Category Archives: Pollination

Introducing Ceropegia stylesii – a novel species of “Brachystelma” from South Africa

This is a guest post by Dr Annemarie Heiduk about a new species that she’s recently described.

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In an earlier blog post about the discovery of a novel Ceropegia species, Jeff’s finishing sentence was: “I wonder what else is still waiting to be discovered in the stunning grasslands of South Africa?”

I am happy to provide a first answer to this question: Ceropegia stylesii.

This new species does not have the tubular kettle-trap flowers typical of Ceropegia, which temporarily trap pollinators, but open-rotate corollas where the gynostegium (fused male and female reproductive organs) is freely accessible to pollinators. So, in the traditional sense, C. stylesii is not a Ceropegia. This needs some explanation here!

Ceropegia is a genus in the plant family Apocynaceae (Jeff’s favourite family of plants!) and therein the genus is placed in the subfamily Asclepiadoideae which originally was a family on its own (“Asclepiadaceae”).

Within this subfamily, the genus Ceropegia belongs to the Stapeliinae – a subtribe which comprises ca. 720 species. About 220 species thereof have exciting looking and very cleverly designed kettle-trap flowers which attract small flies as pollinators via deceptive strategies (see http://plantlifesouthafrica.blogspot.com/2019/07/plantlife-sa-volume-473-july-2019.html). The remaining species in Stapeliinae are the well-known stem-succulent stapeliads (ca. 355 species in >30 genera) and ca. 140 species known as Brachystelma.

With increasingly better molecular methods to study the evolutionary relationships of species in Stapeliinae, the traditional grouping of the species was illuminated as being artificial, i.e., species with kettle-trap flowers are not actually a natural group and Brachystelma species are scattered among them; the stapeliads are also nested in Ceropegia but as a single (monophyletic) group. These results based on DNA-sequence similarities are not compatible with the traditional generic concept in Stapeliinae, and as a result, changes were instigated.

Some colleagues wish to see all 720 species of Ceropegia, Brachystelma and the stapeliads merged into one single large genus Ceropegia, a solution which would entail more than 400 new name combinations. Others prefer to adopt a less dramatic change of concept and only include Brachystelma in an enlarged Ceropegia while keeping the stapeliads separate based on their monophyly and distinct vegetative features. This pragmatic solution considers both taxonomic and phylogenetic facts and reduces the previously multiple cases of paraphyly to a single case. More importantly, it avoids hundreds of name changes in the group. Both concepts are correct in their own right and justified, so it is a personal decision which one to follow.

The newly described species C. stylesii would traditionally have been placed in Brachystelma as it is lacking tubular kettle-trap flowers. After the inclusion of Brachystelma into Ceropegia, C. stylesii is placed within section Bowkerianae – a group comprising species both with and without tubular kettle-trap flowers. With the description of C. stylesii, the section now has 15 members of which 10 have open-rotate flowers. Among these, C. stylesii appears to be most closely related to C. gerrardii from which it can only readily be distinguished when in flower (see the lower most image above).

The flowers of C. stylesii superficially look like miniature versions of a dark-flowered form of C. gerrardii, which growths in the same habitat. C. stylesii flowers are only about 6 mm in size whereas those of C. gerrardii are about three times larger. While C. gerrardii occurs in grasslands throughout eastern South Africa, C. stylesii is believed to be endemic to Ngome, where it is known from two localities with a total of less than 10 plants. After the recent discovery of C. heidukiae at Ngome, the area revealed another outstanding member of this amazing plant group, and thereby once again proves its conservation importance.

C. stylesii is named for David Gordon Alexander Styles, botanical explorer and collector, to honour his valuable contribution to botanical knowledge in South Africa. David is renowned for “…his daring nature to go leaps and bounds for the specimen he is interested in” (see Chetty 2021), a statement I can readily confirm based on personal experience. Many of David’s collections (by now well over 6000 specimens donated to various herbaria) are novelties awaiting to be described. With C. stylesii, a total of five plant species bear his name. I am delighted that eventually a Ceropegia species could be named for him as David’s knowledge on the distribution and habitats of these special plants is of great value to my research on this plant group.

