Tag Archives: Science

No, the HS2 ‘bat tunnel’ has not cost £300,000 per bat

As I write I’m listening to the Radio 4 series AntiSocial with Adam Fleming and this week the topic is the economic and social cost of nature conservation. One of the topics being discussed is the so-called ‘bat tunnel’ being built through an area of ancient woodland in Buckinghamshire. The cost has been estimated at £100 million and, according to The Times, this amounts to £300,000 per bat protected. That’s clearly a lot of money to protect bats, but is it an accurate reflection of reality? The answer is no, and here’s why.

Let’s put aside the fact that the ‘bat tunnel’ will protect a lot of other wildlife associated with this area of ancient woodland, including other bat species and a range of additional mammals, birds and insects. Let’s also ignore the fact that the cost of the tunnel is so high because of decisions made by HS2 that have nothing to do with bats, such as making it wider to accommodate local train services. Let’s instead just focus on the type of bat that’s being specifically discussed, Bechstein’s bat. It is indeed a rare bat in Britain, known from just six breeding populations, all associated with ancient woodland (itself a rare habitat type in this country).

The population that the ‘bat tunnel’ protects is estimated to be 300 individuals – that’s where the figure of £300,000 per bat comes from, i.e. £100 million divided by 300 (actually £333,333 per bat, but let’s not quibble about a few tens of thousands of pounds when HS2 is going to cost tens of billions).

Anyone in possession of both a sense of proportion and some basic maths can see that such a calculation is nonsense. The tunnel will be in place for many decades, potentially hundreds of years. Over time bats will die and other bats will be born. Some will stay in the area and others will migrate away and (hopefully) found other populations, or at least add to the genetic diversity and growth of one of the other existing populations. Calculating the cost-per-bat on this basis is both impossible and nonsensical. But then making that initial calculation was also a pointless exercise. The only reason to do it was to generate publicity and clicks for a newspaper that ought to know better.

As I’ve previously discussed, the railway system of Britain and the rest of Europe has both a negative and a positive impact on biodiversity across the region, and understanding those impacts is important. Thoughtless, politically-motivated journalism such as The Times is promoting is not helpful.

(Before anyone asks, the photograph accompanying this post does NOT show the ‘bat tunnel’! It’s a tunnel in Tenerife, part of the network of water conduits that were built in the past and now provide homes for many of the resident bats)

Was this the first online database of plant-pollinator interactions?

Leave a reply

Over the past few years, the ways in which we collate and use large databases of plant-pollinator interactions, and make them publicly available according to FAIR data principles, has been much on my mind. These were and are important considerations for several projects, including the Pollinators of Apocynaceae Database; the pandemic garden pollinators initiative that I coordinated during lock-down; the WorldFAIR project; and, most recently, an EU-funded project called BUTTERFLY that launches in April and involves both the DoPI and GloBI databases.

The latter are just two of a growing number of databases making information about plant-pollinator interactions in wild and agricultural settings freely available to other scientists and to wider stakeholders. An intriguing question to those of us interested in the history of pollination ecology as a science is: what was the first such online database? I think that I have the answer, but I’m happy to be corrected. But first some background.

Since returning to Britain from Denmark in March, Karin and I have been renting a house from some friends as a temporary measure before we found somewhere else to live. A really nice property became available late last year and we decided to move in on 18th December. Then last week the final consignment of boxes and furniture that we’d had in storage arrived at our new home and we’ve been spending time deciding what we want to keep and what needs disposing of.

I’d be the first to admit that I’ve always been something of a hoarder when it comes to books and paperwork, so one of my priorities has been thinning out the contents of old folders and box files. Yesterday I opened one that contained a sheaf of papers related to the study that Sigrid Liede-Schumann and I published on pollination systems in the family Asclepiadaceae (now subsumed into Apocynaceae). One of the items I found is, I think, a fascinating piece of history with regard to online interaction databases.

