Functional traits of plants and pollinators explain resource overlap between honeybees and wild pollinators.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Cappellari A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9056470 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) pose a risk to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, by affecting managed livestock and wildlife that provide valuable resources and ecosystem services, such as the pollination of crops. Honeybees (Apis mellifera), the prevailing managed insect crop pollinator, suffer from a range of emerging and exotic high-impact pathogens, and population maintenance requires active management by beekeepers to control them. Wild pollinators such as bumblebees (Bombus spp.) are in global decline, one cause of which may be pathogen spillover from managed pollinators like honeybees or commercial colonies of bumblebees. Here we use a combination of infection experiments and landscape-scale field data to show that honeybee EIDs are indeed widespread infectious agents within the pollinator assemblage. The prevalence of deformed wing virus (DWV) and the exotic parasite Nosema ceranae in honeybees and bumblebees is linked; as honeybees have higher DWV prevalence, and sympatric bumblebees and honeybees are infected by the same DWV strains, Apis is the likely source of at least one major EID in wild pollinators. Lessons learned from vertebrates highlight the need for increased pathogen control in managed bee species to maintain wild pollinators, as declines in native pollinators may be caused by interspecies pathogen transmission originating from managed pollinators.
| S-EPMC3985068 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Sacbrood virus (SBV) is one of the many viruses that infect both the Western honeybee (Apis mellifera) and the Eastern honeybee (Apis cerana). Recently, the interspecies transmission of SBV has been discovered, especially among wild pollinators. This newly discovered evolutionary occurrence regarding SBV indicates a much wider host range than previously believed, causing further concern about the future sustainability of agriculture and the resilience of ecosystems. Over the past few decades, vast numbers of studies have been undertaken concerning SBV infection in honeybees, and remarkable progress has been made in our understanding of the epidemiology, pathogenesis, transmission, and manifestations of SBV infection in honeybees and other pollinators. Meanwhile, some methods, including Chinese medicine, have been established to control and prevent sacbrood disease in A. cerana in Asian countries. In this review, we summarize the existing knowledge of SBV and address the gaps in the knowledge within the existing literature in the hope of providing future directions for the research and development of management strategies for controlling the spread of this deadly disease.
| S-EPMC9505205 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cities are socioecological systems that filter and select species, therefore establishing unique species assemblages and biotic interactions. Urban ecosystems can host richer wild bee communities than highly intensified agricultural areas, specifically in resource-rich urban green spaces such as allotments and family gardens. At the same time, urban beekeeping has boomed in many European cities, raising concerns that the fast addition of a large number of managed bees could deplete the existing floral resources, triggering competition between wild bees and honeybees. Here, we studied the interplay between resource availability and the number of honeybees at local and landscape scales and how this relationship influences wild bee diversity. We collected wild bees and honeybees in a pollination experiment using four standardized plant species with distinct floral morphologies. We performed the experiment in 23 urban gardens in the city of Zurich (Switzerland), distributed along gradients of urban and local management intensity, and measured functional traits related to resource use. At each site, we quantified the feeding niche partitioning (calculated as the average distance in the multidimensional trait space) between the wild bee community and the honeybee population. Using multilevel structural equation models (SEM), we tested direct and indirect effects of resource availability, urban beekeeping, and wild bees on the community feeding niche partitioning. We found an increase in feeding niche partitioning with increasing wild bee species richness. Moreover, feeding niche partitioning tended to increase in experimental sites with lower resource availability at the landscape scale, which had lower abundances of honeybees. However, beekeeping intensity at the local and landscape scales did not directly influence community feeding niche partitioning or wild bee species richness. In addition, wild bee species richness was positively influenced by local resource availability, whereas local honeybee abundance was positively affected by landscape resource availability. Overall, these results suggest that direct competition for resources was not a main driver of the wild bee community. Due to the key role of resource availability in maintaining a diverse bee community, our study encourages cities to monitor floral resources to better manage urban beekeeping and help support urban pollinators.
