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Pollinator diversity and foraging specialization (Image 3)
An undergraduate student research assistant observes a captured bumblebee held temporarily in a vial as part of fieldwork for a project that studied changes in bee foraging behavior driven by pollinator species loss and the impact of such changes on native plant pollination.
For the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Berry Brosi, an ecologist and assistant professor at Emory University, and Heather Briggs, a graduate student at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz, showed how reduced competition among pollinators disrupts floral fidelity--or specialization--among the remaining bees in the system. This can lead to less successful plant reproduction.
Some studies have indicated that plants can tolerate losing most pollinator species in an ecosystem as long as other pollinators remain to take up the slack. Those studies, however, were based on theoretical computer modeling. Brosi and Briggs wanted to see if those findings would prove to be true in real-life scenarios so they conducted manipulative field experiments to learn how the removal of a single pollinator species would affect the plant-pollinator relationship. They also conducted controlled foraging trials in the lab at Emory.
The researchers conducted their experiments at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte, Colo. The facility, which is located at 9,500 feet, has subalpine meadows that are too high for honeybees but are teeming with bumblebees during the summer months. The experiments focused on the interactions of the insects with larkspur, a dark-purple wildflower that's visited by 10 of the 11 bumblebee species that live there.
"We found that these wildflowers produce one-third fewer seeds in the absence of just one bumblebee species," said Brosi. "Thats alarming, and suggests that global declines in pollinators could have a bigger impact on flowering plants and food crops than was previously realized."
Bee declines are of enormous societal relevance given the central role of bees as pollinators in both natural ecosystems and in human agricultural enterprises. Brosi's work addresses topics such as the effects of land-use change on bee communities; the impact of bee species loss on plant pollination in diverse natural communities; the conservation and landscaping genetics of bees; and understanding and managing disease threats in bees.
To read more about this research, see the UC-Santa Cruz news story Bees "betray" their flowers when pollinator species decline, study shows. [Research supported by NSF grant DEB 11-20572.] (Date of Image: 2010-2013) [Image 3 of 6 related images. See Image 4.]
Credit: Karen Levy, Emory University
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