work, and has recently published a great paper on the subject.

On most days of field work we might see two or three species, but the day before yesterday we saw 11 species in just an hour. We were visiting a private garden belonging to a retired gentleman named Jonas who has been feeding the hummingbirds in and around his property constantly for about 12 years. The day we visited, Jonas had 13 bottles of sugar solution hung up around the house and we estimated that over 100 individual birds were using them. It’s hard to be more accurate as these birds move so fast, disappearing and re-appearing without warning, like hyperactive kids on a outing to a chocolate factory. It’s a quite stunning sight.

The 11 species we observed are about half of the total number Jonas has recorded since he began feeding the birds and there’s a regular annual rhythm to their appearance, presumably in response to temperature and plant flowering in other parts of the country. The density and richness of birds in this one small property is clearly artificial and we saw nothing like it out in the forest. Jonas is concerned that by feeding the birds so frequently (he uses 5kg of sugar a day and replenishes each feeder several times) he might be negatively affecting plant pollination in the surrounding forest. I doubt that this is the case and reassured him that his efforts were probably positive, certainly compared to some of the other activities that go on around the area, such as building, clearing forest, agriculture, and so on. Assuming that food availability limits the population size of these birds (which may or may not be the case) then feeding the hummingbirds should result in a population increase in that area which will spill out into the wider forest. Similar arguments apply to feeding garden birds in the UK, particularly in the winter.

As I watched the birds crowd and jostle around the feeders, frequently erupting into conflict and chase, I reflected that my trip to Brazil was passing as swiftly as the waft from a hummingbird’s wing on my skin. These last few days in lowland rainforest and restinga vegetation were spent conducting another two surveys of wind versus animal pollination, to add to the previous ones. This lowland forest is very similar in structure to the montane forest 1000 m higher, whilst the coastal restinga forest has rather shorter trees and is also drier. The coastline is stunningly beautiful but there’s a clear tension between its roles as a tourist destination and as an area of rich biodiversity. Humans are often drawn to such places and may unintentionally destroy what they so value, one of the ironic aspects to ecotourism as an ecosystem service.

Over the last few days I’ve been talking a lot with the students who are accompanying us, about their research data and what it means. One of our ongoing themes is the idea of flower colour, shape, smell, etc., as hypotheses about the likely pollinators of those flowers, a notion captured in the idea of “pollination syndromes”. For some flowers the syndromes are probably good predictors, for example the red tubular hummingbird-pollinated species of Fuchsia, Aeschynanthus and other Atlantic Forest plants. But there are also lots of examples of plants with flowers that don’t fit the conventional, “classic” syndromes. Yesterday on a 6km hike we encountered a species of Piper with very oddly smelling flowers, which by general agreement we described as “cockroach with a hint of lemon”. We have no idea what pollinates this plant, though we have some predictions. The genus Piper with its deceptively simple flowers has long fascinated me, ever since I undertook a short postdoctoral project on some Australian species in 1993-94. Hopefully Andre and Coquinho will spend some time observing the plants with their digital movie camera when they are in the forest next month; the results could be fascinating.

The Brazilian students I have met are a committed, passionate bunch who believe strongly in the importance of the natural heritage they are studying and trying to conserve. Though I’ve come and gone from their country like a hummingbird to a feeder, I hope I’ve made some impression on them. They’ve certainly impressed me and I’ve learned a lot from them, from their professors, and from the places we’ve visited. It’s been an amazing adventure but it’s time to come home now and see my family and friends, and colleagues. Over-and-out from Brazil.

