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News Release 13-131

Bee Faithful? Plant-Pollinator Relationships Compromised When Bee Species Decline

Removing even one bumblebee species from an ecosystem affects plant reproduction

Bumble bee foraging on tall larkspur

Bumble bee foraging on tall larkspur near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado.


July 22, 2013

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Remove even one bumblebee species from an ecosystem and the effect is swift and clear: Pollination is less effective, and plants produce significantly fewer seeds.

This according to research published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that focuses on the interactions between bumblebees and larkspur wildflowers in Colorado's Rocky Mountains.

The findings show that reduced competition among pollinators disrupts floral fidelity, or specialization, among the remaining bees in the system, leading to less successful plant reproduction.

"We found that these wildflowers produce one-third fewer seeds in the absence of just one bumblebee species," says Emory University ecologist Berry Brosi, who led the study.

"That's alarming and suggests that global declines in pollinators could have a bigger effect on flowering plants and food crops than was previously realized."

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the research; the paper was co-authored by ecologist Heather Briggs of the University of California-Santa Cruz.

"This study shows that the loss of a single bee species can harm pollination and reproduction of all flowering plant species in an ecosystem," says Alan Tessier, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.

"What's equally impressive is the demonstration of the mechanisms--that the loss of a single species changes the foraging behavior of all the remaining bee species."

About 90 percent of plants need animals, mostly insects, to transfer pollen between them so they can fertilize and reproduce.

Bees are by far the most important pollinators worldwide and have co-evolved with the floral resources they need for nutrition.

During the past decade, however, scientists have reported dramatic declines in populations of some bee species.

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 were curious about whether this theoretical resilience would hold up in real-life scenarios.

The team conducted field experiments to learn how the removal of a single pollinator species would affect the plant-pollinator relationship.

"Most pollinators visit several plant species over their lifetimes, but often will display what we call floral fidelity over shorter time periods," Brosi says.

"They'll tend to focus on one plant while it's in bloom, then a few weeks later move on to the next species in bloom. You might think of them as serial monogamists."

Floral fidelity clearly benefits plants, because a pollinator visit will only lead to plant reproduction when the pollinator is carrying pollen from the same plant species.

"When bees are 'promiscuous,' visiting plants of more than one species during a single foraging session, they are much less effective as pollinators," Briggs says.

The researchers conducted their experiments at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte, Colo.

Located at 9,500 feet, the facility's subalpine meadows are too high for honeybees, but they are buzzing during the summer months with bumblebees.

The experiments focused on the interactions of the insects with larkspurs, dark purple wildflowers that are visited by 10 of the 11 bumblebee species there.

The researchers studied a series of 20-meter-square wildflower plots, evaluating each one in both a control state, left in its natural condition, and in a manipulated state, in which nets were used to remove the bumblebees of just one species.

The researchers then observed bumblebee behavior in both the control plots and the manipulated plots.

"We'd literally follow around the bumblebees as they foraged," Briggs says. "It's challenging because the bees can fly pretty fast."

Sometimes the researchers could only record between five and 10 movements, while in other cases they could follow the bees to 100 or more flowers.

"When we caught bees to remove target species from the system, or to swab their bodies for pollen, we released them unharmed," Brosi says.

No researchers were harmed either, he adds. "Stings were very uncommon during the experiments. Bumblebees are quite gentle on the whole."

Across the steps of the pollination process, from patterns of bumblebee visits to plants, to picking up pollen, to seed production, the researchers saw a cascading effect of removing one bee species.

While about 78 percent of the bumblebees in the control groups were faithful to a single species of flower, only 66 percent of the bumblebees in the manipulated groups showed such floral fidelity.

The reduced fidelity in manipulated plots meant that bees in those groups carried more types of pollen than those in the control groups.

The changes had direct implications for plant reproduction: Larkspurs produced about one-third fewer seeds when one of the bumblebee species was removed, compared to larkspurs in the control groups.

"The small change in the level of competition made the remaining bees more likely to 'cheat' on the larkspur," Briggs says.

While previous research has shown how competition drives specialization within a species, the bumblebee study is one of the first to link this mechanism to the broader functioning of an ecosystem.

"Our work shows why biodiversity may be key to the conservation of an entire ecosystem," Brosi says.

"It has the potential to open a whole new set of studies into the implications of interspecies interactions."

-NSF-

Media Contacts
 Cheryl Dybas, NSF, (703) 292-7734, email: cdybas@nsf.gov
Beverly Cox Clark, Emory University, (404) 712-8780, email: beverly.clark@emory.edu

Related Websites
NSF News: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=119843
NSF Article: It's Wildflower Season on Mountain Peaks, But Alpine Plants May Soon Miss the Date: http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=124767&org=NSF
NSF News: Where Have All the Hummingbirds Gone?: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=124345

The U.S. National Science Foundation propels the nation forward by advancing fundamental research in all fields of science and engineering. NSF supports research and people by providing facilities, instruments and funding to support their ingenuity and sustain the U.S. as a global leader in research and innovation. With a fiscal year 2023 budget of $9.5 billion, NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 40,000 competitive proposals and makes about 11,000 new awards. Those awards include support for cooperative research with industry, Arctic and Antarctic research and operations, and U.S. participation in international scientific efforts.

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