Tag Archives: Pollinators

Insect pollinators boost the market price of holly and mistletoe: a new study just published

Holly and mistletoe 20161211_103252.png

Each year I’ve always added at least one Christmas-themed biodiversity post to the blog, for example: Thank the insects for Christmas, A Christmas vignette, and Six Kingdoms for Christmas. That’s partly because I really like Christmas as a winter festival, with its folklore and customs. But it’s also because these are a great vehicle to demonstrate how pervasive and important is natural capital and the ecosystem services it provides to society.

This year I’ve gone one stage further and actually published some Christmassy research to back up the blog post. Now, in a new study published in the Journal of Pollination Ecology, we have shown how important insect pollinators are in determining the market value of two of the most emblematic of Christmas plants: holly (Ilex aquifolium) and mistletoe (Viscum album). Here’s the full reference with a link to the paper itself, which is open access:

Ollerton, J., Rouquette, J.R. & Breeze, T.D. (2016) Insect pollinators boost the market price of culturally important crops: holly, mistletoe and the spirit of Christmas. Journal of Pollination Ecology 19: 93-97

Holly and mistletoe are two seasonal crops that play a culturally important role as symbols of Christmas across the world, though both also have pre-Christian pagan roots. Now for the first time the role of insect pollinators in determining the commercial value of these plants has been investigated, using sales records going back over the last eleven years from Britain’s largest annual auction of holly and mistletoe, held every year in Worcestershire.

Analysis of the sales records of Nick Champion Auctions in Tenbury Wells shows that insect pollination raises the sale price of these crops by on average two to three times. This is because holly and mistletoe with berries is more sought after than material without berries, with wholesale buyers paying higher prices at auction. These berries in turn are the result of pollination by insects such as flies and bees: both holly and mistletoe are 100% dependent on insect pollination due to their having separate male and female plants.

There is some annual variation to the prices, and in years where berries are scarce (possibly due to low insect numbers) the price difference can be four-fold.

Due to concerns about pollinator declines and food security there is huge interest in the role of bees and other insects in supporting agriculture, and how we can value that role. However we believe that this is the first study showing that insect pollinators play a large part in determining the value of culturally symbolic, non-food crops. Almost all of the economic valuations of insect pollination to agriculture have focused on food crops such as beans, apples, cocoa, coffee, and so forth. Very little is known about how the value of non-food crops (fibres, construction materials, pharmaceuticals, ornamentals, etc.) is enhanced by insect pollination. This is an area where much more research is required.

But in the mean time, where better to end than with a bit of seasonal John Clare?

The shepherd, now no more afraid,
Since custom doth the chance bestow,
Starts up to kiss the giggling maid
Beneath the branch of mistletoe
That ‘neath each cottage beam is seen,
With pearl-like berries shining gay;
The shadow still of what hath been,
Which fashion yearly fades away.

The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827)

The macroecology of animal versus wind pollination – a new study just published

Third International Conference on Pollinator Biology, Health and Policy – Pennsylvania – 18-20 July, 2016

“Insect pollinated” crops that don’t actually require insect pollination

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Cucumber fruit 20160713_103558

Yesterday evening I learned that a large grant application that I’d submitted earlier this year had failed to secure funding. Statistically there was a high likelihood of this happening but that doesn’t make it feel any better: weeks and weeks of work have come to nothing.

So in a mood of bloody-minded contrariness and general displeasure at the unfairness of the world I thought I’d provide an alternative to the Bees’ Needs week I mentioned yesterday by focusing on food crops that look as though they should be insect pollinated (and their ancestors certainly were) but which don’t actually require pollinators.

The example pictured above is an F1 hybrid cucumber (Cucumis sativus) variety called “Mini Munch”, kindly grown from seed and given to me by my friend and colleague Dr Janet Jackson. Many cucumbers don’t need insect pollination, despite their large, colourful flowers, and the fact that related crops (melons, courgettes, squashes, etc.) generally do require pollinators. Indeed some varieties taste bitter if they are pollinated. I can recommend this web page on how to grow cucumbers for further advice.

