Field Borders Provide Winter Refuge for Beneficial Predators and Parasitoids: A Case Study on Organic Farms.

Semi-natural field borders are frequently used in midwestern U.S. sustainable agriculture. These habitats are meant to help diversify otherwise monocultural landscapes and provision them with ecosystem services, including biological control. Predatory and parasitic arthropods (i.e., potential natural enemies) often flourish in these habitats and may move into crops to help control pests. However, detailed information on the capacity of semi-natural field borders for providing overwintering refuge for these arthropods is poorly understood. In this study, we used soil emergence tents to characterize potential natural enemy communities (i.e., predacious beetles, wasps, spiders, and other arthropods) overwintering in cultivated organic crop fields and adjacent field borders. We found a greater abundance, species richness, and unique community composition of predatory and parasitic arthropods in field borders compared to arable crop fields, which were generally poorly suited as overwintering habitat. Furthermore, potential natural enemies tended to be positively associated with forb cover and negatively associated with grass cover, suggesting that grassy field borders with less forb cover are less well-suited as winter refugia. These results demonstrate that semi-natural habitats like field borders may act as a source for many natural enemies on a year-to-year basis and are important for conserving arthropod diversity in agricultural landscapes.

Reduced water-availability lowers the strength of negative plant-soil feedbacks of two Asclepias species.

Negative plant-soil feedbacks can serve as a mechanism for plant species coexistence. Despite predicted changes in precipitation patterns due to climate change, little is known as to how the strength and direction of feedbacks change under differing soil moisture regimes. We performed a fully reciprocal greenhouse experiment where seedlings of two co-occurring Asclepias spp. (milkweed) were grown either with their own or the other species' microbial communities under high or low watering treatments. We found that seedlings of each species were smaller when exposed to conspecific relative to heterospecific soil biota, perhaps due to a build-up of specific soil pathogens. Importantly, this negative feedback diminished under reduced water-availability, and also in the absence of live soil organisms. Our findings suggest that the ability for plants to coexist may be fundamentally altered in areas that face increased drought.

General models for resource use or other compositional count data using the Dirichlet-multinomial distribution.

Many ecological studies investigate how organisms use resources, such as habitats or foods, in relation to availability or other variables. Related statistical problems include analysis of proportions of species or genotypes in a community or population. These require statistical modeling of compositional count data: data on relative proportions of each category collected as counts. Common methods for analyzing compositional count data lack one or more important considerations. Some methods lack explicit accommodation of count data, dealing instead with proportions. Others do not handle between-sample heterogeneity for overdispersed data. Yet others do not allow general types of relationships between explanatory variables and resource use. All three components have been combined in a Bayesian framework, but for frequentist hypothesis tests and AIC model selection, maximum-likelihood estimation is needed. Here we propose the Dirichlet-multinomial distribution to accommodate overdispersed compositional count data. This approach can be used flexibly in combination with explanatory models, but the only correlations among compositional proportions that it can accommodate are the negative correlations due to the fact that proportions must sum to 1. Many existing models can be generalized to use the Dirichlet-multinomial distribution for residual variation, and the flexibility of the approach allows new hypotheses that have often not been considered in resource preference analysis, including that availability has no relation to use. We also highlight a new design for resource use studies, with multiple individual-use data sets from each of multiple sites, with different explanatory data for each site. We illustrate the approach with three examples. For two previously published habitat use data sets, we support the original conclusions and show that use is not unrelated to availability. For a data set of pollen collected by multiple bees from each of two sites, pollen use differs between the sites. Using bootstrap goodness-of-fit tests, we illustrate that the Dirichlet-multinomial is acceptable for two of the examples but unsuitable for one of the habitat use examples.

Chronic contact with imidacloprid during development may decrease female solitary bee foraging ability and increase male competitive ability for mates.

