Regular readers of the blog will know that I’m a keen gardener as well as having a deep interest in the natural world, and I know from personal experience how being amongst plants, flowers, birds and insects can lift a person’s mood and improve their health.
It was interesting, therefore, to get a message via my Contact page from a tutor on the Students For Research programme. They had been looking at my blog and the tutor had challenged her students to find a web resource that they thought might interest me. And indeed they succeeded! They found this web page about Clinical Trials on the Positive Effects of Gardening and Experiencing Nature and it makes for very interesting reading. There’s a lot of good research happening in this area.
Earlier this week, the East Midlands Environment Agency proudly tweeted that they had placed honey bee hives on an ecologically important site that they own. As you might imagine, the response from pollinator experts such as myself, conservation NGOs, and some beekeepers, was not positive, as you can see if you look at the comments beneath my tweet:
If this is an important site for nature conservation, as claimed, then the #EnvironmentAgency should NOT put hives of honey #bees on it!
— Prof. Jeff Ollerton – @JeffOllerton@ecoevo.social (@JeffOllerton) July 12, 2023
By coincidence, overnight I received a message from someone in the USA asking for advice. Here’s a redacted version of their message:
My community has a 4 acre serpentine barren site that is part of a larger string of these unique barrens ….. Honey bee hives have recently been located adjacent to the barrens. Can you advise me as to the best way to determine whether there are, and to document any, adverse effects to the serpentine barrens native pollinators?
Going back to the question of how to assess any impacts, the simple answer is that it’s not easy and it relies on having good data. This was my response to my American correspondent:
Ideally you would need to take a before-and-after approach where you have data on things like number of native pollinator species, their abundance (including nest sites), rates of visitation of different pollinators to flowers, and fruit or seed set from particular plants. You’d then compare what was going on before the hives arrived with what’s occurring since their arrival.
If you don’t have the “before” data it’s much more difficult to assess if there has been an impact from the honey bees. However, the advice of most conservation groups is to adopt the “precautionary principle” and not site hives on or adjacent to areas of nature conservation value, especially if they are relatively small areas. See for example the Bumblebee Conservation Trust’s advice: https://www.bumblebeeconservation.org/managed-honeybees/
The precautionary principle is a well established concept across a range of areas, including health and engineering, as well as nature conservation. In the latter it needs to be more widely applied, especially when it comes to questions of where to site honey bee hives, and how many.
Last year I posted about the work that I’ve been doing on railways and biodiversity with UIC – the International Union of Railways – and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. That work is now complete and the second of our two reports called UIC Guidelines on Managing Railway Assets for Biodiversity is now out.
UKCEH has produced a press release and I’m copying it verbatim below:
New guidelines for the management of Europe’s railway network to protect and enhance biodiversity have been published.
The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) has worked with the International Union of Railways (UIC), the professional association representing rail companies across the world, to provide technical recommendations and key design features for incorporating and enhancing habitats within the existing European network and new line upgrades, providing examples of best practice.
The UIC European region comprises 118-member companies from 39 countries, amounting to 350,000 kilometres of rail network.
Professor Richard Pywell, Head of Biodiversity at UKCEH who is one of the lead authors of the report, said: “We worked closely with railway companies across Europe to distil the best available knowledge on managing railway assets to benefit nature. For each asset, we considered the most effective measures to protect and restore biodiversity, and how to monitor the outcomes of these interventions.”
Another report author, independent consultant Professor Jeff Ollerton, added: “Working with UIC on this project has revealed just how important the land managed by Europe’s railway companies is for nature. The next step is to better understand how nature supports Europe’s economy, and the health and wellbeing of its people.”
The authors used the widely-adopted mitigation hierarchy approach which guides, developers on protecting existing habitats and ecosystems where possible.
The new UIC Guidelines for Managing Railway Assets for Biodiversity have been drawn up as part of the REVERSE project, in which UIC has worked with its members and UKCEH to formulate a collective vision for protecting and enhancing biodiversity across the European rail network. They now form part of the European Railways: Strategy and Action Guide to ensure management for biodiversity is embedded at every level of the railway business, alongside safety, performance and sustainability. The adoption of the guidelines by member companies will be promoted through various UIC meetings and online events.
The REVERSE project comprises more than 20 European rail companies including Network Rail and SNCF as well as WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature).
In 2021, UKCEH worked with Network Rail to draw up the rail company’s Biodiversity Action Plan to inform lineside habitat management across the UK. This involved using high-resolution imagery from satellites and aircraft to produce a detailed national map of all the habitats alongside the rail network.
At the moment Karin and I are in the UK for a couple of weeks. I had work to do as an external examiner at the University of Swansea, plus we wanted to catch up with some family and friends. Our main base has been the home of our mates Ian and Simone and we’ve enjoyed some warm, muggy evenings sitting in their garden chewing the fat. Every now and again my eyes have been drawn to the activities of bumblebees as they move in and out of the foliage of a small Silver Fir. The bees are attracted to the large colonies of an aphid that is feeding on the tree’s trunk, from which they are collecting honeydew, as you can see in the photograph above.
When we think of the diets of bees we automatically think “nectar and pollen”. Honeydew, as a sugar-rich fluid, fits broadly into this concept, though as far as I know there’s been little study of its relative importance as a food source for bees. Aside from a few “vulture bees”, all of the 20,000 or so species are vegetarian. And therein lies a problem. Bees evolved from carnivorous wasps and so the evolution of bees, and their complex ecologies, is tied into this profound dietary shift toward a plant-based diet.
A particular issue that has hardly been investigated until recently is that the ratio of elements within meat is very different to that of plants. In particular, animal tissue has a high ratio of sodium (Na) relative to potassium (K), whereas for plants the ratio is reversed – high ratio of K:Na.