As you can see in the image above, it’s a print-out* of an email that I received on 31st December 1995 from Mark Fishbein. If I recall correctly, I’d met Mark at a conference and he’d mentioned that he’d been compiling published and unpublished records of pollinators of North American Asclepiadaceae into a database. In this email he tells me that:

“I now have my data base accessible (primitively) on the World Wide Web. It would be easiest for me if you accessed the data base this way…Here’s what to do (if you have access to a web browser)…”

As we complete the first quarter of the 21st century it’s difficult to conceive that, less than 30 years ago, people were saying things like “if you have access to a web browser”! But the World Wide Web was only opened to public use in 1991 and even by the mid-90s, was not being widely used even in academia. Note also that Mark’s database was not password protected – it was freely (FAIRly?) available to anyone who could access it. In this regard Mark was certainly ahead of his time and, as far as I know, “pollrec” was the first online database of plant-pollinator interactions.

After we published our paper in 1997, Sigrid and I made what was then termed ASCLEPOL (including Mark’s and our own records) available online, and this was later merged with APOPOL to form the basis of the Pollinators of Apocynaceae Database. The latter is not formally available online, but it is available as supplementary information in the paper and has been merged into GloBI.

Thirty years is not a long time in real terms, but over that period there’s been huge cultural changes as far as society is concerned, and we take for granted things like online access to information that were hardly conceived of back then. But in 1995, Mark’s approach was revolutionary, even if we didn’t appreciate it at the time. When I emailed him about it yesterday he told me that he was “comfortable with my new role of being someone of historical interest”, followed by a smiley face emoji (another late 20th century development). So thank you Mark, this blog post is for you!

—————————————————————————————————

*Yes kids, back in the day grandpa printed out some important emails so as not to lose them.

Biodiversity Net Gain and pollinators: catch up with my talk on YouTube

3 Replies

Yesterday I delivered a webinar for the Biological Recording Company on the topic of what Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) could mean for pollinator conservation. It’s a topic that clearly has a lot of resonance for the ecology community: almost one thousand people (994 to be precise) booked to attend, of which 380 actually watched. That’s a fairly typical ratio for free webinars, in my experience – many people book a place in the expectation that they will receive a link to watch the recording later.

The talk was indeed recorded and can be viewed by following this link to YouTube. There was a Q&A session afterwards which is not part of the recording but the questions and my answers have been transcribed and can be viewed on the Biological Recording Company’s blog, together with links to all of the references and data sources that I cited. Here’s the link to the blog.

I had a lot of really positive feedback during and after my talk, plus some extremely useful comments about where my interpretation of BNG was incorrect (or at least didn’t tell the whole story). As I stressed during my talk, BNG is a journey not an end point and we are all at the start of that journey! It’s going to be fascinating and important to see whether BNG can positively impact declining pollinator populations.

Biodiversity Net Gain and pollinators – join me for a FREE webinar next Monday!

Leave a reply

Biodiversity Net Gain is generating a lot of attention in the UK at the moment, some of it positive*:

“when designed and delivered well, BNG can secure benefits for nature, people and places, and for the economy”

“[BNG is] a game-changer for health and wellbeing”

And some of it extremely negative*:

“Biodiversity Net Gain is a lie but most people without enough ecological knowledge cannot see this & are fooled by the lie”

“[BNG is] a horrible legalistic contrivance, and it means nothing”

Regardless of how you feel about BNG, it’s here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and so we need to explore it and understand how (or whether) it can positively improve the state of nature in Britain.

Although I don’t pretend to be an expert on BNG**, I have thought a lot about how it might impact the group that I do have some expertise in, pollinators, and the implications for the pollination services that they provide to wild and crop plants.

Last October I produced a short report that considered the implications of BNG for insect pollinators – you can download a copy from the original blog post, though do be aware that some of the dates I mentioned were later revised by the then government and I have yet to revise the document.

As a follow up to this I have been invited by the Biological Recording Company to lead a one-hour webinar discussing this topic on Monday 28th October at 1pm. It’s free to attend and you can book a ticket by following this link. There’ll be a short presentation (30 minutes or so) followed by a live Q&A.

I hope that some of you can join me!

——————————————————————

*Real quotes, culled from reports and social media.

