Morning Glorys and Bees

For the next two days, we are working on faculty-led projects, which means that we are doing the data-collection and grunt work for projects design by visiting faculty members. This morning my group worked with Kathleen Kay, a plant evolutionary biologist from UC Santa Cruz. (And, just for more evidence that its a small world, she hired Allison Louthan to work in her lab, a Grinnellian who graduated last year who started the Ecology & Evolution Journal Club that Ben and I went to.) She's very approachable and laid-back (very Californian). Her project focused on who extrafloral nectaries, or sources of nectar outside the flower, can protect the flower against nectar robbers, like carpenter bees, who bite a hole in the bottom of the flower and drink nectar without pollination, and also influence pollination visitation by little soliary bees. Extrafloral nectaries generally attract aggressive insects like ants and wasps by providing food in exchange for defense from insect herbivores. She choose the morning glory flower as the study subject since they are one-day flowers (we don't have to deal with florivory—herbivory on flowers—from the day before) and another researcher had documented extensive carpenter bee damage (up to 50%) on the flower. The hypothesis is that when the EFN incentive is turned off by making stopping the flow of nectar or preventing insects from reaching the flower, the plant with be more vulnerable to floral herbivory. So that was the original game plan.

We got up and out the door at 5:15 am and found flowers that were about to open. We covered the EFN on some of the flowers with nail polish to prevent the nectar from attracting ants and left the EFN on the others. Then we sat and watched. And sat and watched some more. A large chunk of fieldwork is tedious waiting in uncomfortable positions. So waiting for the bees to fly in and wiggle themselves into the flower was good practice. Despite the tedium, I enjoyed the experience; when you sit quietly, you see a lot of neat details that you otherwise miss. I saw a gorgeous green spider huddle down below the white blossom; unfortunately, I did not see him catch anything. I heard a rodent squeaking in distress and then saw a snake slithering away in the underbrush. And I stuck my nose down the flower to watch the bees waddle around collecting nectar. Unlike the bumblebees that you might conventionally think of as the prototypical bee, these wild bees are very small (~ 3 cm), shiny, and black. They are usually solitary, not clonal and they usually eat pollen, not nectar. So the bees spent more of their visit doodling around near the anther to gather pollen and less time wiggling to the base of the flower to drink nectar. Pretty neat. No one, however, saw a carpenter bee and only a few people observed herbivory. So we'll see what the data looks like this afternoon.

And tomorrow morning, I will be waking up at 5 am to watch howler monkeys! Hooray!