In a new conceptual review paper with my colleagues Zuzanna Filipiak and Michał Filipiak, we have explored the implications of this difference in elemental ratios for bee ecology and evolution, and for the conservation of these important insects. The paper is open access and you can download a copy by following a link in this reference:
Bees provide important ecological services, and many species are threatened globally, yet our knowledge of wild bee ecology and evolution is limited. While evolving from carnivorous ancestors, bees had to develop strategies for coping with limitations imposed on them by a plant-based diet, with nectar providing energy and essential amino acids and pollen as an extraordinary, protein- and lipid-rich food nutritionally similar to animal tissues. Both nectar and pollen display one characteristic common to plants, a high ratio of potassium to sodium (K:Na), potentially leading to bee underdevelopment, health problems, and death. We discuss why and how the ratio of K:Na contributes to bee ecology and evolution and how considering this factor in future studies will provide new knowledge, more accurately depicting the relationship of bees with their environments. Such knowledge is essential for understanding how plants and bees function and interact and is needed to effectively protect wild bees.
But just as when a movie director says “That’s a wrap” at the end of the final day of filming, the hard work does not stop here. Two people have read the full manuscript as I was producing chapters and their suggestions have been incorporated into this draft. The publisher will now send it to a third, independent beta reader and once their feedback has been acted on it will go to a copy editor who will suggest stylistic changes, check for logic and consistency, and so forth.
At the same time I will be choosing which plates to put in the book, which images to use on the back cover, writing their descriptions and deciding where to cite them; checking the sources and further reading sections for each chapter and formatting the references; and producing an appendix that lists the scientific names against the vernacular names that I am using in the book. I also need to finalise the acknowledgements section.
As an author, producing a book is a long process that doesn’t end with the actual writing of the manuscript. It’s incredibly satisfying, however, and working with Pelagic on my second book for them has been a great experience. All being well, Birds & Flowers should be out by early winter.
Now, I have three options for the next book that I’m writing….which one to choose…?
As a teenager one of my main interests was collecting fossils. In search of specimens I wandered for hours, scouring the Carboniferous coal shale heaps and Permian reef outcrops of my native Sunderland. I spent so much time bothering the geology curator at the local museum with my inquiries that he offered to host me for a year as the placement part of my college course. If I had been able to convince my tutors that paleontology was really just biology in deep time I may have ended up as a professional fossil researcher. But it was not to be and instead I spent a (mostly happy) year working in the microbiology laboratory of a local brewery.
My interest in the ecology of the past has never left me, and over the years I’ve contributed a few articles to journals commenting on the latest fossil findings as they relate to pollination and flowering plant evolution. So I was delighted to be asked by Spanish paleontologist David Peris to help with a new review of insect pollination in deep time, led by PhD candidate Constanza Peña-Kairath. That review has just been published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and for the next 50 days it’s available for free download by following the link in the reference:
Inferring insect pollination from compression fossils and amber inclusions is difficult because of a lack of consensus on defining an insect pollinator and the challenge of recognizing this ecological relationship in deep time. We propose a conceptual definition for such insects and an operational classification into pollinator or presumed pollinator. Using this approach, we identified 15 insect families that include fossil pollinators and show that pollination relationships have existed since at least the Upper Jurassic (~163 Ma). Insects prior to this can only be classified as presumed pollinators. This gives a more nuanced insight into the origin and evolution of an ecological relationship that is vital to the establishment, composition and conservation of modern terrestrial ecosystems.
As part of our roles as ambassadors of the new conservation organisation Restore (more of which later this year), several of us including Dave Goulson, George McGavin, and myself, are promoting this online petition to get the government to take the issue of neonicotinoid pesticides seriously. Here’s some text from Dave explaining the situation with a link to a petition that you can sign:
“For three years in a row our government has granted farmers special permission to use banned neonicotinoid pesticides on sugar beet. This is contrary to the expert advice of their own Expert Committee on Pesticides, who specifically recommended that permission should not be granted. It also flies in the face of a huge body of scientific evidence showing that these chemicals are phenomenally toxic to all insect life, and that their use on any crop contaminates soils, hedgerow plants, and nearby streams and ponds for years to come. We are in a crisis, with insect populations in freefall. It is about time our government woke up to this, and acted accordingly. This petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/631948 is a necessary means of holding the government to account. Please sign and share, as signing will ensure the issue is debated in Parliament.”
This petition now has more than 15,000 signatures which ensures that it gets a response from the Government. If it reaches 100,000 mark, it will trigger a debate in Parliament. Please sign and promote this important initiative!
For the past year I’ve been keeping a secret from all but a few trusted confidantes: the subject and title of my next book! My publisher – Pelagic – has now announced it on their website and so it’s time to make it public. “Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship” will be the first book that covers bird pollination in its entirety, going beyond just hummingbirds, sunbirds and honeyeaters, to consider the more than 60 other bird families that interact with flowers, and the tens of thousands of plants that rely on them as pollinators. You can read more about it on Pelagic’s website.
The 3D mock-up of the cover shown above features an illustration by my good friend Stephen Valentine, a very talented artist who you may remember produced this painting of waxwings that Karin bought for my birthday a few years ago. I’m extremely pleased with how Pelagic have incorporated this into the design of the cover.
The book will be available by autumn I hope, if my writing schedule goes to plan!
It’s been a couple of years since I last did a talk or workshop for the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire & Northamptonshire. But I’m pleased to say that they’ve invited me back and you can join me tomorrow evening for an online introductory talk about pollinators and pollination in the UK.
The talk starts at 7pm UK time and full details of how to sign up are in the link below:
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.
Prof. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author 