Plant-pollinator meta-network of the Kashmir Himalaya: a new study just published

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Although we sometimes like to think that we have a “global” perspective on plant-pollinator interactions, in truth there are large parts of the world where we have little or no information. That’s especially true of biodiversity hotspots. One such hotspot is the Kashmir Himalaya, a relatively small area (just 135 km long by 32 km wide) that nonetheless contains an estimated 2,000 species of flowering plant, more than 150 of which are endemic to the area. In addition, over 1,280 insect pollinator species have been described, including at least 29 species of bumblebees and as many as 40 species of butterflies.

Recently I’ve been collaborating with Dr Zubair Rather from the University of Kashmir and his colleagues on a data set that represents the first network analysis of plant-pollinator interactions from the region. The network is presented at a large spatial scale – what is often termed a “meta-network”. As Dr Kit Prendergast and I noted in our recent paper, scale matters when it comes to analysing these sorts of networks. Nonetheless (to quote the current paper):

“meta-networks represent the “backbone” of plant-pollinator interactions to which smaller, local networks are attached”

Even at this very large scale we’re seeing some fascinating patterns emerging with respect to the plants, for example the importance of cultivated apples in supporting the wider network of flower visitors. Also notable, and I believe demonstrated for the first time, is the fact that both the indigenous Asian Honeybee (Apis cerana) and the introduced Western Honeybee (A. mellifera) utilise exactly the same, extremely broad array of plants from which to collect nectar and pollen.

Our Kashmir meta-network is, hopefully, the starting point for further work on plant-pollinator interactions in this fascinating and diverse part of the world. The paper is published in a special issue of the journal Flora that’s dedicated to the importance of natural history when considering the ecology and evolution of plant-pollinator relationships. The special issue is a celebration of the work of Professor Marlies Sazima and is edited by Dr Pedro Bergamo.

Here’s the reference with a link to download a free copy which should be valid up to and including 23rd January 2023:

Rather, Z.A, Ollerton, J., Parey, S.H., Ara, S., Watts, S., Paray, M.M & Khuroo, A.A. (2022) Plant-pollinator meta-network of the Kashmir Himalaya: structure, modularity, integration of alien species and extinction simulation. Flora (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Plant-pollinator studies are increasingly using network analysis to investigate the structure and function of such communities. However, many areas of high biodiversity largely remain unexplored in this way. Our study describes a plant-pollinator meta-network from an understudied biodiversity hotspot, the Kashmir Himalaya, where we specifically investigate plant-pollinator network nestedness and modularity, as well as the influence of alien species and the impacts of simulating species extinctions on network structure. Natural history observations were used to document the meta-network between 230 plant and 80 pollinator species forming 1958 (11% of the possible) interactions. Among the plants Malus domestica and among the pollinators Apis mellifera and A. cerana formed the largest number of interactions with significant influence over the whole network. Network cumulative degree distribution depicted a higher number of degree levels in pollinators than plants. A moderately high number of realized interactions were revealed, thereby indicating potential structural and functional stability in the network. Eight strongly defined modules were observed in the network which varied in their composition. For example, the Ephedra module exclusively comprised of native species whereas the Apis module comprised of all the four different types of interacting species (i.e. native and alien plants and pollinators) and also integrated the highest number of alien species. In the network overall, 40% of interactions were by alien species, reflecting how well these were integrated. Extinction simulations suggested that the network would collapse more quickly when the most connected pollinators are removed, rather than the most connected plant species. Our study is the first assessment of a plant-pollinator network from this Himalayan biodiversity hotspot; and will help to inform the ecological and economic implications of plant-pollinator interactions in an era of global biodiversity crisis.

Books as gifts this Christmas – here’s some ideas for adults and children

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Although we are still in the early part of November, it’s never too soon to be thinking about buying Christmas gifts for friends and family. And what better gift than a book? Here’s a few suggestions for some that I’ve read this year that I think will make fine presents.

Who doesn’t love a good story, and Stephen King is a master storyteller. I’ve really enjoyed his more recent novels and Billy Summers stands out for me. It’s part thriller, part romance, and as always there’s a little touch of the uncanny. Very different, but just as much a page turner, is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Although Robinson is known as a science fiction writer, this novel is set in the near future when climate change breakdown is forcing governments and businesses into making radical changes. As much as anything this is a road map for how we can get ourselves out of the current climate crisis.