| S-EPMC10077915 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Basic knowledge on dispersal of microbes in pollinator networks is essential for plant, insect, and microbial ecology. Thorough understanding of the ecological consequences of honeybee farming on these complex plant-pollinator-microbe interactions is a prerequisite for sustainable honeybee keeping. Most research on plant-pollinator-microbe interactions have focused on temperate agricultural systems. Therefore, information on a wild plant that is a seasonal bottleneck for pollinators in cold climate such as Salix phylicifolia is of specific importance. We investigated how floral visitation by insects influences the community structure of bacteria and fungi in Salix phylicifolia inflorescences under natural conditions. Insect visitors were experimentally excluded with net bags. We analyzed the microbiome and measured pollen removal in open and bagged inflorescences in sites where honeybees were foraging and in sites without honeybees. Site and plant individual explained most of the variation in floral microbial communities. Insect visitation and honeybees had a smaller but significant effect on the community composition of microbes. Honeybees had a specific effect on the inflorescence microbiome and, e.g., increased the relative abundance of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) from the bacterial order Lactobacillales. Site had a significant effect on the amount of pollen removed from inflorescences but this was not due to honeybees. Insect visitors increased bacterial and especially fungal OTU richness in the inflorescences. Pollinator visits explained 38% variation in fungal richness, but only 10% in bacterial richness. Our work shows that honeybee farming affects the floral microbiome in a wild plant in rural boreal ecosystems.
| S-EPMC9813210 | biostudies-literature
Project description:1. The establishment of new botanic gardens in tropical regions highlights a need for weed risk assessment tools suitable for tropical ecosystems. The relevance of plant traits for invasion into tropical rainforests has not been well studied.2. Working in and around four botanic gardens in Indonesia where 590 alien species have been planted, we estimated the effect of four plant traits, plus time since species introduction, on: (a) the naturalization probability and (b) abundance (density) of naturalized species in adjacent native tropical rainforests; and (c) the distance that naturalized alien plants have spread from the botanic gardens.3. We found that specific leaf area (SLA) strongly differentiated 23 naturalized from 78 non-naturalized alien species (randomly selected from 577 non-naturalized species) in our study. These trends may indicate that aliens with high SLA, which had a higher probability of naturalization, benefit from at least two factors when establishing in tropical forests: high growth rates and occupation of forest gaps. Naturalized aliens had high SLA and tended to be short. However, plant height was not significantly related to species' naturalization probability when considered alongside other traits.4. Alien species that were present in the gardens for over 30 years and those with small seeds also had higher probabilities of becoming naturalized, indicating that garden plants can invade the understorey of closed canopy tropical rainforests, especially when invading species are shade tolerant and have sufficient time to establish.5. On average, alien species that were not animal dispersed spread 78 m further into the forests and were more likely to naturalize than animal-dispersed species. We did not detect relationships between the measured traits and estimated density of naturalized aliens in the adjacent forests.6. Synthesis: Traits were able to differentiate alien species from botanic gardens that naturalized in native forest from those that did not; this is promising for developing trait-based risk assessment in the tropics. To limit the risk of invasion and spread into adjacent native forests, we suggest tropical botanic gardens avoid planting alien species with fast carbon capture strategies and those that are shade tolerant.
| S-EPMC8093684 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundHoneybees (Apis mellifera L.) are frequently used in agriculture for pollination services because of their abundance, generalist floral preferences, ease of management and hive transport. However, their populations are declining in many countries. Agri-Environment Schemes (AES) are being implemented in agricultural systems to combat the decline in populations of pollinators and other insects. Despite AES being increasingly embedded in policy and budgets, scientific assessments of many of these schemes still are lacking, and only a few studies have examined the extent to which insect pollinators use the floral enhancements that are part of AES and on which floral components they feed (i.e., pollen and/or nectar).MethodsIn the present work, we used a combination of observations on honeybee foraging for nectar/pollen from the Californian annual plant Phacelia tanacetifolia in the field, collection of pollen pellets from hives, and pollen identification, to assess the value of adding phacelia to an agro-ecosystem to benefit honeybees.ResultsIt was found that phacelia pollen was almost never taken by honeybees. The work here demonstrates that honeybees may not use the floral enhancements added to a landscape as expected and points to the need for more careful assessments of what resources are used by honeybees in AES and understanding the role, if any, which AES play in enhancing pollinator fitness.DiscussionWe recommend using the methodology in this paper to explore the efficacy of AES before particular flowering species are adopted more widely to give a more complete illustration of the actual efficacy of AES.
| S-EPMC5119232 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The obligate mutualism and exquisite specificity of many plant-pollinator interactions lead to the expectation that flower phenotypes (e.g., corolla tube length) and corresponding pollinator traits (e.g., hawkmoth proboscis length) are congruent as a result of coevolution by natural selection. However, the effect of variation in flower morphology on the fitness of plants and their pollinators has not been quantified systematically. In this study, we employed the theoretical morphospace paradigm using a combination of 3D printing, electronic sensing, and machine vision technologies to determine the influence of two flower morphological features (corolla curvature and nectary diameter) on the fitness of both parties: the artificial flower and its hawkmoth pollinator. Contrary to the expectation that the same flower morphology maximizes the fitness of both plant and pollinator, we found that the two parties have divergent optima for corolla curvature, with non-overlapping fitness peaks in flower morphospace. The divergent fitness optima between plants and pollinators could lead to evolutionary diversification in both groups.
