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Filtering by Tag: Publications
It’s been some busy times as we’re trying to get some longterm projects published! Hopefully the first in a string of these is our new work in PNAS, led by Anthony Vaudo and with collaborator Lee Dyer, in which we asked how the protein and lipid content structured interactions between Eastern Sierra/Great Basin plants and native bees. More to come on this!
Sunrise, not sunset!
A busy year and I’ve gotten behind on updates— some notable cool things that happened amidst a global pandemic…
Proud of our new paper out in Functional Ecology, in which Sarah Richman and a great team explored how natural chemicals found in some plants’ nectars (caffeine, thymol, and digoxin, found in Citrus, thyme, and foxglove respectively…) interact with neonicotinoid pesticides to influence bee health and behavior. Read our blog post about it here!
Big congratulations to two PhD students, Jess and Anna who each received fellowships— Anna a 3-year NIFA Predoctoral Fellowship to study the effects of pesticides and fungicides on bees and plants, and Jess a 3- year NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to focus on pollen chemistry and bee behavior. Lots to celebrate!
Comings and goings
Seems like time for an update! Despite all the challenges thrown our way by the pandemic (lab shutdowns, conference cancellations, online teaching), some bright spots of the past year:
Jake Francis defended his dissertation, and left to begin a postdoctoral position at UC Davis with Dr. Rachel Vannette. We can’t wait to see what cool insights into plant-microbe-pollinator interactions he uncovers! Congrats!
We collectively decided that learning more about microbes would be a good pandemic project— so we (co first authors Jake Francis and Anna Tatarko produced a new paper in Current Opinion in Insect Science that explores how insights from the world of pollinator behavior might inform research into floral microbes, and vice versa.
Anthony Vaudo rounded up an impressive dataset on the macronutrient content of different plant species’ pollens (alongside data on bee corbicular loads), and in his 2020 paper, also provides a useful methodology.
PI Leonard “returned” from sabbatical and was, as they say on the Great British Bake Off show, chuffed to receive the 2020 NSHE Graduate Academic Advisor Award. Truly chuffed!
Isabelle, Sage, and Jake sampling flowers at our Norden CA field site
This summer’s research is in full swing, and new happenings include:
Two new papers! Muth et al. Biology Letters asks how neonic pesticides impact learning of floral scent vs. color…and Francis et al. Current Biology explores how nectar and pollen chemistry might work together to affect interactions between plants, their pollinators, and their co-flowering competitors.
Two new people! Isabelle Maalouf has joined us as a postgrad research assistant, and Anthony Vaudo has joined the lab as a postdoctoral researcher, joining the NSF-funded project “Nutritionally complex floral rewards in a community context”.
Campus workspace
As spring semester comes to an end, some lab highlights!
Felicity ended her postdoctoral era with a new publication on how neonicotinoid pesticides impact learning in free-flying bees, and now heads to UT-Austin to begin her faculty position.
Jake received 2nd place in the UNR Graduate Student Association’s Student Paper Competition! A version of this work will be out in press in a few weeks, so stay tuned…
Anna received a Hadley-Lynch Scholarship from the UNR Biology Department!
PI Leonard received the Hyung K. Shin Award for Excellence in Research from the College of Science. It was great to have all our hard work recognized in this way!
Now for a busy but hopefully productive summer! Many of us will be at conferences (e.g. International Pollinator Conference at UC Davis, Evolution). PI Leonard is starting a year of leave, so may be a bit slower to answer emails than normal.
Eventually…
As the latest snowstorm heads into town, we’re starting to make plans for Spring/Summer 2019, which include:
Saying farewell :( to Dr. Felicity Muth, who is heading to start her own lab at UT Austin :)
Attending the 2019 International Pollinator Conference (UC Davis) and giving talks at Evolution
Beginning sabbatical leave!
It’s been a busy and productive year so far, with USDA-funded new postdoctoral researcher Sarah Richman joining the lab, and new PhD student Anna Tatarko starting up electrophysiological experiments with Dennis Mathew. The past few months have also seen a new paper out on how pollen fatty acids influence bee learning, and (very shortly) we think our first in a series of neonicotinoid papers written by Felicity Muth will be out. Stay tuned!
Measuring nectar
We're wrapping up a great summer by attending the BOMBUSS conference in Logan, Utah. This first-of-its kind meeting was an intensive immersion in methods for bumblebee researchers.
Felicity gave a lightning talk and poster about the new FMPER technique, which we are using to measure learning in wild bees. Excitingly, the paper describing the method is now out (Methods in Ecology and Evolution). The FMPER technique is not only awesome for our research, but also makes a great undergraduate lab activity (contact us for details).
