Progress 02/15/23 to 02/14/24
Outputs
Target Audience:The scientific community was a primary target for our efforts this year. We shared preliminary data and our overall conceptual framework through invited talks by PD Leonard at the 2023 Gordon Research Conference on Plant-Herbivore Interactions and co-PD Vaudo at the 2024 International Conference on Pollinator Biology, Health and Policy and "Pollinator State of the Science" USDA/EPA workshop. This introduced our projects to national and international audiences including experts in pollination ecology, plant biology, and nutritional/chemical ecology. More locally, we also reached members of the public interested in bees and beekeeping through several outreach efforts, including organizing an outreach event at a local Meadery to celebrate National Pollinator Week in July 2023, delivering a presentation about bee behavior at the Nevada State Beekeepers meeting, and presenting an online extension talk about bee biology for continuing education credit through UNR Extension. Finally, undergraduate students were one of our audiences this year, whom we reached by running a 3-hour lab activity on bee learning and biology for an upper-level undergraduate neuroscience course. The lab was co-run by a PhD student involved in the grant research, and we demostrated the learning assay we are using in our experiments on diet and bee performance. Changes/Problems:We hit a major delay in the arrival of both our postdoctoral reseacher (who started in July 2023) and a critical piece of equipment (an incubator designed to match the one currently in PD Leonard's lab, needed for the proposed experiments that involved keeping bees in otherwise identical set ups but at different temperatures). The incubator was orderd in Jan 2023, had an initial ship date of 6/30/23 but did not arrive until late October 2023 and was unable to be installed in PD Leonard's lab until December 2023. Needless to say this was a frustrating delay, which set back the initiation of the bee-focused experiments by ~ 6 months. While normally we might just have pivoted to focus on pollen chemistry and greenhouse work, the unexpected delay unfortunately coincided with co-PD Kosma's sabbatical in Europe. We now have the people and equipment in place, but the incubator delay was enough of a setback that we anticipate requesting a no-cost extension if possible. A second change to note is that co-PD Anthony Vaudo has maintained Adjunct Professor position at UNR, and his involvement with advising on the grant, but has accepted a federal Research Biologist position at the Rocky Mountain Research Station (USFS). We are happy for Anthony's career success, and Dr. Charles Dean has been hired as a postdoctoral researcher to fill this role on the grant. Dr. Dean brings expertise in chemical ecology and insect physiology that we believe will enhance the depth and breadth of grant research. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Training Activities: Grant personnel including Postdoc Dr. Charles Dean, PD Leonard, and PhD student Jessica Buelow participated in a series of plant identification workshops held in the herbarium of the UNR Natural History Museum. Dr. Charles Dean was trained in behavioral techniques, including general experimental design as well as more specific learning and memory assays used in grant experiments. Professional Development: PD Leonard led a reading group for Postdoc Dr. Charles Dean and PhD student Jessica Buelow focusing on nutritional ecology. Grant personnel (Postdoc Charles Dean and PhD student Jessica Buelow) gained experience in mentoring by co-mentoring an undergraduate involved in the research. The undergraduate (Peyton Benner) gained research experience, and prepared a proposal to fund an independent research project. In terms of more formal instruction experience, Dr. Dean provided a guest lecture for PD Leonard's Sensory Ecology undergraduate course, and PhD student Jessica Buelow helped develop and present a hands-on lab activity relating to bee behavior for an upper-division neuroscience course. Jessica Buelow and undergraduate Peyton Benner participated in the Meadery outreach event for National Pollinator Week, with Buelow giving a 20 minute talk about bee behavior and biology, and Benner helping exhibit a bumble bee colony. Buelow further developed her public speaking skills by presenting a general talk about bee behavior for the 2023 Nevada State Beekeepers Association meeting. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We reached colleagues in the scientific community through the presentations described above (e.g. Entomological Society of America, Gordon Research Conference, USDA/EPA State of the Science Workshop). We reached Nevada Beekeepers, Master Gardeners, and members of the general public via public talks at the Nevada State Beekeepers meeting, a local meadery, and an online talk on bee biology delivered by PD Leonard (220 people in "attendance") through UNR Extension. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?