As I was taking that photograph, and in another demonstration of how the world is against me at the moment, I spotted a bee feeding on one of the all-female flowers of this variety.

Megachile on cucumber 20160713_103627

It spent some time there probing the centre with its tongue, so I think these flowers still produce nectar despite them not needing pollinators, a hang-over from their ancestry. Plants have a whole range of mechanisms that ensure reproduction without the agency of insects and other animal pollinators, and this has been exploited by crop breeders who have selected crop varieties for their ability to self pollinate or to reproduce asexually via apomixis (as in the case of this cucumber).

The same bee then flew onto a tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) flower (another group which varies in its demands for pollination) and I got a better look – seems to be a Leaf-cutter Bee of the genus Megachile.

Megachile on tomato 20160713_103712

The final example of a crop which requires little or no insect pollination are the chillies (Capsicum spp.) all of which are self-pollinating, I believe. This variety is a scrambling purple type called Orzoco*.

Orzoco chilli 20160713_102213

So, crops vary hugely in their need for pollinators and the presence of certain traits of animal pollination, such as large, brightly coloured flowers and nectar, is no guarantee that the crop really does have to be serviced by pollinators. The only way to be certain is to experimentally test the plants, a topic I hope to come back to later in the summer.

Don’t worry, this grumpiness won’t last long, in no time at all I’ll be back to banging on about the importance of pollinators. At least Monty, one of our two cats, still loves me.

*At least, that’s what it said on the seed packet; I’ve also seen it referred to as Orozco – does anyone know which name is correct?

Six bees, one stone: recent pollinator-related talks and workshops

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BBKA lecture April 2016 As I write this I’m painfully conscious that (a) it’s a couple of weeks since I last posted on the blog; and (b) I have a long list of things to complete before I head off to Tenerife for ten days of field work on Friday. The absence of posting has been due to my current work load, including the number of conferences, talks and workshops I’ve been involved with in the past month, which seems to have taken up a disproportionate amount of my time. It’s all been interesting and useful, however, and reflects the rising activity stemming from the National Pollinator Strategy, and increasing interest in pollinators more broadly. I’ve certainly learned a lot and hopefully my own expertise contributed to the success of these events.

In this post I thought I’d briefly summarise what I’ve been up to recently, in the process expanding the numerical and phylogenetic parameters of “killing two birds with one stone“:

16th March – took part in a workshop to map the latest phase of Buglife’s B-Lines across Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. This was a really interesting exercise and I felt that we’d actually achieved rather a lot by the end of the day. Once the final maps are completed I’ll post a link so you can see where the routes go through these counties and how they meet up.

23rd March – spoke at a one-day conference on “delivering biodiversity” organised by the Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges at the University of Worcester. Although I was talking about our bird surveys on the University of Northampton’s new Waterside Campus, pollinators did receive some attention during a workshop on creating wildflower meadows. I’ll post an update on the Waterside work once we’ve completed the next set of spring surveys.

30th March – spoke at the Bumblebee Working Group at the University of Sussex – have already posted an account of that.

6th April – took part in a”Pollinator Experts Elicitation” workshop at the University of Warwick, along with a group of nine other academics, and members of stakeholder groups such as FERA and the NFU. Run as part of Warwick’s Food and Behavioural Science Global Research priority groups, the organisers, from the university’s Department of Statistics, used the Delphi Method to assess the likelihood of sustaining pollinator populations under different scenarios of disease, climate change, and habitat degradation. It was a fascinating process and interesting to see how often experts’ views converged on the same opinion. Also rather humbling to see the degree of our uncertainty in our forecasts. The workshop garnered quite a bit of media attention including pieces on the BBC’s Midlands Today and the Farming Today programmes.