After co-leading a session on "Foraging and Nutrition" with Hollis Woodard (UC Riverside), and spending 3 days talking Bombus non-stop, very excited to get back to lab and try out some of what we've learned!
We're going to keep BOMBUSS spirit alive at UNR this semester, with EECB Colloquia by Hollis Woodard, Maj Rundlöf (Lund University./UC Davis) aaaaand Felicity Muth herself this semester!
Most flowers offer visitors some combination of nectar AND pollen, but nearly all research on bee cognition involves nectar alone (or, increasingly, pollen alone). We wondered how well bees learned an association between color and a given resource (pollen) when they were also collecting the alternative resource (nectar).
The paper tells a complex story that can be easily summarized: while collecting pollen had no effect on bees' ability to learn a nectar-color association, collecting nectar impaired their ability to learn a pollen-color association.
Read the whole story for our thoughts on why this might be happening, and what it might mean for plant fitness. This paper was a long time in coming, so it's nice to see out!
Our new paper in Evolutionary Ecology reviews new findings and questions springing from the Special Issue I guest-edited. It was a great experience putting together this project, and fun to do some brainstorming about the future of the field.
Our new paper in Animal Behaviour is getting some coverage in the Science Times! Click through for beautiful video and article that highlights this work done by Avery Russell!
**Update: this got a lot of press! Science, Nature and Scientific American**
In our new Biology Letters paper, Felicity, Jake and I showed that bees responded differently to pollen blends adulterated with a sweet (sucrose) or bitter (quinine) substance. The taste of pollen affected how much of it bees collected from a flower, as well as their tendency to land subsequently on a visually-similar flower. We're excited about the implications of these findings for looking at pollen chemistry in a new light! This was also a fun chance to use our thermal camera :)
In our new Behavioral Ecology paper, Jake looks at how bees order their collection of pollen (protein) and nectar (carbohydrates). Request a copy on ResearchGate!
"Mosaic" flowers (aka frankenflower) created by combining different species' corollas and anthers
Our NSF collaboration with colleagues at the University of Arizona (PhD Student Avery Russell, co-PI Dan Papaj and undergraduate Rebekah Golden) has produced a new paper in Behavioral Ecology, involving a first-of-its-kind experiment that explores what floral features bees learn from plants that reward bees with pollen alone. Avery pioneered the "frankenflower" design, which allows him to compare the responses of naive and experienced bees to flowers that have anthers matched or mismatched between Solanum and Exacum plants. Check it out on ResearchGate, or via the journal website. Congrats Avery!!
Bees might learn that the colors of petals, anthers, or pollen itself predicts pollen rewards.
In our new Animal Behaviour paper (Muth et al. 2016 or try ResearchGate) , Felicity pushed the study of pollen learning forward by 1) demonstrating that bees can learn based on reinforcement by floral-collected pollen and 2) exploring what features of flowers they can learn, and how long they remember these associations.
We're excited about our new publication, "Colour learning when foraging for nectar and pollen: bees learn two colours at once" out today in Biology Letters. It was a fun experience to prepare a short-format manuscript, and Felicity's experiment uncovered some exciting findings about basic aspects of bee foraging.
When most people think about bee learning, they think of sugary nectar rewards. However, many bees collect both nectar and pollen (their source of protein) on a foraging trip. Felicity was interested in the cognitive aspects of this "multitasking". At least here when the rewards are on different flowers, bees can indeed learn to associate color + reward type. Doing so may come at a cost, as we found some evidence that bees focusing on a single reward performed better (more on that in forthcoming publications).
From the plant POV, it's interesting that bees seem to form expectations about what kind of reward a plant will offer based on its color. Could this have consequences for co-flowering plant species?
Our paper on how secondary compounds in floral nectar affect bumble bee parasites (self-medication project) is now out in Proceedings B: Biological Sciences! It's getting some neat press as well. Leif wrote a nice piece about "floral pharmacies" here, and it was featured as a Nature "Research Highlight" as well.
Two papers on the use of vibration in learning experiments are now out!
Long, S.M., Leonard, A.S., Carey, A.*, and Jakob, E.M. 2015. Vibration as an effective stimulus for aversive conditioning in jumping spiders. Journal of Arachnology 43:111-114.
Muth, F., Scampini, A.V.*, and Leonard, A.S. 2015. The effect of acute stress on learning and memory in the bumble bee. Learning and Motivation.
- J Comp Phys A Paper on how bees use multisensory floral stimuli now out!
Find out in our new paper on how visual and olfactory stimuli affect bumblebee brain development!
How might flowers use patterns to defend themselves against nectar thieves? Paper on nectar guide patterns and nectar robbing now out! Also, I was interviewed for PLOS's "Author Spotlight".