Talking of which, Michael Mann’s The New Climate War should be read by everyone interested in understanding how big corporations have colluded with the media and governments to trivialise and misrepresent the problems that we currently face. I reviewed this and a book about the insect biodiversity crisis, Silent Earth by Dave Goulson, in this blog post.

If you are looking for a book to help young children understand the importance of bees and other pollinators then I can highly recommend Can We Really Help the Bees? by Katie Daynes and Róisín Hahessy, for which I acted as science advisor.

For the ornithologically minded you might want to consider the lavishly illustrated Hummingbirds: A Celebration of Nature’s Jewels by Glenn Bartley and Andy Swash. Those who love writing and art with an environmental focus would appreciate an annual subscription to Dark Mountain, which gives you two beautifully produced volumes every year. A couple of my essays appeared in earlier volumes and the quality of the contributions never fails to impress me.

There’s lots of great natural history authors and books to choose from on Pelagic Publishing’s list, including of course my own Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society! I especially enjoyed Ian Carter’s recent memoir Human, Nature: A Naturalist’s Thoughts on Wildlife and Wild Places.

For the budding or experienced cook, Niki Webster’s Rebel Recipes serves up some amazing vegan dishes that Karin and I have really enjoyed trying. And speaking of my wife, of course I have to include her Essential Companion to Talking Therapy as the perfect gift for anyone considering or currently undergoing counselling or therapy, or who is thinking about becoming a practitioner.

Finally, if you’re looking for particular book ideas or just like browsing through lists of what others recommend, there’s lots of inspiration over at the independent Shepherd site.

I hope that you’ve found this useful. Feel free to comment with suggestions for other books that you’ve enjoyed.

Food system resilience: concepts, issues and challenges – a new, open access review just published

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Human populations across the planet are locked into complex economic, agricultural, social, political and ecological systems that provide them with food or, under extreme circumstances, fail to provide that sustenance. The complexity of these food systems requires that they are studied from a multi-disciplinary perspective because no one subject, or individual, can possibly do justice to this crucial topic.

One of the most pressing questions related to food systems is how we ensure that they are resilient to the current and future challenges of war, pandemics, climate change, economic shocks, biodiversity loss (including pollinators, of course), and a host of other factors. Some of these are predictable, others are not, except that recent and distant history tells us that such challenges are always going to be a feature of our societies and we need to prepare as best we can. This review of our current understanding of resilience in food systems is therefore timely and important.

My involvement with this review stems from the work I did with with Simon Potts and Tom Breeze at the University of Reading, Helen Lomax (University of Huddersfield) and Jim Rouquette (Natural Capital Solutions) on a project called Modelling landscapes for resilient pollination services in the UK (funded by BBSRC 2017-2020). That project, in turn, was part of a much larger funding programme entitled Resilience of the UK Food System in a Global Context. You can expect to see more publications coming from this research in the future.

Here’s the full reference with a link to the open access paper:

Zurek, M., Ingram, J., Bellamy, A.S., Goold, C., Lyon, C., Alexander, P., Barnes, A., Bebber, D.P., Breeze, T.D, Bruce, A., Collins, L.M., Davies, J. Doherty, B., Ensor, J., Franco, S.C., Gatto, A., Hess, T., Lamprinopoulou, C., Liu, L., Merkle, M., Norton, L., Oliver, T., Ollerton, J., Potts, S., Reed, M.S., Sutcliffe, C. & Withers, P.J.A. (2022) Food system resilience: concepts, issues and challenges. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 47: 22.1–22.24 doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-112320-050744

Here’s the abstract:

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resilience (robustness, recovery, and reorientation—the three “Rs”). We focus on enhancing resilience of food system outcomes and argue this will require food system actors adapting their activities, noting that activities do not change spontaneously but in response to a change in drivers: an opportunity or a threat. However, operationalizing resilience enhancement involves normative choices and will result in decisions having to be negotiated about trade-offs among food system outcomes for different stakeholders. New approaches to including different food system actors’ perceptions and goals are needed to build food systems that are better positioned to address challenges of the future.

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.

Using museum specimens to look at long-term stresses on pollinator populations: two new papers just published

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One of the projects with which I’ve been involved over the past few years has been a collaboration with researchers at Imperial College and the Natural History Museum, alongside regional collections in the UK, to assess how museum specimens of bumblebees (Bombus spp.) can be used to look at long-term ecological changes in pollinator populations. The first two papers from that project were published in August but because of my trip to Kenya I’ve only now been able to post about them.