If your ears aren’t dirty, you’re not doing it correctly – Brazil Diary 4

6 Replies

The first part of this post was written on a long car journey down through Minas Gerais State to Botucatu, with Andre, Felipe Amorim and Ana Moraes. It’s more than a 1000 km drive from Serra do Cipo state park, so we have done the journey in two parts, beginning at 5.30pm Saturday night, driving for over 3 hours, back through Belo Horizonte to the small town of Igarapé. Arriving at 9pm, we looked for a hotel in which to spend the night. The first one was a flea pit and Ana was sure she’d seen an insect running from the light when we assessed the rooms. All of us love biodiversity, but not that much, so we politely declined. The second place we tried was the Marketing Palace Hotel and was basic but clean. After a quick dinner and a few beers we retired to bed. I dreamt of magic and suicide in vivid technicolour, but fortunately didn’t wake Andre with whom I was sharing.

With little supporting evidence, I put the dreams down to secondary compounds in the Miconia fruit I’d been eating during field work earlier that day. The morning had started early with a trip into the State Park in search of a population of an orchid that Ana is studying for her postdoctoral project, the species Epidendrum campestre. Ana has already assessed several populations for their genetic and morphological variability and was keen to add another to her data set. There is a herbarium collection from this area from 1978 but it’s not been relocated since. The park is over 33,000 ha in area, soon to increase to about 39,000 ha with the purchase of an adjacent farm that will become part of the park.

Once we had left the main trail and headed for the low, rocky hills, the walking (really scrambling) became tough, slow going. As we picked our way from rock to rock, pushing through the less dense patches of vegetation, it was clear that this is an area of incredible plant diversity. Rocky outcrops and ravines are always good for plant diversity as species that cannot survive the greater competition found in richer soils are able to hang on in crevices and in shallow, humus-filled depressions. But we had no luck; the orchids were not in that part of the park.

As well as helping Ana and Felipe to search for these legendary orchids, Andre and I recorded all of the plant species that were in flower, and scored them for animal or wind pollination, based on the type of flowers, pollen release, flower visitors, etc. Over the day we recorded about 60 species in flower (perhaps one quarter of the total flora, as many species were not flowering), of which 10% were wind pollinated. This fits with the prediction of a study I published in 2011 of around 90% animal pollinated species for these tropical communities, compared to 70-80% on average in the temperate zone. It’s satisfying when ecology is a predictive science in this way, though understanding why these patterns exist is less straightforward; is it because there are more animals in the tropics that can act as pollinators? Perhaps, though bee diversity actually peaks in subtropical latitudes, in seasonally dry Mediterranean vegetation rather than in the tropics.

As well as scoring pollination systems, I was also looking out for species from my favourite plant family, Apocynaceae. And I wasn’t disappointed; not only did we see at least 10 species (most of them flowering) but I was able to taste the fruit of one species, Hancornia speciosa, adding another family to my life list of those that I’ve eaten.

Following a quick lunch of apples, local cheese bread and small pies, it was clear that we were running out of water. So we decided to follow a small stream up to a point where it was fast flowing and potable. The community here was low gallery forest, cool and welcoming and with a succession of shallow pools, the humidity allowing the growth of epiphytic sundews, ferns, and a few bromeliads. Tired by the climb, I sat and watched as a Green Kingfisher bobbed and displayed on a branch. Although dirty, hot, and aching, I felt myself very fortunate indeed to be in such a special place. The title of this posting comes from a comment that Andre had made the previous day as we scrumped ripe mangos from a roadside tree; according to his father, when eating mangos, “if your ears aren’t dirty, you’re not doing it correctly”. The same notion applies to field work; if by the end of a day of tropical field work you are not dripping in sweat, filthy, with insect bites and stressed muscles, and desperate for a shower and a cold beer, you’re not doing it right.