**Indeed, it’s such a new approach to development and nature conservation, can anybody consider themselves an expert?

What are the limits to pollinator diversity? A new article poses the question

Leave a reply

The most globally significant groups of pollinators are well known and have been studied for a long time: bees and wasps, flies, butterflies and moths, birds, bats and beetles are all familiar to those of us with an interest in pollination ecology. However, every few years a new type of pollinator or a novel pollination system is described from nature or from the fossil record, or we add further examples of previously neglected pollinator groups such as cockroaches.

This begs the question: how much is there still to discover? How close are we to describing the full diversity of animals that act as pollen vectors? Can looking at the past help us to predict what we might find in the future? That’s the topic of a Perspective article that I was invited to write for the special issue of the Journal of Applied Entomology on the theme of The Neglected Pollinators that I mentioned last month. It’s a subject that I’ve thought about a lot over the last few decades and it was great to get an opportunity to air some ideas and speculation.

The article is open access and you can download a copy by following the link in this reference:

Ollerton, J. (2024) What are the phylogenetic limits to pollinator diversity? Journal of Applied Entomology (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Although huge progress has been made over the past 200 years in identifying the diversity of pollinators of angiosperms and other plants, new discoveries continue to be made each year, especially in tropical areas and in the fossil record. In this perspective article I address the following questions: Just how diverse are the pollinators and what are the phylogenetic limits to that diversity? Which other groups of animals, not currently known to regularly engage with flowers, might be found to be pollinators in the future? Can we predict, from the fossil record and from discoveries in under-researched parts of the world, which animal groups might turn out in the future to contain pollinators? I also discuss why adding to our knowledge of plant–pollinator interactions is important, but also stress that an incomplete knowledge may not be a bad thing if it means that remote, inaccessible and relatively pristine parts of the world remain that way.

Science ceramics – the perfect gift for the geek in your life!

1 Reply

Over at the Dynamic Ecology blog, Jeremy Fox has provided a link to a company called Not Quite Past that uses AI to generate an image for a ceramic tile in the style of Dutch Delftware based on the prompts that you give it. That part is free, but if you wish the company will then manufacture that tile and ship it to you (though there’s a minimum order of 10 tiles).

It reminded me that when I was working in China earlier this year, we visited the extraordinary Museum of Chengjiang Fossils, dedicated to an amazing assemblage of early Cambrian-age animals. This biota is comparable to the more famous Burgess Shale fauna in Canada: both are in excess of 500 million years old, and they share some animals in common.

One such taxon is the genus Anomalocaris, a group of predatory early arthropods, the disarticulated parts of which were originally misidentified as belonging to different animals. It was the late Stephen J. Gould who first brought the story to popular attention in his 1989 book Wonderful Life. I read this when it was first published and had the pleasure of seeing Gould give a lecture about it in Oxford, and the story of Anomalocaris stuck with me. So it was great to see actual fossils of this remarkable animal in China.

Not only did I get to view the fossils, but I was able to buy the plate that’s featured at the top of this post, featuring a hand-painted painted Anomalocaris in a traditional Chinese style. It’s perhaps the most geeky ceramic imaginable, though Jeremy’s Daphnia tile comes a close second!

Here’s some more photos from the Chengjiang Museum, including sculptures of both Anomalocaris and the similarly mis-reconstructed Hallucigenia:

Butterflies, bumblebees and hoverflies can be equally effective pollinators of some plants says a new study

1 Reply

Just after I arrived in Northampton in 1995, I set about looking for suitable local sites for conducting pollination ecology field work for myself and students. The campus on which we were situated at the time was adjacent to an urban park – Bradlaugh* Fields – parts of which were designated as local nature reserves. In the intervening years, data from that area have made their way into a wide range of published studies, including:

I still have data collected during that time that have never been published, but good data are hard won and they may see the light of day at some point. Case in point is that we’ve just published a paper based on data from Bradlaugh Fields, the first of which were collected in 2001!

In this paper we’ve tested how effective hoverflies, butterflies and bumblebees are at pollinating the flowers of a common generalist grassland plant, colloquially called Field Scabious (Knautia arvensis). The expectation was that bumblebees, being generally larger, hairier and more flower-focused than the other groups, would be the most effective at transferring pollen to stigmas. To our surprise, they were not: hoverflies and butterflies performed just as well! In fact we argue that butterflies may be MORE important as pollinators of this plant because they fly further distances between individual plants, rather than hopping between the inflorescences of the same plants, as bumblebees tend to do.

