Synergistic negative effects between a fungicide and high temperatures on homing behaviours in honeybees.

Interactions between environmental stressors may contribute to ongoing pollinator declines, but have not been extensively studied. Here, we examined the interaction between the agricultural fungicide Pristine (active ingredients: 25.2% boscalid, 12.8% pyraclostrobin) and high temperatures on critical honeybee behaviours. We have previously shown that consumption of field-realistic levels of this fungicide shortens worker lifespan in the field and impairs associative learning performance in a laboratory-based assay. We hypothesized that Pristine would also impair homing and foraging behaviours in the field, and that an interaction with hot weather would exacerbate this effect. Both field-relevant Pristine exposure and higher air temperatures reduced the probability of successful return on their own. Together, the two factors synergistically reduced the probability of return and increased the time required for bees to return to the hive. Pristine did not affect the masses of pollen or volumes of nectar or water brought back to the hive by foragers, and it did not affect the ratio of forager types in a colony. However, Pristine-fed bees brought more concentrated nectar back to the hive. As both agrochemical usage and heat waves increase, additive and synergistic negative effects may pose major threats to pollinators and sustainable agriculture.

Breaking the cycle: Reforming pesticide regulation to protect pollinators.

Over decades, pesticide regulations have cycled between approval and implementation, followed by the discovery of negative effects on nontarget organisms that result in new regulations, pesticides, and harmful effects. This relentless pattern undermines the capacity to protect the environment from pesticide hazards and frustrates end users that need pest management tools. Wild pollinating insects are in decline, and managed pollinators such as honey bees are experiencing excessive losses, which threatens sustainable food security and ecosystem function. An increasing number of studies demonstrate the negative effects of field-realistic exposure to pesticides on pollinator health and fitness, which contribute to pollinator declines. Current pesticide approval processes, although they are superior to past practices, clearly continue to fail to protect pollinator health. In the present article, we provide a conceptual framework to reform cyclical pesticide approval processes and better protect pollinators.

Intraspecific Variation in Learning: Worker Wasps Are Less Able to Learn and Remember Individual Conspecific Faces than Queen Wasps.

Research on individual recognition often focuses on species-typical recognition abilities rather than assessing intraspecific variation in recognition. As individual recognition is cognitively costly, the capacity for recognition may vary within species. We test how individual face recognition differs between nest-founding queens (foundresses) and workers in Polistes fuscatus paper wasps. Individual recognition mediates dominance interactions among foundresses. Three previously published experiments have shown that foundresses (1) benefit by advertising their identity with distinctive facial patterns that facilitate recognition, (2) have robust memories of individuals, and (3) rapidly learn to distinguish between face images. Like foundresses, workers have variable facial patterns and are capable of individual recognition. However, worker dominance interactions are muted. Therefore, individual recognition may be less important for workers than for foundresses. We find that (1) workers with unique faces receive amounts of aggression similar to those of workers with common faces, indicating that wasps do not benefit from advertising their individual identity with a unique appearance; (2) workers lack robust memories for individuals, as they cannot remember unique conspecifics after a 6-day separation; and (3) workers learn to distinguish between facial images more slowly than foundresses during training. The recognition differences between foundresses and workers are notable because Polistes lack discrete castes; foundresses and workers are morphologically similar, and workers can take over as queens. Overall, social benefits and receiver capacity for individual recognition are surprisingly plastic.

Hormonal underpinnings of status conflict: Testosterone and cortisol are related to decisions and satisfaction in the hawk-dove game.