FUNCAMP – Brazil Diary 1

9 Replies

“Nobody but a person fond of natural history can imagine the pleasure of strolling under cocoa-nuts, in a thicket of bananas and coffee plants, and an endless number of wild flowers”

Charles Darwin – letter to his father; Brazil, February 1832

When Darwin wrote this letter he was 23 years old and was experiencing the tropics for the first time in his life. It’s a typically understated, 19th Century view of the sheer unfamiliarity and exuberance that tropical environments impress upon the traveller from north temperate climes. In actuality Darwin was probably initially overwhelmed by the whole experience: I’m 48 and have made many such trips, and the first few days in the tropics never fail to overwhelm and excite me. Last Friday I arrived in Brazil for a month of teaching, lecturing and research funded by a grant from FAPESP awarded to my Brazilian collaborators, Professor Marlies Sazima and André Rodrigo Rech. This week, with André’s help, I am running a course for graduate students entitled: “Pollination: ecology, evolution and conservation” at the University of Campinas, which everyone refers to as Unicamp, one of the most prestigious and research active universities in Latin America. The following week we head to Belo Horizonte where I’m giving a talk at the National Botanical Congress, and a lecture at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

Following all these teaching and lecturing engagements, I head out into the field with André and some of the other Unicamp postgrads for two weeks of data collection on the ecology of Brazilian plants and their pollinators. The field work starts in the Serra do Cipó National Park, then moves on to the Serra do Mar State Park, one of the largest remaining areas of Atlantic Rainforest.

We’re half way through the pollination course and the students have been just great; there are 28 of them, including some postdocs and professors from other universities, which is very flattering. Each day is structured around a lecture, plus papers to read and the students bring questions to pitch to the group for discussion. We’re also doing a little field work around the campus though the weather has been rather wet the last couple of days, which has limited what we can do.

As well as interacting with the students, a real highlight of the trip so far has been the diversity of bird species on the campus. After checking into my hotel on 1st November I took a stroll around the grounds and immediately spotted bird after bird that I’d never seen before, but which are common in this area. No sooner had I started to identify one species (initially using Ber van Perlo’s Field Guide to the Birds of Brazil, which I soon augmented by a locally produced guide to the birds on campus ) than another hove into view and I’d have to remember its features in order to identify it next; and then another; and then another. Information overload and, as I said, overwhelming!

Bird of the Week has been the Southern Crested Caracara which I first saw sitting at the top of a tree from my bedroom window. By the 2nd November I had counted 21 bird species; this went up to 36 the next day which included a walk around a small lake on campus. Current total is about 40, but there are others which I’ve yet to identify and have been too busy with the course to spend much time birding. But I’ve also added two new plant families to my life list of those I’ve eaten: Aquifoliaceae, the holly family, which provides the popular South American drink maté. And Dilleniaceae, via the introduced species Dillenia indica the fruit of which is edible and popular in South East Asia, though is hopefully better cooked than raw: to me it tastes of lemon infused with car tyres.

Note to my family, students and colleagues back in Northampton: whilst it’s true that my hotel is called FUNCAMP, this actually stands for Fundação de Desenvolvimento da Unicamp. It in no way implies that I’m not working hard!

Je ne egret rien

5 Replies

Conservation does not mean the same as preservation, despite the popular synonymy of these two words. Preservation implies that something remains the same, is static and held in the same unchanging state. One can preserve an old book, or fruit, or traditions for instance. But one cannot preserve biodiversity because species change in abundance and distribution, regardless of the activities of humans. That’s just how nature is. One could take a deep time view of such change and consider the ancient habitats and organisms that built much of Britain’s underlying geology, as I mentioned when I described some walking on the Dorset coast a while back. But even over shorter time scales that are comprehendible to humans, biodiversity changes, by the day, the month and the year.

That’s where egrets, and the pitiful punning title of this post, come in. At the end of last week Karin and I spent a long weekend on the Suffolk coast, in the village of Walberswick. It’s an old stomping ground for Karin but I don’t really know this area very well at all. We spent our time talking and reconnecting, eating local food, drinking the good local Adnams beer, walking along the beaches, through saltmarsh and reed beds, and collecting stones and sea glass (I really like sea glass and have amassed bottles of the stuff over the years that we keep on sunny windowsills – think of it as aesthetic waste management). And we looked at birds as we encountered them in these rich, diverse habitats. Final total for the weekend was a respectable 37 species, including a few I couldn’t identify, helped along by a trip to the RSPB’s Minsmere Reserve (with, it seemed, every other birder in Suffolk; we had to queue to get into some hides).