Crucially, the importance of these different groups of pollinators varies enormously as the relative abundance of the insects visiting the flowers differs between seasons. In some years butterflies dominate as pollinators, in other years bumblebees or hoverflies. This is driven, we think, both by fluctuations in the populations of these insects and by the availability of other, more preferred flowers that may bloom at the same time.

The paper is part of a special issue of the Journal of Applied Entomology devoted to The Neglected Pollinators. It’s open access and you can download a copy by following the link in this reference:

Ollerton, J., Coulthard, E., Tarrant, S., Woolford, J., Ré Jorge, L. & Rech, A.R. (2024) Butterflies, bumblebees and hoverflies are equally effective pollinators of Knautia arvensis (Caprifoliaceae), a generalist plant species with compound inflorescences. Journal of Applied Entomology (in press)

Here’s the abstract:

Plant-pollinator interactions exist along a continuum from complete specialisation to highly generalised, that may vary in time and space. A long-held assumption is that large bees are usually the most effective pollinators of generalist plants. We tested this by studying the relative importance of different groups of pollinators of Knautia arvensis (L.) Coult. (Caprifoliaceae: Dipsacoideae). This plant is suitable for such a study because it attracts a diversity of flower visitors, belonging to different functional groups. We asked whether all functional groups of pollinators are equally effective, or if one group is most effective, which has been documented in other species with apparently generalised pollination systems. We studied two subpopulations of K. arvensis, one at low and one at high density in Northampton, UK. To assess pollinator importance we exposed unvisited inflorescences to single visits by different groups of pollinators (butterflies, bumblebees, hoverflies and others) and assessed the proportion of pollinated stigmas. We then multiplied the effectiveness of each pollinator group with their proportional visitation frequency in five different years. For each group we also compared time spent on flowers and flight distance between visits. The relative importance of each pollinator group varied between years, as did their flight distances between flower visits. Butterflies were the best pollinators on a per visit basis (in terms of the proportion of stigmas pollinated) and flew further after visiting an inflorescence. Different measures and proxies of pollinator effectiveness varied between taxa, subpopulations, and years, and no one group of pollinators was consistently more effective than the others. Our results demonstrate the adaptive value of generalised pollination strategies when variation in relative abundance of different types of pollinators is considered. Such strategies may have buffered the ability of plants to reproduce during past periods of environmental change and may do so in the future.

*Named after the estimable local MP and radical Charles Bradlaugh – see my blog post When Charles collide: Darwin, Bradlaugh, and birth control for Darwin Day 2016

Speaking at Oxford Ornithological Society – 11th September

Leave a reply

Later this month I’ve been invited by the Oxford Ornithological Society to give a talk about my new book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship. The talk will summarise the main themes from the book, particularly the sheer diversity of birds that can act as pollinators, what it means for the ecology and evolution of flowers, why the conservation of such interactions matters, and the cultural significance of bird-flower interactions. I’ll also deal with the question of why Europe is so odd when it comes to the question of birds as pollinators.

The talk is on Wednesday 11th September at Exeter Hall, Kidlington, starting at 7.45 pm; it’s free to society members, and non-members are invited to make a donation. Do come along if you’re in the area!

More details here: https://www.oos.org.uk/programme.php

I’ll bring a few copies of Birds & Flowers and Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society if anyone wants to buy a signed book.

Also in the diary are talks at South Leicester Birdwatchers (13th November) and Northamptonshire Bird Club (5th March).

If you represent a birding club or natural history society and wish to book me for a talk, please get in touch via my Contact page.

Don’t forget the blogosphere! A new opinion piece just published

2 Replies

Despite claims to the contrary, the total demise of the ecology blogosphere has not yet occurred. Some of us are still going strong, and others such as Dynamic Ecology and Jabberwocky Ecology have reactivated after a prolonged hiatus. It seems timely, therefore, to revisit the whole notion of ecological blogging, what it’s for, and what bloggers and readers get from it, personally as well as professionally. That’s the purpose of a new opinion piece just published in the Annals of Applied Biology.

