Pesticide exposure causes bumblebee flight to fall short

APRIL 29, 2019

by Imperial College London

Bees exposed to a neonicotinoid pesticide fly only a third of the distance that unexposed bees are able to achieve.

Flight behaviour is crucial for determining how bees forage, so reduced flight performance from pesticide exposure could lead to colonies going hungry and pollination services being impacted.

Foraging bees are essential pollinators for the crops we eat and the wildflowers in our countryside, gardens and parks. Any factor compromising bee flight performance could therefore impact this pollination service.

A study by Imperial College London researchers, published today in the journal Ecology and Evolution, reveals how exposure to a common class of neurotoxic pesticide, a neonicotinoid, reduces individual flight endurance (distance and duration) in bumblebees.

The study shows that bees exposed to the neonicotinoid imidacloprid in doses they would encounter in fields fly significantly shorter distances and for less time than bees not exposed, which could reduce the area in which colonies can forage for food by up to 80 percent.

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Bees use multiple cues in hunt for pollen

Date: November 8, 2016

Source: University of Exeter


Bees use a variety of senses and memory of previous experiences when deciding where to forage for pollen, research by the University of Exeter suggests.

The researchers believe pollen-collecting bees do not base their foraging decisions on taste alone, but instead make an "overall sensory assessment" of their experience at a particular flower.

Bees typically do not eat pollen when they collect it from flowers, but carry it back to the nest via special "sacs" on their legs or hairs on their body.

This makes it difficult to understand how bees judge whether the pollen a flower produces is nutritious enough for their young.

Indeed, researchers have been puzzled for a long time as to what exactly bees look for when they collect pollen from flowers.

Co-author Dr Natalie Hempel de Ibarra, expert in insect neuroethology at Exeter's Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour, said: "It seems that bees don't just respond to a single nutritional compound in pollen, such as crude protein content, but to a range of sensory cues in pollen and flowers.

"They also form memories for locations and types of flowers that they have visited which affect their foraging decisions.

"We need more research that considers the behaviour and neurobiology of bees to understand when and why they prefer some plants and some pollen over others.

Continued

Dolphin 'sponging' spans centuries

Bottlenose dolphins using sponges to protect their noses while foraging is a technique that the animals discovered in the 19th century, a study has found.

Scientists analysed data on the dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia, to model the appearance and transmission of the skill over generations.

The study found that "sponging" could have begun with a single "innovation event" between 120 and 180 years ago.

It suggested that mothers passed on the skill by teaching their offspring.

The analysis is published in the journal Animal Behaviour, and used previous field studies to investigate how sponging was established and maintained.

"It has been thought that behaviours which are exclusively learnt from one parent are not very stable. With our model we could now show that sponging can be a stable behaviour," said Dr Anna Kopps, a biologist at the University of New South Wales.

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19909635

Foraging Baboons Are Picky Punters: Baboon Foraging Choices Depend On Their Habitat and Social Status

ScienceDaily (Sep. 13, 2012) — Baboons choose which tree to find food in and who to take foraging, just like humans decide where to shop and who to go shopping with.

In a study published today in The American Naturalist, a group of scientists led by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) have used a technique developed to study human consumer choices to investigate what influences a baboon's foraging decisions. The technique, known as discrete choice modelling, has rarely been used before in animal behaviour research. It showed how baboons not only consider many social and non-social factors when making foraging decisions, but also how they change these factors depending on their habitat and their own social traits.

Over a six month period in Tsaobis Leopard Park in Namibia, ZSL scientists followed troops of chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) on foot from dawn to dusk. They recognised individual baboons by distinguishing features, and closely observed both the aggressive and friendly social relationships between baboons, noting which food patch they foraged in and who they foraged with. As expected, baboons were more likely to use patches containing more food. More interestingly, they also paid attention to their social relationships with other baboons in the patches.

Read on: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120913203917.htm

Seabirds eating more plastic than ever before

New study finds that bird ingestion of plastic in U.S./Canadian North Pacific amongst highest in the world

August 2012. A new study by U.S. and Canadian scientists has found that seabirds may be eating much more plastic trash than they have in the past, and that seabirds studied off the coast of Washington State and British Columbia are ingesting plastic at rates that are "among the highest" in the world.

Northern fulmars
The report was authored by Stephanie Avery-Gomm of the University of British Columbia and five other researchers. The study was carried out in 2009 - 2010 and involved the analysis of 67 Northern Fulmars that washed up dead on the shores between Long Beach, Washington, and Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Northern Fulmars, gull-like petrels related to albatrosses and shearwaters, are particularly suitable to study when considering trends in plastic pollution because they forage almost exclusively at sea, have vast ranges and because they will forage almost anything from the surface of the water.

Worrying result
"The results are troubling. The large amount of plastic ingested by fulmars from the eastern North Pacific are approaching the high levels which have been documented previously in the historically polluted North Sea, where fulmars have been used as an indicator species of ocean health for decades. In addition, it is safe to say, based on earlier studies from the North Pacific, plastic ingestion in Northern Fulmars, and therefore plastic pollution, has increased in the North Pacific over the past forty years," said Avery-Gomm.

Plastic fills up the stomach
"The science on this issue is still being refined - there is much we don't know about the impacts of plastic ingestion on birds in general and Northern Fulmars in particular. We do know that the plastic in the stomach displaces the space for food that the birds need and that plastic can lacerate the stomach lining. Some of the birds we looked at had their gizzards completely full with plastic. We also know that plastic in the sea absorbs an astounding level of contaminants in a very short time and that these contaminants may leach out in a bird that swallows it," said Avery-Gomm.

Read on:  http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/plastic-seabird.html