A contribution to a special issue on Hormones and Human Competition.Testosterone is theorized to influence status-seeking behaviors such as social dominance and competitive behavior, but supporting evidence is mixed. The present study tested the roles of testosterone and cortisol in the hawk-dove game, a dyadic economic decision-making paradigm in which earnings depend on one's own and the other player's choices. If one person selects the hawk strategy and the other person selects the dove strategy, the player who selected hawk attains a greater financial pay-off (status differentiation). The worst financial outcome occurs when both players choose the hawk strategy (status confrontation). Ninety-eight undergraduate students (42 men) provided saliva samples and played ten rounds of the hawk-dove game with another same-sex participant. In support of the hypothesis that testosterone is related to status concern, individuals higher in basal testosterone made more hawk decisions - decisions that harmed the other player. Acute decreases in cortisol were also associated with more hawk decisions. There was some empirical support for the dual-hormone hypothesis as well: basal testosterone was positively related to satisfaction in the game among low basal-cortisol individuals but not among high basal-cortisol individuals. There were no significant sex differences in these hormonal effects. The present findings align with theories of hormones and status-seeking behavior at the individual level, but they also open up new avenues for research on hormone profiles at the collective level. Our results suggest that the presence of two or more high-testosterone members increases the likelihood of status confrontations over a limited resource that can undermine collective outcomes.

A mitotoxic fungicide alters post-ingestive glucose signals necessary for associative learning in honey bees.

The Proboscis Extension Reflex (PER) paradigm trains honey bees to associate an odor with a sugar reward and is commonly used to assess impacts on associative learning after exposure to pesticides. While the effects of some types of pesticides have been well-investigated, relatively little attention has been focused on fungicides that are applied to flowering crops. We have previously shown that consumption of field-relevant concentrations of the fungicide Pristine® (active ingredients: 25.2% boscalid, 12.8% pyraclostrobin) impairs honey bee performance in an associative learning assay, but the mechanism of its action has not been investigated. We hypothesized that Pristine® interferes with carbohydrate absorption and/or regulation, thereby disrupting the post-ingestive feedback mechanisms necessary for robust learning. To test this hypothesis, we measured hemolymph glucose and trehalose levels at five time points during the ten minutes after bees consumed a sucrose solution. Pristine®-exposed bees had elevated baseline glucose concentrations in the hemolymph relative to control bees. Hemolymph glucose levels rose significantly within five minutes of feeding in control bees, but not in Pristine®-fed bees. These data suggest that the post-ingestive feedback mechanisms necessary for robust learning are disrupted in bees that have consumed this fungicide, providing a plausible mechanistic explanation for its effects on learning performance in the PER assay. Pristine®-exposed bees may have elevated hemolymph glucose levels because the fungicide elicits an inflammatory response. These results provide additional mechanistic understanding of the negative physiological effects of mitotoxic fungicides on this important pollinator.

'Inert' co-formulants of a fungicide mediate acute effects on honey bee learning performance.

Managed honey bees have experienced high rates of colony loss recently, with pesticide exposure as a major cause. While pesticides can be lethal at high doses, lower doses can produce sublethal effects, which may substantially weaken colonies. Impaired learning performance is a behavioral sublethal effect, and is often present in bees exposed to insecticides. However, the effects of other pesticides (such as fungicides) on honey bee learning are understudied, as are the effects of pesticide formulations versus active ingredients. Here, we investigated the effects of acute exposure to the fungicide formulation Pristine (active ingredients: 25.2% boscalid, 12.8% pyraclostrobin) on honey bee olfactory learning performance in the proboscis extension reflex (PER) assay. We also exposed a subset of bees to only the active ingredients to test which formulation component(s) were driving the learning effects. We found that the formulation produced negative effects on memory, but this effect was not present in bees fed only boscalid and pyraclostrobin. This suggests that the trade secret "other ingredients" in the formulation mediated the learning effects, either through exerting their own toxic effects or by increasing the toxicities of the active ingredients. These results show that pesticide co-formulants should not be assumed inert and should instead be included when assessing pesticide risks.

Seasonal variability in physiology and behavior affect the impact of fungicide exposure on honey bee (Apis mellifera) health.