Environmentally persistent xenobiotics, such as neonicotinoid insecticides, are thought to contribute to insect declines. Much of what is known about the non-target effects on bees comes from oral exposure in eusocial species. However, most bee species are solitary and nest below ground. For them, contaminated nesting resources may represent an important, yet understudied, route of exposure. We examined the effect of chronic contact exposure with realistic soil concentrations of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid (0, 7.5, 15, or 100 ppb) during immature development on adult locomotion (movement speed and distance) and brain development of the solitary bees Osmia lignaria and Megachile rotundata. Adult locomotion and mushroom body morphology were characterized 2 (females) or 4 (males) and 14 (both sexes) days after emergence. Unlike the 0 and 7.5 ppb groups, female O. lignaria treated with 15 and 100 ppb did not move faster with age. If movement speed is associated with foraging or nest-building ability, this could result in a 25% reduction in nest provisioning efficiency over the first 14 days. Young male M. rotundata moved more quickly (7.5 and 100 ppb) and farther (100 ppb) when treated with imidacloprid, potentially increasing their ability to compete for more receptive female bees. We did not detect an effect of imidacloprid on the relative volumes of the neuropil and Kenyon cell subregions. We discuss how an environmentally persistent xenobiotic has the potential to alter population dynamics through changes in adult locomotion, even in the absence of a detectable effect on gross brain morphology.

The managed-to-invasive species continuum in social and solitary bees and impacts on native bee conservation.

Invasive bee species have negative impacts on native bee species and are a source of conservation concern. The invasion of bee species is mediated by the abiotic environment, biotic communities, and propagule pressure of the invader. Each of these factors is further affected by management, which can amplify the magnitude of the impact on native bee species. The ecological traits and behavior of invasive bees also play a role in whether and to what degree they compete with or otherwise negatively affect native bee species. The magnitude of impact of an invasive bee species relates both to its population size in the introduced habitat and the degree of overlap between its resources and the resources native bees require.

Can anthophilous hover flies (Diptera: Syrphidae) discriminate neonicotinoid insecticides in sucrose solution?

Understanding how neonicotinoid insecticides affect non-target arthropods, especially pollinators, is an area of high priority and popular debate. Few studies have considered how pollinators interact and detect neonicotinoids, and almost none have examined for these effects in anthophilous Diptera such as hover flies (Syrphidae). We investigated behavioral responses of two species of hover flies, Eristalis arbustorum L. (Eristalinae) and Toxomerus marginatus Say (Syrphinae), when given a choice between artificial flowers with uncontaminated sucrose solution and neonicotinoid-contaminated (clothianidin) sucrose solution at field-realistic levels 2.5 ppb (average) and 150 ppb (high). We examined for 1) evidence that wild-caught flies could detect the insecticide gustatorily by analyzing amount of time spent feeding on floral treatments, and 2) whether flies could discriminate floral treatments visually by comparing visitation rates, spectral reflectance differences, and hover fly photoreceptor sensitivities. We did not find evidence that either species fed more or less on either of the treatment solutions. Furthermore, T. marginatus did not appear to visit one of the flower choices over the other. Eristalis arbustorum, however, visited uncontaminated flowers more often than contaminated flowers. Spectral differences between the flower treatments overlap with Eristalis photoreceptor sensitivities, opening the possibility that E. arbustorum could discriminate sucrose-clothianidin solution visually. The relevance of our findings in field settings are uncertain but they do highlight the importance of visual cues in lab-based choice experiments involving insecticides. We strongly encourage further research in this area and the consideration of both behavioral responses and sensory mechanisms when determining insecticidal impacts on beneficial arthropods.

Chronic contact with realistic soil concentrations of imidacloprid affects the mass, immature development speed, and adult longevity of solitary bees.