8th-9th April – delivered two lectures at the British Beekeepers Association’s Spring Convention at Harper Adams University. Rather disconcerting to be the least-informed person in the room, given my limited knowledge of bee keeping, but they were a friendly and curious lot with good-sized audiences for my talks on the diversity of bees to be found in urban settings, and the global diversity and functional importance of pollinators.

13th April – spoke to a very receptive audience at the Friends of Linford Lakes Nature Reserve near Milton Keynes, on the topic of “Bees for dinner? The importance of pollinators in a changing world“. Great evening and lots of interesting questions afterwards, though my talk was a bit too long (must cut it for next time).

That’s it for now, hope to do some posts from Tenerife while we are there.

Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production: IPBES gains momentum

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Bee on apple blossom - 1st May 2015

The over-arching themes of this blog have been about understanding biodiversity; the science behind its study; why it’s important; how it contributes to human well being, (including both intangible and economic benefits); and how policy informed by science can support the conservation of species and ecosystems. These are all issues that have a global perspective beyond the bounds of my home country (the United Kingdom), or even my continent (Europe) because species, ecosystems and the threats to them do not respect political borders.

Enter IPBES – the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (sometimes shortened to Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services).

IPBES is a United Nations body established in 2012 that in many ways is a parallel entity to the IPCC ( Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), bringing together scientists, policy makers and stakeholders, with a mission:

“to strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human well-being and sustainable development“

Which has got to be a good thing: science informing policy, what’s not to like?

The first output from IPBES will be a Thematic Assessment of Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production, and it’s just been discussed (today) at the 4th Plenary meeting of IPBES in Kuala Lumpur – here’s a link to the press release.

In the coming weeks I’ll talk more about IPBES and its Thematic Assessment (for which I acted as a reviewer), but for now I’ll just repeat some of the headline figures from the report:

20,000 – Number of species of wild bees. There are also some species of butterflies, moths, wasps, beetles, birds, bats and other vertebrates that contribute to pollination.
75% – Percentage of the world’s food crops that depend at least in part on pollination.
US$235 billion–US$577 billion – Annual value of global crops directly affected by pollinators.
300% — Increase in volume of agricultural production dependent on animal pollination in the past 50 years.
Almost 90% — Percentage of wild flowering plants that depend to some extent on animal pollination*.
1.6 million tonnes – Annual honey production from the western honeybee.
16.5% — Percentage of vertebrate pollinators threatened with extinction globally.
+40% – Percentage of invertebrate pollinator species – particularly bees and butterflies – facing extinction.

*They are quoting a figure that I calculated, and very proud of it I am too 🙂

Pollinators and pollination – something for the weekend #9

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The latest in an (ir)regular series of posts to biodiversity-related* items that have caught my attention during the past few weeks; this one’s focused on pollinators and pollination because there’s been so much emerging on this recently it’s been impossible to decide what to write more fully about!

In “Disentangling visual and olfactory signals in mushroom-mimicking Dracula orchids using realistic three-dimensional printed flowers” in the journal New Phytologist, Tobias Policha and colleagues have used artificial, 3D printed flowers to assess the relative importance of scent versus colour/shape in some fly pollinated orchid species. Yes, Dracula is a real genus!
In the journal Nature, Mathilde Baude and colleagues have looked at how nectar resources have changed in extent and composition over the 20th Century in a paper entitled “Historical nectar assessment reveals the fall and rise of floral resources in Britain“.
An important disease of honeybees, Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) is “driven by trade and movement of honeybee colonies” according to a new study in Science by Lena Wilfert and colleagues, “Deformed wing virus is a recent global epidemic in honeybees driven by Varroa mites“, further emphasising what many of us have been saying, that reduction in honeybee numbers is largely a veterinary/husbandry problem, rather than a conservation issue.
Some of my colleagues in Denmark and Brazil (amongst other countries) continue their exploration of the ecology and evolution of hummingbird-plant interaction networks with a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B entitled “High proportion of smaller ranged hummingbird species coincides with ecological specialization across the Americas“.
Also in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Conrad Labandeira and (particularly Chinese) colleagues have documented some amazing similarities between extinct fossil lacewings and butterflies, in “The evolutionary convergence of mid-Mesozoic lacewings and Cenozoic butterflies“.
On the 20th May there’s going to be an exciting one-day symposium entitled “Bats, Bees, Birds, Butterflies and Bouquets: New Research in Pollination Biology” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. Wish I could go!
Finally, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has a whole set of resources related to its Global Action on Pollination Services for Sustainable Agriculture programme, including a newly released “Protocol to detect and monitor pollinator communities: Guidance for practitioners” by Gretchen LeBuhn and colleagues. Worth exploring in detail. Something that’s unclear to me is the extent to which this aspect of the FAO’s work is going to be replaced or duplicated by the report (and presumably subsequent, follow-up work?) on pollinators and pollination that’s due this year from the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), about which I hope to report in the near future.