Two of the species we saw were egrets, a common name that covers several genera in the heron family Ardeiedae. As the Wikipedia entry for egrets notes: “The distinction between a heron and an egret is rather vague, and depends more on appearance than biology”, as good an argument for the importance of scientific species names as any I’ve encountered.

The first of the two species I spotted was the Little Egret (Egretta garzetta), an elegantly roaming bird that actively hunts along river margins and through marshland and flooded fields. I was able to get within 10 metres or so of a bird at Walberswick and could admire its poised movements on vivid yellow feet, contrasting with black legs to make it look like a woman wearing footless stockings, as Karin put it (she took the photograph that accompanies this entry). The second species of egret was the Great White Egret (Ardea alba), a much taller bird than the first, and an ambush hunter; like the related Grey Heron its strategy is to stand still and wait until prey comes to it.

The earliest record of a Little Egret in Britain was almost 200 years ago, in East Yorkshire in 1826. However it is not known to have bred in this country until a pair did so in Dorset in 1996. In other words, just 20 years ago this was an uncommon bird in Britain whose rare arrival would have generated a flurry of local twitching. Now it hardly gets a mention on birding sites, we are so familiar with it. Not so the Great White Egret which still raises some excitement when it appears. Although this species was also recorded as early as 1821 in Britain, Great White Egrets only began to breed in Britain in 2012 and there is considerable anticipation that it will follow the Little Egret in expanding its population in this country.

We could add other birds to this list of species which have naturally colonised Britain within living memory, such as the almost ubiquitous Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) as well as insects such as the Tree Bumblebee Bombus hypnorum and the Ivy Bee Colletes hederae. Others will undoubtedly follow in the future, and perhaps the Cattle Egret will be the next member of the heron family to take up permanent residence on our shores.

Of course the flip side of new arrivals such as these is extinction, a topic that I will return to at some point as we’re currently putting the finishing touches to what I hope will be an exciting new paper on British bee and wasp extinctions. Understanding the ebbs and flows of biodiversity over time requires data to be collected and we are fortunate in Britain to have a number of active monitoring schemes that regularly survey different groups of organisms. This activity is vital if we are to be able to monitor our wildlife and to take action if we see declines, though the most recent results for the Status of Priority Species index makes grim reading: the overall abundance of threatened species in the UK declined by 68% between 1970 and 2010. It’s a complex message, though, and there are some success stories within those statistics. But the animals that have fared worst have been the insects, particularly moths and some of the bees, wasps and ants.

Against this background of monitoring and decline I was happy to accept an invitation last week to attend a Defra-sponsored meeting at the Natural History Museum in London to discuss the setting up of an insect pollinator monitoring scheme. A group of about 50 scientists and conservationists discussed what such a scheme might look like and how it could be implemented. I’ll report back in more detail about this in the future once some decisions have been made as to how to proceed.

Meetings such as this, as well as being important in their own right, provide an opportunity to catch up with old friends and colleagues and discuss their latest work, or latest child/house move/job move, as appropriate. So it was good to have a couple of beers after the meeting and chat with a few people including Dave Goulson, arguably one of the most significant scientists working in British pollinator conservation, and an outspoken critic of the current use of neonicotinoid pesticides. Dave founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and has produced a lot of the scientific literature on bumblebees as he describes with wit and passion in his recent book A Sting in the Tale. I’ve known Dave for over twenty years (we were PhD students together) so I was a little embarrassed to ask him to sign my copy of his book, but as a collector of signed editions I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip. Dave mentioned that the book has been shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and I hope it wins: ok, I’m biased, and can read it in Dave’s own voice which adds enormously to the book. But it’s a great read for anyone interested in pollinators, or conservation, or just in the processes which turn a natural history obsessed kid into a professional scientist.