The non-target effects of pesticides are an area of growing concern, particularly for ecologically and economically important organisms such as bees. Much of the previous research on the effects of neonicotinoids, a class of insecticide that has gained attention for non-target effects, on bees focused on the consumption of contaminated food resources by a limited number of eusocial species. However, neonicotinoids are known to accumulate and persist in soils at concentrations 2 to 60 times greater than in food resources, and may represent an important route of exposure for diverse and ecologically important ground-nesting bees. This study aimed to assess the effect of chronic contact exposure to realistic soil concentrations of imidacloprid, the most widely used neonicotinoid pesticide, on bee longevity, development speed, and body mass. Cohorts of Osmia lignaria and Megachile rotundata were used as proxies for ground-nesting species. We observed species- and sex-specific changes to adult longevity, development speed, and mass in response to increasing concentrations of imidacloprid. These results suggest that chronic exposure to nesting substrates contaminated with neonicotinoids may represent an important route of exposure that could have considerable physiological and ecological consequences for bees and plant-pollinator interactions.

An assessment of the efficacy and peak catch rates of emergence tents for measuring bee nesting.

PREMISE OF THE STUDY: Emergence tents are a new tool used to understand nesting ecology of ground nesting bee species. However, many questions remain about how to use tents effectively. We assessed (a) variance in tent capture rates over time, (b) the effects of site characteristics on proportion of tents capturing bees, and (c) the effect of soil characteristics on nest site choice. METHODS: Emergence tents were placed out for one week in May, June, and August and checked daily. Soil, bee, and floral characteristics were recorded. RESULTS: Across all sites and months the average number of tents capturing bees was less than 20% during one week of sampling, but this varied between sites. Tent captures decreased after 48 h deployment, but accumulation differed seasonally, with slower accumulation of total bees caught in May than in June or August. Although capture rates were not affected by bee or floral abundance, soil moisture beneath a tent influenced where bees were captured. DISCUSSION: Effective use of emergence tents may require adjusting the length of deployment depending on season and will require a minimum of 48 h installation to help maximize efficacy. The overall low capture rates demonstrate the need to optimize emergence tent use.

Filtering across spatial scales: phylogeny, biogeography and community structure in bumble bees.

Despite the expansion of phylogenetic community analysis to understand community assembly, few studies have used these methods on mobile organisms and it has been suggested the local scales that are typically considered may be too small to represent the community as perceived by organisms with high mobility. Mobility is believed to allow species to mediate competitive interactions quickly and thus highly mobile species may appear randomly assembled in local communities. At larger scales, however, biogeographical processes could cause communities to be either phylogenetically clustered or even. Using phylogenetic community analysis we examined patterns of relatedness and trait similarity in communities of bumble bees (Bombus) across spatial scales comparing: local communities to regional pools, regional communities to continental pools and the continental community to a global species pool. Species composition and data on tongue lengths, a key foraging trait, were used to test patterns of relatedness and trait similarity across scales. Although expected to exhibit limiting similarity, local communities were clustered both phenotypically and phylogenetically. Larger spatial scales were also found to have more phylogenetic clustering but less trait clustering. While patterns of relatedness in mobile species have previously been suggested to exhibit less structure in local communities and to be less clustered than immobile species, we suggest that mobility may actually allow communities to have more similar species that can simply limit direct competition through mobility.

Breeding system and pollination ecology of introduced plants compared to their native relatives.

Identifying how plant-enemy interactions contribute to the success of introduced species has been a subject of much research, while the role of plant-pollinator interactions has received less attention. The ability to reproduce in new environments is essential for the successful establishment and spread of introduced species. Introduced plant species that are not capable of autonomous self-fertilization and are unable to attract resident pollinators may suffer from pollen limitation. Our study quantifies the degree of autogamy and pollination ecology of 10 closely related pairs of native and introduced plant species at a single site near St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Most of these species pairs had similar capacities for autogamy; however, of those that differed, the introduced species were more autogamous than their native congeners. Most introduced plants have pollinator visitation rates similar to those of their native congeners. Of the 20 species studied, only three had significant pollen limitation. We suggest that the success of most introduced plant species is because they are highly autogamous or because their pollinator visitation rates are similar to those of their native relatives. Understanding and identifying traits related to pollination success that are key in successful introductions may allow better understanding and prediction of biological invasions.