(numbers here refer to those in the "Accomplishments" section). Objective 1: Evaluate the nutritional stability of floral resources under warming, developing new methods to characterize and predict changes to pollen chemistry with a particular focus on lipids and lipid-derived metabolites. The return of PD Kosma from a year sabbatical will position us to address Obj. 1 in the next reporting period. 1) Methods development manuscript: We anticipate that this manuscript will be submitted or close to submission during the next reporting period. 2) Field-based project led by PhD student Jessica Buelow (warming Lupinus plants in a field setting). We anticipate that the majority of data/sample collection will be completed during the next reporting period. We are eager to begin the greenhouse element of our project, and this project will be led by Dr. Charles Dean over the next reporting period. While the timing will depend on the availability of specific plant species, we anticipate he will have begun data collection on this project. Objective 2: Determine how warming alters bee nutritional needs using bumble bees (Bombus impatiens, the Common Eastern Bumble Bee) and mason bees (the Blue Orchard Bee, Osmia lignaria). 3) We began a major lab-based experiment on Bombus impatiens to explore the performance consequences of variation in omega 3:6 fatty acid dietary ratios (in line with the "Restricted Diet Manipulation" experiment described in the project narrative). This effort is led by the postdoctoral researcher we hired on the grant, Dr. Charles Dean, with assistance from PhD student Jessica Buelow and an undergraduate helper Peyton Benner. We anticipate that analysis of the behavioral data will be completed, and the chemical analysis of physiological markers should be well underway or even complete during the next performance period. Dr. Dean is eager to expand into Osmia, so we will decide whether to expand out into this new-to-us system, or go into further depth with Bombus during this period, to be determined by the specific results of the initial experiment. PhD Jessica Buelow has developed a dissertation proposal that dovetails with this objective, but focuses more specifically on the potential that secondary metabolites found in nectar and pollen might have temperature-dependent toxicity to bees. She is also interested in the extent to which specific lipids found in pollen might mediate this toxicity. Jessica plans to initiate these experiments (while assisting with some of the main grant experiments) during the next reporting period. Objective 3: Explore how the combined effects of warming alter interactions between bees and plants to impact the performance of both parties. 4) PD Leonard plans to spearhead an effort to write a review paper focusing on how climate change might alter the nutritional basis of species interactions. A target journal and author list will be finalized during the reporting period, along with an organizational structure. 5) Co-PD Vaudo and Dean will run their accepted symposium on anthropogenic influences on insects at the 2024 Pacific Branch Meeting of the Ecological Society of America Progress on this third Objective as a whole depends on having some specific outcomes relating to how warming affects plant chemistry. We may or may not have that in an interpretable form by the end of the next reporting period, but we should have plants started growing in a greenhouse by then.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Objective 1: Evaluate the nutritional stability of floral resources under warming, developing new methods to characterize and predict changes to pollen chemistry with a particular focus on lipids and lipid-derived metabolites. We made progress in several areas relating to this goal, (but prioritized Obj. 2 this year due to Co-PD Kosma's sabbatical as his lab and greenhouse access will play a major role in this area). We have numbered these efforts for cross-reference across this report. 1) Methods development manuscript: Co PD Vaudo continued to prepare this manuscript for publication, which describes a new pipeline for characterizing the external lipid chemistry of pollen samples of different starting masses. Given that there are often constraints on collecting sufficient material, we started with different masses of commercial pollens (1, 5, or 10 mg) and compared how starting material impacted our estimate of external lipid chemistry. Ultimately we show that starting masses as low as 5mg well-capture the same patterns that 10 mg returns. We believe this finding will be impactful because it will help make the study of pollen lipids more widely possible, particularly in situations where researchers want to include a large number of species or samples. Given the growing recognition of lipids' nutritional importance for bee health, we are eager to facilitate more researchers focusing on them. 2) Field-based project led by PhD student Jessica Buelow. Jessica is a PhD student in the UNR Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology program, who is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Jess has developed a dissertation proposal that connects to several grant themes, for