The article is part of a special issue of that journal dedicated to the late Prof. Simon Leather, who was both its former Editor-in-Chief and a dedicated blogger. Simon, with his insightful, often very funny, blogging voice on Don’t Forget the Roundabouts, is sorely missed.

The full reference with a link to the journal is below. If anyone needs a PDF, please do ask via my Contact page:

Heinen, R., Duffy, M., Fox, J.W., Heard, S.B., McGlynn, T., Ollerton, J., Rillig, M.C., Saunders, M.E., Millman, C.A. & Azevedo, R.A. (2024) Opinion: Don’t forget the blogosphere. Annals of Applied Biology 185: 124–131

Here’s the abstract:

Communicating results and ideas to a wider audience has been an important, but challenging component of scientists working in an academic environment. Particularly in recent decades, various social media platforms have become increasingly important to facilitate this. In addition, many scientists have used blogging platforms to communicate and discuss their work. Although the online dynamics of science communication are continuously changing, blogging has been used in a remarkably stable form for several decades. For this work, we brought several ecology bloggers to reflect on blogging as a science communication medium. We argue that blogging can be a powerful way to present new ideas and discuss them with a wide audience. Although blogs are not the same as scientific articles, they often serve as the initial brainstorm session. Importantly, we argue that blogs are most effective when bloggers and readers actively engage in conversations. We believe that blogging will be here to stay in science communication because of its unique and independent form of outreach.

Urban bees are often early bees says a new study

1 Reply

The latest paper from Muzafar Sirohi‘s PhD work on urban solitary bees has just been published in the journal Zoodiversity, a publication of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In this paper we looked at how the flight periods of urban populations of bees differ from those in surrounding nature reserves and other “natural” settings. One of the most interesting findings is that urban bees tend to emerge earlier, and be active longer, than their rural counterparts. The quote the study:

“We observed a substantial effect of urban microclimate on bee flight periods. A total of 153 individuals of nine bee species were recorded one to nine weeks before or after their expected flight periods. In contrast, only 14 individuals of four species were seen at unusual flight periods in nature sites.”

In my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society I discussed the importance of towns and cities for supporting pollinator populations, and conversely how important those populations are for urban food production. Likewise, in Birds and Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship I have a chapter entitled “Urban flowers for urban birds”. The relationship between our built environment and pollinators is a fascinating topic, but there’s still much we don’t understand about how these insects and vertebrates respond behaviorally to urbanisation. Are they adapting in an evolutionary sense, or simply responding flexibly to the different conditions that cities impose on their biologies? Will future climate change make towns and cities uninhabitable for these animals? Hopefully our paper will stimulate further work on these and other topics.

Here’s the full reference with a link to the paper (which is open access):

Sirohi, M. H., Jackson, J., & Ollerton, J. (2024). Comparison of Flight Periods of Solitary and Primitively Eusocial Bees in Urban Environments and Nature Conservation Areas: a Preliminary Report. Zoodiversity 58: 317-334

Here’s the abstract:

Solitary and primitively eusocial bees, an important group of pollinators, have declined in the past few decades. In view of the recent focus on safeguarding pollinating insects, it is vital to understand the basic ecology of species for their conservation, for example their phenologies. We observed the flight periods of solitary and primitively eusocial bees in both the urban core of a large British town and nearby nature conservation areas. The bee surveys were conducted with standardised methods, on warm sunny days from the first appearance of bees in March 2012 and continued until October 2012. This study confirmed that a high number of species are active in the spring season. The emergence dates of species in urban areas and nature sites varied; about 26 of the 35 species were recorded at least one week earlier in urban areas; in contrast, only four species were seen earlier in nature conservation sites. When comparing this with the expected flight periods recorded (largely in nature sites) in the literature, many species were recorded at their expected time. However, a few individuals were recorded after their usual flight activity time, suggesting that the populations were possibly affected by the microclimate in urban areas. More urban phenological data are needed to understand the phenological trends in bees in urban habitats.