California farmers depend on bees to pollinate the state's multi-million dollar fruit and nut crops, but last season thousands of bee colonies disappeared around the country.
The KQED science program Quest recently featured CNR ecologist Claire Kremen, and her research on bee pollination. In addition, an online-only special features the urban bees of entomologist Gordon Frankie.
Better Bees: Super Bee and Wild Bee
Public curiosity about bees kept UC Berkeley graduate student Alex Harmon-Threatt on her toes at an annual wildflower festival at the Sunol-Ohlone Regional Wilderness, south of Livermore, on April 7. Kids and adults alike peered through her magnifying glass at a collection of native wild bee species on display: bumblebees, mining bees, sunflower bees, leaf-cutter bees, yellow-faced bees — even bees that "land on you lightly and drink your sweat," she told incredulous young visitors.
In the News & Views blog of the Ecological Society of America, Professor Steve Beissinger discusses his and Zachariah Peery’s Feb 07article Reconstructing the historic demography of an endangered seabird.
He writes:
It’s a simple question that I often get asked about an endangered species: “What caused it to decline?” but I find it to be one of the hardest to answer without giving a hand-waiving response. Determining causes of decline for a species based on data-driven conclusions rather than informed opinion is challenging because it first requires figuring out which demographic rate is depressed and then requires evidence linking it to one or more causes. Yet, to provide clear recommendations for recovering a threatened species, is there any more meaningful question to answer than what is causing it to decline?
From The San Francisco Chronicle [original URL]
By Alison Rood
When Professor Gordon Frankie wants to impress schoolchildren with the importance of bees, he lays out an array of foods such as berries, grapes, pears and chocolate alongside a couple of dried-out tortillas and rice cakes and asks them which foods they prefer.
"Invariably the kids go for the fruits and chocolate," he said. "Then I tell them: In a world without bees, the only choice they'd have would be the dried-out tortillas or rice cakes, since wheat and rice are self-pollinated. Even chocolate, from the cacao plant, depends on the pollination of bees. That gets their attention."
Frankie, an entomologist at UC Berkeley and a specialist in the behavior of native bees, has been the leader of a decadelong urban bee research project. By documenting bee diversity and populations in urban gardens throughout California, he's discovering which flowering plants attract native bees and determining whether urban gardens can support bees. He said the declining native bee population is comparable to global warming in terms of a potential ecological catastrophe.
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By studying marbled murrelet specimens collected around the early 1900s, biologists now have reconstructed the seabird's rates of reproduction and survival before its dramatic decline, providing for the first time a baseline measure of health by which contemporary populations can be compared.
Continue reading "Biologists shed light on health of marbled murrelet population in early 1900s" »
Matteo Garbelotto of UC Berkeley prepares a fungal sample from the Venice Museum of Natural History to send to his lab for sequencing and analysis.
Matthew Stuckey, fourth year in Environmental Economics and Policy and Conservation Resource Studies, is researching how the butterfly Colias behrii colonized the Sierra Nevada.
Through mentorship with Professor George Roderick and graduate student Sean Schoville, Stuckey has been working on cloning nuclear genes to assess genetic variation within and among populations of C. behrii.
Roderick’s team is using genetics to understand how organisms have colonized new areas. SPUR funds have helped provide chemicals and lab supplies necessary for molecular cloning – a technique essential for Stukey’s research.
The SPUR program also benefits the mentors who work closely with undergraduates on their research. For Schoville, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, having Stuckey's help has been a huge benefit. “These undergraduates are some of the brightest students,” he says. “Working with them gives me a great opportunity to see their minds grow and mature.”
The study is the first global estimate of crop production that is reliant upon animal pollination. It comes one week after a National Research Council (NRC) report detailed the troubling decline in populations of key North American pollinators, which help spread the pollen needed for fertilization of such crops as fruits, vegetables, nuts, spices and oilseed.
Continue reading "Pollinators help one-third of world's crop production" »
Baboons, duiker antelopes and cane rats are available by the pound in markets in major cities in North America and Europe, reports ESPM professor Justin Brashares.
While the meat showing up in cities from New York to London represent just a sliver of the illegal bushmeat trade, it highlights the strong demand that still exists for illegally hunted meat, the ecologist says.
Bushmeat (wild animals hunted for food) can be problematic when the animals killed are endangered or carrying disease. Most concern about bushmeat centres on western and central Africa, where great apes are among the animals eaten, and where it represents a serious threat to many animal populations.
Read the full story at Science News.
The effects of overfishing may have driven marbled murrelets, an endangered seabird found along the Pacific coast, to increasingly rely upon less nutritious food sources, according to a new study by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley.
The results, to be published online by early March 2006 in the journal Conservation Biology, suggest that feeding further down the food web may have played a role in low levels of reproduction observed in contemporary murrelet populations, and has likely contributed to the seabirds' listing as an endangered species, the researchers said.