Feel free to recommend links that have caught your eye.

*Disclaimer: may sometimes contain non-biodiversity-related items.

SCAPE 2016 – the 30th anniversary meeting

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As regular readers of this blog are aware, the annual SCAPE conference is one of my favourite scientific meetings, and for the last few years I’ve published live blogs of the conference as it happens (for example, here, here, here). SCAPE 2016 will be a very special one – it’s the 30th anniversary of the meeting – and is taking place in a very special place. Initial details have recently been circulated by Professor Jon Ågren (Uppsala University) on behalf of the organising committee, as follows:

The meeting will take place at Abisko, northernmost Sweden 13-16 October. More information will be published in late spring, but mark these days in your calendar already now!

Information about the premises of the meeting:

http://www.kirunalapland.se/en/accommodation/abisko-turiststation-abisko-2/

Some info about Abisko National Park:

https://www.sverigesnationalparker.se/en/choose-park—list/abisko-national-park/#.VpVbH_krJD8

And about the nearby Abisko Scientific Research Station:

http://polar.se/en/abisko-naturvetenskapliga-station/

Anyone wishing to receive the next SCAPE circular, send an email to Jon: jon.agren@ebc.uu.se

Pollination syndromes: a brief update on recent developments, and news that Stefan Vogel has passed away

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In a recent post I discussed the current debates about “pollination syndromes”, which I described as “sets of flower characteristics that have repeatedly evolved in different plant families due to the convergent selection pressures applied by some groups of pollinators”.

The authors of the Ecology Letters paper that I discussed (Rosas-Guerrero et al. 2014) have now replied to our original critique of their approach and you can read that reply (Aguilar et al. 2015) in Journal of Pollination Ecology by following this link. Readers can make up their own minds as to whether the authors have responded adequately to our concerns, but I just briefly wanted to raise three points.

The first is that much of these authors’ response is focused on an earlier paper of ours (Ollerton et al. 2009) rather than on our critique per se. Nick Waser, Mary Price and myself have therefore written a second response that deals with some of the misunderstandings apparent in that piece; it’s available to download here.

The second point relates to the existing literature on pollination syndromes and pollinator effectiveness used by Rosas-Guerrero et al. (2014); as we demonstrated in our critique this is clearly a biased data set that is skewed towards groups of plants with relatively large flowers, “interesting” pollination systems, and text book examples of classical pollination syndromes such as bird and bat pollination. Researchers who study flowers and their pollinators choose their subjects based on a whole set of criteria, but random selection is not one of them. However as far as we can judge, Aguilar et al. (2015) seem to be arguing that drawing strong, “universal” conclusions about syndromes from this highly biased data set is perfectly acceptable because of the statistical rigour of formal meta-analysis. I’d re-iterate our main point that no amount of statistical rigour and exhaustive literature searching can take into account inherent biases within the primary data (i.e. the literature itself).