Honey bee pollination services are of tremendous agricultural and economic importance. Despite this, honey bees and other pollinators face ongoing perils, including population declines due to a variety of environmental stressors. Fungicides may be particularly insidious stressors for pollinators due to their environmental ubiquity and widespread approval for application during crop bloom. The mechanisms by which fungicides affect honey bees are poorly understood and any seasonal variations in their impact are unknown. Here we assess the effects on honey bee colonies of four-week exposure (the approximate duration of the almond pollination season) of a fungicide, Pristine® (25.2% boscalid, 12.8% pyraclostrobin), that has been commonly used for almonds. We exposed colonies to Pristine® in pollen patties placed into the hive, in either summer or fall, and assessed colony brood and worker populations, colony pollen collection and consumption, and worker age of first foraging and longevity. During the summer, Pristine® exposure induced precocious foraging, and reduced worker longevity resulting in smaller colonies. During the fall, Pristine® exposure induced precocious foraging but otherwise had no significant measured effects. During the fall, adult and brood population levels, and pollen consumption and collection, were all much lower, likely due to preparations for winter. Fungicides and other pesticides may often have reduced effects on honey bees during seasons of suppressed colony growth due to bees consuming less pollen and pesticide.

A common fungicide, Pristine®, impairs olfactory associative learning performance in honey bees (Apis mellifera).

Although fungicides were previously considered to be safe for important agricultural pollinators such as honey bees, recent evidence has shown that they can cause a number of behavioral and physiological sublethal effects. Here, we focus on the fungicide Pristine® (active ingredients: 25.2% boscalid, 12.8% pyraclostrobin), which is sprayed during the blooming period on a variety of crops and is known to affect honey bee mitochondria at field-relevant levels. To date, no study has tested the effects of a field-relevant concentration of a fungicide on associative learning ability in honey bees. We tested whether chronic, colony-level exposure at field-relevant and higher concentrations of Pristine® impairs performance on the proboscis extension reflex (PER) paradigm, an associative learning task. Learning performance was reduced at higher field-relevant concentrations of Pristine®. The reductions in learning performance could not be explained by effects on hunger or motivation, as sucrose responsiveness was not affected by Pristine® exposure. To determine whether Pristine®'s negative effects on learning performance were mediated at a specific life stage, we conducted a cross-fostering experiment that exposed bees to the fungicide either only as larvae, only as adults, or during both stages. We found that exposure across the entire life was necessary to significantly reduce learning performance, although non-significant reductions occurred when bees were exposed during just one stage. Our study provides strong evidence that Pristine® has significant sublethal effects on learning performance. As associative learning is a necessary ability for foraging, our results raise concerns that Pristine® could impair foraging abilities and substantially weaken colony health.

Is shame a proximal trigger for drinking? A daily process study with a community sample.

Between-subjects studies show that people with higher levels of shame tend to experience more negative drinking-related consequences than people with lower levels of shame. However, within-subjects studies of the association between daily fluctuations in shame and subsequent drinking have yielded mixed findings. This study aimed to resolve these inconsistencies by examining the association between daily fluctuations in shame, between-subjects differences in shame, and subsequent evening alcohol consumption in a sample of 70 community-dwelling drinkers. In addition, we examined whether the previous night's drinking predicted shame the next day based on the theory that shame may operate in a cyclical fashion in some people to maintain problematic drinking patterns. Multilevel model analyses showed a cross-level interaction in which individuals' average levels of ashamed mood moderated the effect of daily fluctuations in shame on solitary drinking. In contrast, previous day's drinking was only weakly related to shame the next day. This study contributes to existing literature by refining models of negative mood-related drinking and further elucidating the patterns by which shame serves as a trigger for drinking, particularly among high shame individuals. The authors interpret results in terms of self-control theory and demonstrate the importance of disaggregating between- and within-subjects variance when examining longitudinal data. (PsycINFO Database Record

Do Mean Guys Always Finish First or Just Say That They Do? Narcissists' Awareness of Their Social Status and Popularity Over Time.

Narcissists crave respect and admiration. Do they attain the status and popularity they crave, or do they just think that they do? In two studies (Ns = 133 and 94), participants completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, described themselves on core personality traits (e.g., extraversion), and were described by an informant on those traits. Participants also provided self- and peer ratings of status and liking in small groups after an initial meeting and over the course of 4 months (Study 2). Relative to people lower, people higher in narcissism initially attained, but eventually lost status; yet, they were aware that they tended to lose status. Narcissists were not especially popular, although they tended to think they were more popular. These patterns differed among narcissism facets, providing further support for the idea that the mixed adaptiveness of narcissism may be due to the heterogeneity of the construct.