Pollination Biologist

 

Although the inter-annual dynamics of networks have been well-studied, empirical work focusing on the intra-annual dynamics of networks is less common. Understanding this short-term variability of community interactions is critical because properties ascribed to interaction networks made from entire seasons may not apply uniformly to communities throughout the season. Consequently, this pooling of interactions across large time scales may obscure short term trends in interactions that are relevant to our understanding of the relationships between individual species and the overall structure of the community. I seek to better understand how the interactions of communities change over short time scales.

Successful pollination requires a flower visitor to forage from multiple individuals of the same flowering species in succession. However, this delivery of conspecific pollen can be impeded by neighboring co-flowering species that distract pollinators and lower the quality of pollen loads. Indeed, many plants within a community share pollinating species to some degree. Individual insects can even visit different flowering species during the same foraging bout. This reliance on shared pollinators can result in direct competition for pollinator visits and interference competition via heterospecific pollen transfer (HPT) between co-flowering species. Receipt of foreign pollen can be detrimental to female fitness and the loss of pollen to heterospecifics can reduce male fitness. I am interested in how community context and floral morphology traits impact pollinator visitation rates and pollen deposition.

My Master's thesis work focused on the relationship between neonicotinoid pesticide exposure and honey bee foraging efficiency. I studied how field-realistic doses of pesticides influenced honey bee foraging throughout several days of exposure. This dosing regime more closely matched how bees in agricultural landscapes would be exposed to insecticides.