| S-EPMC6415803 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Habitat restoration is a key measure to counteract negative impacts on biodiversity from habitat loss and fragmentation. To assess success in restoring not only biodiversity, but also functionality of communities, we should take into account the re-assembly of species trait composition across taxa. Attaining such functional restoration would depend on the landscape context, vegetation structure, and time since restoration. We assessed how trait composition of plant and pollinator (bee and hoverfly) communities differ between abandoned, restored (formerly abandoned) or continuously grazed (intact) semi-natural pastures. In restored pastures, we also explored trait composition in relation to landscape context, vegetation structure, and pasture management history. Abandoned pastures differed from intact and restored pastures in trait composition of plant communities, and as expected, had lower abundances of species with traits associated with grazing adaptations. Further, plant trait composition in restored pastures became increasingly similar to that in intact pastures with increasing time since restoration. On the contrary, the trait composition of pollinator communities in both abandoned and restored pastures remained similar to intact pastures. The trait composition for both bees and hoverflies was influenced by flower abundance and, for bees, by connectivity to other intact grasslands in the landscape. The divergent responses across organism groups appeared to be mainly related to the limited dispersal ability and long individual life span in plants, the high mobility of pollinators, and the dependency of semi-natural habitat for bees. Our results, encompassing restoration effects on trait composition for multiple taxa along a gradient in both time (time since restoration) and space (connectivity), reveal how interacting communities of plants and pollinators are shaped by different trait-environmental relationships. Complete functional restoration of pastures needs for more detailed assessments of both plants dispersal in time and of resources available within pollinator dispersal range.
| S-EPMC5468136 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Ecologists seek general explanations for the dramatic variation in species abundances in space and time. An increasingly popular solution is to predict species distributions, dynamics, and responses to environmental change based on easily measured anatomical and morphological traits. Trait-based approaches assume that simple functional traits influence fitness and life history evolution, but rigorous tests of this assumption are lacking, because they require quantitative information about the full lifecycles of many species representing different life histories. Here, we link a global traits database with empirical matrix population models for 222 species and report strong relationships between functional traits and plant life histories. Species with large seeds, long-lived leaves, or dense wood have slow life histories, with mean fitness (i.e., population growth rates) more strongly influenced by survival than by growth or fecundity, compared with fast life history species with small seeds, short-lived leaves, or soft wood. In contrast to measures of demographic contributions to fitness based on whole lifecycles, analyses focused on raw demographic rates may underestimate the strength of association between traits and mean fitness. Our results help establish the physiological basis for plant life history evolution and show the potential for trait-based approaches in population dynamics.
| S-EPMC3896207 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe different hypotheses proposed to explain positive species richness-productivity relationships, i.e. selection effect and complementarity effect, imply that plant functional characteristics are at the core of a mechanistic understanding of biodiversity effects.Methodology/principal findingsWe used two community-wide measures of plant functional composition, (1) community-weighted means of trait values (CWM) and (2) functional trait diversity based on Rao's quadratic diversity (FD(Q)) to predict biomass production and measures of biodiversity effects in experimental grasslands (Jena Experiment) with different species richness (2, 4, 8, 16 and 60) and different functional group number and composition (1 to 4; legumes, grasses, small herbs, tall herbs) four years after establishment. Functional trait composition had a larger predictive power for community biomass and measures of biodiversitity effects (40-82% of explained variation) than species richness per se (<1-13% of explained variation). CWM explained a larger amount of variation in community biomass (80%) and net biodiversity effects (70%) than FD(Q) (36 and 38% of explained variation respectively). FD(Q) explained similar proportions of variation in complementarity effects (24%, positive relationship) and selection effects (28%, negative relationship) as CWM (27% of explained variation for both complementarity and selection effects), but for all response variables the combination of CWM and FD(Q) led to significant model improvement compared to a separate consideration of different components of functional trait composition. Effects of FD(Q) were mainly attributable to diversity in nutrient acquisition and life-history strategies. The large spectrum of traits contributing to positive effects of CWM on biomass production and net biodiversity effects indicated that effects of dominant species were associated with different trait combinations.Conclusions/significanceOur results suggest that the identification of relevant traits and the relative impacts of functional identity of dominant species and functional diversity are essential for a mechanistic understanding of the role of plant diversity for ecosystem processes such as aboveground biomass production.
| S-EPMC3356333 | biostudies-literature