Meeting Abstract
Plant-pollinator interactions are fundamental for conservation biology, agriculture, and ecology. The temporal synchrony between plants and their pollinators is a key aspect of their interaction. However, the specific factors that determine the synchrony between the timing of bee foraging activity and the timing of plant resource availability are not well understood. Biological clocks play an essential role in controlling physiological process in both pollinators and plants. We hypothesize that the temporal pattern of foraging behavior is mainly determined by the interaction between biological clocks and environmental factors such as light, temperature, and humidity, and also these interactions vary among specialist and generalist species. To test the hypothesis, we analyzed the locomotor activity of bees as an index of foraging activity under simulated light, temperature, and humidity oscillations. We conducted the experiment with the generalist social bee L. malachurum and the solitary specialist S. curvicornis. Overall, we found that the two species have different activity patterns: a unimodal pattern for S. curvicornis and a bimodal pattern for L. malachurum. In the case of S. curvicornis, we found that their internal clock run faster than 24 hours and that temperature and/or humidity reset the internal clock in a daily manner. In the case of L. malachurum we found that the bimodality of its pattern is intrinsically driven by the biological clock. Further studies are needed to dissociate the specific contribution of these environmental factors on the activity pattern of these species. This work was supported by the following grants: NSF-REU #1560389, NSF-PIRE #1545803, NSF-PRCEN #1736019, NSF-BigData #1633164 and #1633184, and NSF-PR-LSAMP #1400868.