Finally, Aguilar et al. (2015) claim that “human disturbance of natural habitats has caused disruptions in patterns of mutualistic interactions that may partly explain the presence of the diverse pollinator assemblages that are frequently found in pollination studies”. It seems to us to be disingenuous to argue that pollination syndromes are universally valid and then to essentially concede that there are lots of wrong visitors (“secondary” pollinators), and to explain that with the idea that everything is disturbed in the Anthropocene. If this is really the case then we probably need to throw out a lot of our understanding of evolutionary ecology as a whole, not just studies of plant-pollinator interactions.

Clearly we don’t accept this argument and in fact it has echoes of arguments that have been going on since the 19th century (Waser et al. 2011): more than 130 years ago the Darwinian biologist Hermann Muller was criticising Federico Delpino (one of the original architects of the idea of pollination syndromes) for ignoring the “wrong” flower visitors. Interestingly, Delpino was a fundamentally a teleologist who saw purpose in nature, expressed through (as he perceived them) the highly ordered relationships between flowers and pollinators.

As we discuss in the Waser et al. (2011) paper, Stefan Vogel was another prominent pollination biologist, and advocate of the importance of pollination syndromes, who was also fundamentally teleological in his thinking. I was sad to learn that Stefan passed away very recently, in what I believe is his 90th year. I was fortunate enough to meet Stefan at a symposium in honour of his 80th birthday at the International Botanical Congress in Vienna in 2005. He graciously signed my copy of The Role of Scent Glands in Pollination and said, with a twinkle in his eye, “you and I have probably got a lot to discuss”. Unfortunately we never got the opportunity, but later I dedicated our 2009 paper on Ceropegia pollination to him “in honour of his pioneering work on pollination” in the genus. Stefan’s legacy of research, particularly in the tropical regions of South America, is a fitting tribute to his memory.

Pollination syndromes clearly continue to attract much interest in the scientific literature, and just this week I was intrigued to see a paper by John Benning showing that a species of Ericaceae that looks as though it “should” be pollinated by bees is actually moth pollinated. No doubt the discussion of the evolutionary extent and predictability of pollination syndromes will continue for some time to come.

The organisers’ positive response to criticisms of the “honey bee decline” conference

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Three days ago I wrote a short, fast post expressing my unease (in robust terms) about a forthcoming conference entitled “Biodiversity and Local Partnerships: Halting the Decline of the Honey Bee in the UK”. I had not anticipated that the post would generate quite as much interest as it did: 2007 views, 16 likes, and 28 comments (including my responses) as of 10am today.

There were also a lot of comments and likes on Facebook, most of it positive and agreeing with my sentiments, though some have suggested that I’m over-reacting, that I may be paranoid, and questioned what my “hidden agenda” is and whether I might be funded by an agrochemical firm (!) Thanks to everyone who took the time to read the post and/or to respond*, to tweet the post, and even, in one case, phone up the conference organisers.

So it was with some satisfaction that yesterday I received the following email from the conference organisers, Public Policy Exchange (PPE), in response to my initial reply to their invitation:

Thank you for your response to our event, we always appreciate any
feedback from experts such as yourself. Your comments have been passed
on to our researchers and they are currently reviewing this event.

Our researchers do use a variety of sources, though on this occasion it
does appear that some have made sweeping generalisations and
over simplified statements, and ultimately have been unreliable. Clearly
our previous marketing mistakenly overplayed the role of the honey bee
in pollination processes. We certainly don’t want to contribute to a
misinformed narrative around bees and other pollinators; that was never
our intention and so we are looking at how we can improve this event.

Biodiversity is an area which we are very keen to develop further and
your feedback is therefore very helpful to us.

Kind regards,

The Conferences Team

They have also changed the title of the conference to “Biodiversity and Local Partnerships: Halting the Decline of Bees and Other Pollinators in the UK“.

So kudos to PPE for their fast response. That’s a good outcome as far as I’m concerned and I may consider attending the conference; hell I’d even consider speaking at it if i was asked!

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*Yes, that’s deliberate – I got the impression that some on Facebook were responding without reading it…