example deploying open top chambers to artificially warm Sierra Nevada wildflowers known to be important nutritional sources for local bees, followed by pollen collection and lipid analysis. She piloted this approach on Lupinus argentus plants (one of our focal genera) at the UNR Whittell Forest & Wildlife Area during the reporting period. We believe Jessica's project will be impactful because Lupinus and other Fabaceous plants are well-known to be nutritionally important to a wide variety of bees, but we know almost nothing about what will happen to the nutritional value of these plants' pollen under warmer temperatures. Will their pollen become 'better' for bees (e.g. with more protein or lipids), 'worse' (e.g. with higher alkaloid content) in a warmer world? Jess' dissertation aims in part to answer these questions. Objective 2: Determine how warming alters bee nutritional needs using bumble bees (Bombus impatiens, the Common Eastern Bumble Bee) and mason bees (the Blue Orchard Bee, Osmia lignaria). This is the Objective we spent most of our efforts on during the reporting period: 3) We began a major lab-based experiment on Bombus impatiens to explore the performance consequences of variation in omega 3:6 fatty acid dietary ratios (in line with the "Restricted Diet Manipulation" experiment described in the project narrative). This effort is led by the postdoctoral researcher we hired on the grant, Dr. Charles Dean, with assistance from PhD student Jessica Buelow and an undergraduate helper Peyton Benner. Briefly, we are keeping individual workers in chambers housed within incubators where we can keep them at baseline or elevated temperature conditions for 5 days, while manipulating the ratio of these fatty acids across five dietary treatments experienced by bees at the two different temperatures. We then measure performance on an associative learning assay, and sacrifice bees while collecting a variety of metrics and samples for further analysis (e.g. ovarian development, fat body size and composition, and cuticular hydrocarbon profile). Due to shipping delays with the incubator required to properly run this experiment, we began data collection in earnest in December 2023, so during the reporting period collected about 1/3 of the required data. This project addresses the major question of how warming impacts bees' nutritional requirements, and as such, we believe that its results will be of major interest. Understanding whether at warmer temperatures bees need (or do not need) the specific fatty acids we focus on can help shape recommendations for what plants (whose pollens can vary widely in fatty acid content) best match bees' needs in a warmer environment. Objective 3: Explore how the combined effects of warming alter interactions between bees and plants to impact the performance of both parties. The empirical component of this Objective depends upon having some data in relation to the previous two Objectives, so most of our efforts during the reporting period related to more conceptual efforts. 4) We began planning for a conceptual framework or review paper focusing on how climate change might alter the nutritional basis of species interactions. Postdoctoral researcher Charles Dean began a bee-specific literature review on this topic during his first few months of the project. We are surprised that this question appears to be largely absent from the conservation or management literature, so envision providing a general framework that could inspire others to ask related questions in their focal systems (e.g. pollinators and beyond). 5) Co-PD Vaudo and Dean put together a successful proposal for a symposium on anthropogenic influences on insects at the 2024 Pacific Branch Meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Face to face discussion of the connection between nutritional ecology and global change can bring about new insights and form new connections for the early career scientists involved in this research. This symposium will provide Drs. Vaudo and Dean a chance to present and gain feedback on their work from potential reviewers and future collaborators.
Publications
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Leonard, A.S. "Floral Reward Complexity and Pollinator Behavior" Invited Talk. Gordon Research Conference: Plant Herbivore Interactions in Action: Fundamentals to Applications. Ventura, CA Feb 26-March 3 2023.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Vaudo, A.D., Grames, E., Kosma, D.K. and Leonard, A.S. "The known unknowns of wild bee nutritional ecology and conservation" Talk. Entomological Society of America Meeting. National Harbor, MD Nov 5-8 2023.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Vaudo, A.D. "Pollen nutrition structures bee-wildflower community interactions". Invited Talk. 2023 International Conference on Pollinator Biology, Health, and Policy. State College, PA. June 2-6 2023.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Other
Year Published:
2023
Citation:
Vaudo, A.S. "Pollen nutritional ecology of bee-flower interactions". USDA/EPA State of the Science Workshop. August 30-31 2023.
|