The details of the papers (both of which are open access and free to download) are below, followed by the official press release:

Arce, A., Cantwell-Jones, A., Tansley, M., Barnes, I., Brace, S., Mullin, V., Notton, D., Ollerton, J., Eatough, E., Rhodes, M., Bian, X., Hogan, J., Hunter, T., Jackson, S., Whiffin, A., Blagoderov, V., Broad, G., Judd, S., Kokkini, P., Livermore, L., Dixit, M., Pearse, W. & Gill, R. (2022) Signatures of increasing environmental stress in bumblebee wings over the past century: Insights from museum specimens. Journal of Animal Ecology 00, 1– 13. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13788

Mullin, V. E., Stephen, W., Arce, A. N., Nash, W., Raine, C., Notton, D. G., Whiffin, A., Blagderov, V., Gharbi, K., Hogan, J., Hunter, T., Irish, N., Jackson, S., Judd, S., Watkins, C., Haerty, W., Ollerton, J., Brace, S., Gill, R. J., & Barnes, I. (2022). First large-scale quantification study of DNA preservation in insects from natural history collections using genome-wide sequencing. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 00, 1– 12. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13945

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE: Museum collections indicate bees increasingly stressed by changes in climate over the past 100 years

• An analysis of bumblebee wings from a network of UK museums shows signs of stress linked to increasingly hotter and wetter conditions.
• As well as revealing what is linked to stress in bees in the past, the study can help predict when and where bees will face most stress and potential decline in the future.
• Bumblebees and other insect pollinators have faced population declines in recent years.
• The researchers have also for the first time used ancient DNA techniques to sequence bumblebee genomes dating back over 100 years.
Scientists from Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum today published two concurrent papers analysing UK bumblebee populations.

The first investigated the morphology (body shapes) of bee specimens dating back to 1900. Using digital images, the group first investigated the asymmetry in bumblebee wings as an indicator of stress. High asymmetry (very differently shaped right and left wings) indicates the bees experienced stress during development – an external factor that affected their normal growth.

Studying four UK bumblebee species, the group found evidence for stress getting higher as the century progressed from its lowest point around 1925. Further analysis showed that each bee species displayed a consistently higher proxy of stress in the latter half of the century.

Learning from the past to predict the future
By taking the climate conditions during the year of collection – namely annual mean temperature and annual rainfall – the team found that in hotter and wetter years bees showed higher wing asymmetry. The study is published today in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

Author Aoife Cantwell-Jones, from the Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park) at Imperial, said: “By using a proxy of stress visible on the bee’s external anatomy and caused by stress during development just days or weeks before, we can look to more accurately track factors placing populations under pressure through historic space and time.”

Author Dr Andres Arce, now at the University of Suffolk, stated: “Our goal is to better understand responses to specific environmental factors and learn from the past to predict the future. We hope to be able to forecast where and when bumblebees will be most at risk and target effective conservation action.”

Senior author Dr Richard Gill, from the Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park) at Imperial, said: “With hotter and wetter conditions predicted to place bumblebees under higher stress, the fact these conditions will become more frequent under climate change means bumblebees may be in for a rough time over the 21st century.”

DNA from a single leg
As well as measuring the wing shapes of bees, in a second parallel study the team successfully sequenced the genomes of over a hundred bumblebee museum specimens dating back more than 130 years. In a pioneering advance, ancient DNA methods typically used for studying woolly mammoths and ancient humans, were for the first time used on an insect population.

Scientists from the Natural History Museum and the Earlham Institute quantified DNA preservation using just a single bee leg from each of the bees studied to create a baseline genome for each of the four species.

From these developments, published today in Methods in Ecology & Evolution, the researchers can now look to determine how the reported stress may lead to genetic diversity loss.

In conjunction with providing a new reference genome, the team will now use this data to study how bee genomes have changed over time, gaining an understanding of how whole populations have adapted – or not – to changing environments.

The value of museum collections
Focusing on bumblebee collections, the team worked with curators from the Natural History Museum London, National Museums Scotland, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, World Museum Liverpool, and Tullie House Museum Carlisle.

