In the run up to release of my new book Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship, my publisher, Pelagic, has updated the book description and provided a preview of some of the pages and colour plates – follow this link to view them. On that page you can also pre-order the book direct from Pelagic Publishing, who will ship worldwide, or it’s available from many of the online book sellers.
I’m really excited to be sharing this with the readers of my blog and can’t wait for publication day! Early in 2024 I hope to do some talks, online and in person, to promote the book – so watch this space.
With best wishes to you all and hopes for a peaceful, and more sustainable, New Year.
Obviously the title of this post is click-bait, as there’s LOTS of things that I wish more people knew about pollination! But here’s one that really gets my (Yule) goat.
I’ve lost track of the number of times that I’ve read statements in books and research papers such as “bees collect lots of pollen from flowers therefore they are good pollinators”. Even worse, I sometimes see studies where pollen has been removed from “pollen baskets” or other scopae, then used as a measure of the importance of those bees as pollinators.
In both cases it seems to have been forgotten that bees are collecting pollen to feed their larvae and pollen that ends up in scopae is generally not available for pollination.
That’s the purpose of the Venn diagram at the top of this short post, to remind us that there can be a disconnect between what bees are doing and what plants require: foraging for pollen only partly correlates with flower pollination. Indeed, the same argument applies to any animal that feeds itself or its young on pollen, including pollen wasps (Maserinae), Heliconia butterflies, and some flower-visiting hoverflies, birds and bats.
It’s not only loss of pollen from reproduction that’s important here: depending on the size and behaviour of the bees relative to the shape and size of the flower, they may go nowhere near the stigma, so even if they are carrying viable pollen, it can be lost as far as the plant is concerned.
Note also that many bee species will collect pollen from wind-pollinated plants such as grasses, oaks, etc. Indeed in some species the availability of such pollen is extremely important – see Manu Saunders’ review on this topic and more recent papers that cite it. Again, it emphasises the partial disconnect between pollen collecting by bees and pollination of flowers by bees.
Assessing which flower visitors are actually pollinators is not technically demanding but it can be time consuming. The minimum that you need is single visit deposition (SVD) experiments in which you expose unvisited flowers to one visit by the potential pollinator. Then you assess how much pollen has landed on the stigma or (better) whether the visit results in seed set.
If you want to know more about the evidence that’s required to determine if a flower visitor is or is not a pollinator, they are codified in the “Cox-Knox Postulates” that I discuss in my book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society.
Books are never perfect. In the run-up to publication of Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship, I am all too aware that this is a truth that’s a cause of anxiety, and sometimes sleeplessness, for all authors. One category of imperfection is tipographical* errors have been introduced at some point in the process of writing and editing. In the past these were corrected in the first edition of a book by the inclusion of errata slips, and such errors are sometimes important in determining the true first editions of older books. On page 20 of the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, for example, there is a misspelling of the word “species”**. This was corrected in the second edition but is an important marker of an extremely valuable book, intellectually and (now) commercially.
A second category involves errors of fact or interpretation or expression that, with hindsight and reader feedback, require correction, or at least acknowledgement, by the author. These are the ones that really make an author squirm inside, even though we know that they are inevitable: we are, after all only human.
It turns out that there are a few examples of both categories in the first edition of my 2021 book Pollinators & Pollination: Nature and Society. Some of them have been corrected in the second edition, but if you purchased the first edition then these are what you should look out for:
P22 – ‘Unmated queens and males (drones) are produced by the colony later in the season’ changes to: ‘Unmated queens and males (drones) are produced by the colony from spring onwards.’
P30, Fig 2.9 – Correct ‘Tabaernemontana’ to Tabernaemontana
P51, Figure 3.8 – title – it should read C. rhynchantha [there’s an h missing]
P57 – ‘The bank that Darwin was referring to is on his property at Down House in Kent, and it was one he observed many times during his walks through the garden.’ changes to ‘The bank that Darwin was referring to is near his property at Down House in Kent, and it was one he observed many times during his walks in the area.’***
P146 – ‘I’ve even see them attack and kill honey bees’ should read: ‘I’ve even seen them….’
P169 – in the title for Figure 10.5, Anon (2019) should be Anon (1919) [in some presentation copies of my book I have corrected this and initialed the change]
P259 – this reference: Klein, A.-M., Steffan-Dewenter, I. and Tscharntke, T. (2003) Fruit set of highland coffee increases with the diversity of pollinating bees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 270: 955–961. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2002.2306.
Should be replaced by:
Klein, A.-M., Steffan-Dewenter, I. and Tscharntke, T. (2003) Bee pollination and fruit set of Coffea arabica and C. canephora (Rubiaceae). American Journal of Botany 90, 153– 157. doi: 10.1046/j.1365-2664.2003.00847.x
The last two have yet to be corrected and will need to wait for the third edition:
P119 – the Rader et al. study did not include birds and bats, just insects.
P262 – “Nabhan, G.P. and Buchmann, S.” should read “Buchmann, S. and Nabhan, G.P.”
That final error is really embarrassing because, as I point out in the chapter ‘The Politics of Pollination’, their book The Forgotten Pollinators was an inspirational one for stimulating research and action around pollinator conservation! I can offer no explanation for why the order of the authors got reversed in my head.