This will be my last blog entry from Britain for a month; on 31st October I fly out to Brazil to spend time with André Rodrigo Rech, running a short pollination biology course, speaking at the Brazilian Botanical Congress, and conducting field work. I’ll try to blog as I go along. In a happy coincidence the Great White Egret is depicted on the Brazilian five real banknote. I’ll look out for it.

Conservation: from CSN to CSR

5 Replies

The history of what might be loosely called “the conservation movement” is a complex one with roots that are both deep and ramified. In the west, direct antecedents can be found in the work of 19th century pro-environmental writers such as Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh, but there are arguably also more subtle influences from other sources, for example the “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet” John Clare whose natural history inspired verse captured a rural way of life and a landscape that was rapidly disappearing:

All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books

The later foundation of organisations such as the RSPB, the Audubon Society, and the precursors of the Wildlife Trusts gave impetus to environmental campaigns focused on specific issues such as species extinctions and destruction of important wildlife sites. But it was in the 1960s that nature conservation, and environmentalism more generally, began to become of wider concern. Again the influences were broad but certainly included both popular science writing such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and the attitudes and campaigning of the counter-culture. Yet a generation later, as a student studying the subject in the 1980s, it was clear to me that the mainstream had not fully engaged with what was still considered hippy, tree-hugging notions of saving the planet/whale/rainforest/ [delete as appropriate].

Having always been a fan of vintage West Coast rock, these hippy ideals were on my mind at the start of last week when I travelled to the BBC’s Maida Vale studios to attend a recording of Radio 4’s Mastertapes featuring David Crosby and his band. As well as playing music from his first solo album, the haunting and majestic If Only I Could Remember My Name, Crosby talked about his life and political activism. The following evening Karin and I were back in London, this time at the Royal Albert Hall to see Crosby with his compadres Steven Stills and Graham Nash, performing as the incomparable CSN. A number of songs from their back catalogue feature environmentalism in one form or another and, despite their vintage, they are as in touch with the political scene as ever.

Now, in the first decades of the 21st century, the green agenda has gone mainstream and it seems that every large business discusses the environment in their Corporate Social Responsibility statements. So with only a few hours sleep I jumped from CSN to CSR, a theme that recurred during the first Northamptonshire Local Nature Partnership conference held at the University the next day. One hundred and twenty delegates heard talks that presented environmentalism and nature conservation from the perspectives of citizen health and well being, Christianity, on-the-ground conservation activities, and the needs of business and enterprise. In the afternoon there were smaller showcase sessions and I presented an overview of pollination as an ecosystem service.

Every organisation (public and private sector) wants to be “green” these days, which is a good thing of course if it’s genuine and well conceived. But as David Rolton pointed out in his talk, businesses were few and far between at this event. During the question-and-answer session I followed up David’s comment with a description of our experiences with the Biodiversity Index. Despite winning a Green Apple Award, and having lots of verbal encouragement from the private sector, as soon as we explain to businesses that they have to pay to use the Index, all interest dissipates. These are the same businesses who are willing to invest in green initiatives such as recycling and energy efficiency, presumably because it saves them money as well: it seems that CSR for most businesses does not extend beyond paying lip service to biodiversity, despite an economic input of over £30 billion that the UK receives from the natural environment every year.

It took time for businesses and other organisations to acknowledge their responsibilities to the environment, and to develop policies relating to recycling, non-pollution and resource efficiency. It seems that businesses are only just beginning to acknowledge their societal (rather than corporate) responsibilities with regard to conservation, and it’s an ongoing process that exercises government. But conservation of biodiversity has got to become a priority; once a species is lost it’s lost forever, and we erode not only a natural heritage that has evolved over billions of years, but also the direct and tangible benefits biodiversity gives us. In the words of CSN: “It’s been a long time coming; it’s going to be a long time gone.“