Author Dr Victoria Mullin, from the Natural History Museum, said: “Museum insect collections offer an unparalleled opportunity to directly study how the genomes of populations and species have been affected by environmental changes through time. However, they are a finite resource and understanding how best to utilise them for genetic studies is important.”

Senior author Professor Ian Barnes, from the Natural History Museum, said: “One of the main problems with museum collections is that the quality of DNA can be very variable, making it difficult to predict which type of analyses we should do. We now have a much better idea about DNA preservation in insect collections, which is a massive boost to our ongoing work to understand the history and future of insect populations.”

Dr Gill concluded: “These studies showcase the value of leveraging museums specimens to go back in time and unlock the past’s secrets. But what we have done is just the beginning, and by continuing our work with these vital public collections and collaborating with curators we can only discover more. All this work was part of a Natural Environment Research Council-funded project and could not have been achieved without the commitment, hard work, and diligence of the museum curators, and our other collaborators”.

PRESS RELEASE ENDS

Some seaweeds have “pollinators”! New research published this week

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Most of us have at some time stared in fascination at the life contained within the pools that form on rocky shores at low tide. But none of us realized that a whole new class of ecological interaction was taking place!

The 12,000 or so described (and many un-named) seaweeds are incredibly important organisms. Their diverse and abundant photosynthesizing fronds make them one of the main primary producers in coastal seas, creating food and habitat for a huge range of animals. Not only that, but some – the coralline seaweeds – lock up vast amount of CO₂ as calcium carbonate and help to create reef systems in the same way as coral.

Although scientists have studied seaweeds for hundreds of years, many aspects of their ecology are still unknown. Their detailed mode of reproduction, for example has only been studied in a small proportion of species.

In a newly published study in the journal Science, French PhD researcher Emma Lavaut and her colleagues have shown that small isopod crustaceans – relatives of woodlice and sea slaters – facilitate the movement of the equivalent of seaweed sperm (termed “spermatia”) from male to female reproductive structures in just the same way that bees and other pollinators move pollen between flowers, so fertilizing female gametes.

Your read that correctly: some seaweeds have pollinators!

It’s an incredible finding! And the implications of this are enormous: Emma and her colleagues have added a whole new branch of life to the examples of sedentary (fixed-place) organisms that require a third party to enable their reproduction. In addition to being a fascinating biological discovery, it has significant environmental and sustainability implications.

Seaweeds are a diverse group of macroalgae that appeared more than one billion years ago, at least 500 million years before the evolution of what we think of as “true” plants, such as the flowering plants, conifers, cycads, ferns and mosses. Sexual reproduction in the brown and green seaweeds, which include kelps, wracks and sea lettuces, involves spermatia that are mobile and use a flagellum to swim through the water to seek out female reproductive structures. However, Emma studied a seaweed, Gracilaria gracilis, which belongs to the Rhodophyta or red seaweeds, and none of the species in this group have these swimming sperm equivalents.

Sexual reproduction in the red seaweeds has therefore always been something of a mystery. Three quarters of species have separate male and female individuals and so they cannot mate with themselves. It was assumed that the gametes were just released into water currents that haphazardly transported them to the female reproductive organs, much as wind pollinated grasses and pine trees release their vast clouds of pollen on land. The authors of this new study, however, point out that most sexual reproduction by these red seaweeds takes place in the relatively still waters of rock pools, a habitat that they mimicked in the laboratory in a series of elegant aquarium experiments.

The isopod crustaceans are attracted to the seaweed because they provide a habitat away from predators and a supply of food: they graze on the microalgae that colonise the seaweed’s fronds. Picking up spermatia and moving them between fronds is a side-effect of this activity by the small invertebrates. As you can see from the illustration above, the isopods and the seaweed are engaged in a “double mutualism“: a plus sign (+) indicates a positive effect of one species on another, while a minus sign (-) indicates a negative impact.

What I find especially fascinating about this research is that both the seaweed (Gracilaria gracilis) and the isopod (Idotea balthica) were originally described as species more than 200 years ago. They also have an extremely wide distribution. The isopod is found around the coasts of Europe and down the eastern seaboard of the Americas. The seaweed is pretty much found globally. These are not rare, unusual species, yet the interaction between them has only just been discovered! This is a point that I made in my recent book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society: quite often, species that are well known interact in previously undocumented ways because no one has had the time or inspiration to look closely at them.