My sincere thanks to those readers who pointed out some of these errors. My hope is that Birds & Flowers has fewer, but I may be fooling myself…
*You see what I did there?
**Proof-reading is boring and soul-destroying for any author, but really Mr Darwin?!
***If there is an after-life, I’d like to think that Darwin’s now enjoying this error after my snarky comment in the second footnote. To which I’ll respond: watch out for a doozy of a footnote about a Darwin footnote in Birds & Flowers!
There’s so much good science and so many great talks coming out of the (broad) field of pollinator and pollination research at the moment! Here’s a few things that have come up on my radar. Feel free to comment and add your own examples of things I may have missed.
Full disclosure, I was one of the reviewers of Pollinators and plants as ecosystem engineers: post-dispersal fruits provide new habitats for other organisms by João Cardoso et al., and I know that there was quite a bit of back and forth between authors, editor and reviewers about what the findings really meant and how best to frame them. My view was that this study should be published because it’s another demonstration of the importance of pollinators and their interactions with plants that goes beyond the obvious outcomes of plant reproduction and support of pollinator populations.
Biodiversity Net Gain (or BNG) promises to transform the way that we approach nature conservation in the UK. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what this might mean for insect pollinators and have produced a new report that summarises the opportunities that BNG presents and how we can make the most of them. You can download a copy of that report by following this link.
This is meant to be a working document and as BNG progresses, and our understanding of its impacts on pollinators increases, I will update it. In the meantime, please do feel free to comment.
‘…people would need to be very weak in the head… before it would occur to them to go into the garden and eat snails…’
Anon. (1867)
Delighted to announce that my essay “A short history of snail-eating in Britain” will be in October’s issue of British Wildlifemagazine. This is a topic that’s intrigued me for many years because it has a close connection to the snail-eating habits of folks (my own family included) in the area of the north-east of England where I grew up. Hopefully it will also interest, and surprise, the readers of British Wildlife!
Today I returned the final, edited files of the book manuscript to the publisher. It’s been a long summer of ‘fine distinctions and nice judgements’, to quote my editor, the inimitable Hugh Brazier. Now that’s all finalised, I thought that it was time to share the chapter titles with you – here goes:
Introduction: Encounters with birds and flowers
1 Origins of a partnership
Understanding 50 million years of bird and flower evolution
2 Surprising variety
The astounding diversity of pollinating birds
3 Keeping it in the family
Accounts of the different groups of bird pollinators
4 A flower’s point of view
How many plants are bird-pollinated, and where are they found?
5 In the eye of the beholder
What do bird flowers look like?
6 Goods and services
The enticements given to birds for pollinating flowers
7 Misaligned interests
The ongoing conflicts between flowers and birds
8 Senses and sensitivities
How bird brains shape the flowers that they pollinate
9 Codependent connections
Networks of interacting flowers and birds
10 Hitchhikers, drunks and killers
The other actors in the network and how they affect the main players
11 The limits to specialisation
How ‘specialised’ are the relationships between birds and flowers?
12 Islands in the sea, islands in the sky
Isolation, in oceans or in mountains, results in some remarkable interactions
13 The curious case of Europe
Why did we believe that Europe had no bird-pollinated flowers?
14 ‘After the Manner of Bees’
The origins of our understanding of birds as pollinators, and their cultural associations
15 Feathers and fruits
Birds as pollinators of edible wild plants and domesticated crops
16 Urban flowers for urban birds
Bird pollination in cities and gardens
17 Bad birds and feral flowers
The impact of invasive species
18 What escapes the eye
The decline and extinction of bird–flower relationships
19 The restoration of hope
People as conservationists of birds and their flowers
There you have it! I’m incredibly excited that the book is now just about finished (I still have to proof read the typeset text and produce an index) and I look forward to finally having a copy in my hands. Birds & Flowers: An Intimate 50 Million Year Relationship is available for pre-order from Pelagic Publishing, or via online bookshops.
A pollination ecologist was recently working on the reproduction of a tropical plant species and discovered that the flowers were visited by two species of weevils, one large and one small.
The larger weevil was too big to access the nectar from the front, so it chewed its way into the flowers, destroying the petals, and in the process picking up no pollen.
The other weevil species was, however, able to enter the flowers, where it became smeared with pollen, which it then transferred to the stigmas in flowers of other plants.
The pollination ecologist therefore concluded that the true pollinator of this plant was, indeed, the lesser of the two weevils…
Writing in the open access Peer Community Journal, Julien Haran, Gael Kergoat, and Bruno de Medeiros have produced a really fascinating review of weevil pollination called:
Weevils are beetles, members of the superfamily Curculionoidea, which contains an estimated 97,000 species. Many are herbivores, including seed predators – I first encountered them as a researcher during my PhD when I assessed the impact of one species as a seed predator of my study plant Bird’s-foot Trefoil. Surprisingly, however, pollinating relationships have evolved multiple times between weevils and plants. Drawing on published studies and their own unpublished observations, the authors conclude that such “associations have been described or indicated in no less than 600 instances.” Most of these are brood-site pollination systems that have probably evolved from seed predation relationships.
No doubt many more examples of weevil pollination remain to be discovered but as it stands, this review paper is a great summary of a fascinating and still rather neglected corner of pollination ecology.
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 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!
Prof. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author 