Although the idea that small sea creatures might be helping seaweeds to reproduce sounds very fanciful, there is a precedence for this discovery. Back in 2016, in a paper published in Nature Communications, a group of Mexican researchers led by Brigitta van Tussenbroek showed that a species of seagrass is pollinated by a diverse assemblage of small crustaceans and polychaete worms. Seagrasses are flowering plants, not seaweeds, but clearly this type of mutually beneficial relationship can exist between different species in the oceans.

Rhodophyta are the most diverse group of seaweeds, with more than 7,000 known species. They are especially abundant on coastal shores, oceanic habitats that are under huge pressure from infrastructure development, pollution, and climate change. At the same time, these seaweeds are economically important and millions of tonnes of them are collected every year as food, as nutritional and pharmaceutical supplements, and to produce agar. In order to conserve these seaweed populations, we need to better understand their ecology and their environmental requirements.

The work by Emma Lavaut and colleagues suggests that interactions with their “pollinators” may be a critical aspect of this understanding. In the same way that “Save the Bees” has been a rallying call for conserving interactions between species on land, we may soon hear this message echoed in “Save the Isopods”. At the very least, I have to add a new section to the second edition of my book!

Full disclosure: I was one of the reviewers of the original manuscript submitted to Science by Emma and her co-authors. It’s a rare privilege to review a study and think: “Wow! This is a game-changer!” and including this paper it’s happened to me only a handful of times. The editors at Science kindly invited my colleague Dr Zong-Xin Ren and myself to write a Perspective piece about the work and we were delighted to do so.

Image credits: Isopod and diatom images from Lavaut et al (2022). Gracilaria image by Emoody26 at English Wikipedia CC BY 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3455016. Design by Shijia Wen and Jeff Ollerton.

Pollinator-flower interactions in gardens during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown of 2020: the data paper has just been published!

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During the lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many pollination ecologists were stuck at home: universities and research institutes were closed and restrictions on travel meant that it was not possible to get out and do field work. In order to keep active and motivated, and to turn adversity into an opportunity, an ad hoc network of more than 70 researchers from 15 different countries (see the map above) decided to collect standardised data on the plant-pollinator networks in their own gardens and nearby public spaces.

When combined with information about location, size of garden, floral diversity, how the garden is managed, and so forth, this would provide some useful data about how gardens support pollinators. For those with kids at home it could also be a good way of getting them out into fresh air and giving them something to do!

Following discussions, several different protocols were instigated which depended upon the time available to the researchers, including one that mirrored the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme’s FIT (Flower-Insect Timed) counts.

The resulting data set of almost 47,000 visits by insects and birds to flowers, as well as information about flowers that were never visited, is freely available and will be an invaluable resource for pollination ecologists. For example, analysing the links between ornamental flowers that share pollinators with fruits and vegetables such as apples and beans, will allow us to make recommendations for the best plants to grow in home gardens that can increase yields of crops.

There’s an old saying about turning adversity into a positive outcome: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, and the researchers were pleased to find that there’s one record of Citrus limon in the data set!

The paper describing the data set has just been published in the Journal of Pollination Ecology and you can download a PDF of the paper and the associated data for free by following this link.

Sincere thanks to all of my co-authors for their commitment to the project!

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!

Pollinators (not) on the menu at Kew

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Recently Phil Stevenson and I advised on an art/science project called Minus Pollinators which considered what a small café menu might look like if there were no pollinators to help produce the many, many fruits and vegetables and nuts that are animal pollinated.

The project is a collaboration between writer and consultant Max Fraser and artist Freddie Yauner. To quote Freddie’s description on his website, the project represents:

A dystopian future in the form of a drinks kiosk where the staples such as coffee, teas, juices, chocolate etc. are no longer available due to pollinator decline…the mobile drinks kiosk acts as an exhibition display, with artworks painted in pollen…and a take-away pamphlet…detailing the importance of insect pollinators for our collective future on this planet.

Minus Pollinators was commissioned as part of a summer-long event called Food Forever at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, after which it goes to the Groundswell festival.

It was a pleasure to work with Max, Freddie and Phil on this because art/science projects are a great way of getting the message across about the importance of biodiversity and the current environmental crisis that we are facing.