Article
Ecology
Alisha Rajbhandari, Kevin Matteson, Emma Katz, Gretchen LeBuhn, Elizabeth Johnson
Summary: In this study, four years of citizen science data was used to analyze bee visitation to flowers in New York City. The research found that five bees were observed in 63% of the observations, with bumble bees being the most commonly observed bee morphotype. Community gardens had the highest bee visitation rate, followed by parks, private gardens, and rooftops/terraces. The 500 m buffer scale was found to be the most informative in analyzing the factors affecting bee visitation.
LANDSCAPE AND URBAN PLANNING
(2023)
Article
Plant Sciences
Luke Owen, David Suchoff, Hsuan Chen
Summary: This study compares the effectiveness of Chrysal ALESCO (R) and traditional STS treatment for inducing male flowers on female hemp plants and their pollen quality. The results show no significant difference in male flower counts, but Chrysal ALESCO (R) performs better or equally in terms of pollen quality.
Article
Biodiversity Conservation
Joshua M. Coates, Benedict Keaney, Benjamin C. Scheele, Saul A. Cunningham
Summary: Migration is crucial for many insect species, and the Bogong moth stands out as a keystone species undergoing a long-distance annual migration. Recent declines in the population of this species have raised concerns, leading to its recognition as an endangered species. In this study, we investigated for the first time the feeding habits of Bogong moths during their summer aestivation and found that they visit a variety of plant species, indicating their potential role in pollination in subalpine and alpine ecosystems.
GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Patricia Izar, Marcelo Fernandez-Bolanos, Lauren Seex, Gerrit Gort, Priscila Suscke, Marcos Tokuda, Olivia Mendonca-Furtado, Michele P. Verderane, Charlotte K. Hemelrijk
Summary: Dominance hierarchy is crucial in reducing competition costs in group-living animals, reflecting attributes like body size as well as the history of winning and losing conflicts. Despite initial lower fighting ability, females can achieve dominance over males, which increases with the proportion of males in the group. This phenomenon is confirmed in both computational models and empirical data of capuchin monkeys, showing that the power relation between sexes is influenced by adult sex ratio beyond predictions from socioecological models.
Article
Plant Sciences
Naixia Mou, Jinhua Wang, Yunhao Zheng, Lingxian Zhang, Teemu Makkonen, Tengfei Yang, Jiqiang Niu
Summary: Urban parks are crucial urban public services. By analyzing social media data, we found a correlation between flowers and the number of visitors to parks, particularly in spring. Different types of flowers have varying appeal in attracting visitors. These findings have important implications for the design and management of urban parks.
URBAN FORESTRY & URBAN GREENING
(2023)
Article
Ecology
Candice C. Power, Anders Nielsen, Douglas Sheil
Summary: Pollination is crucial for biodiversity and food security, but pollinators are facing threats from habitat degradation. A study in Borneo found that bee visitation frequency to flowers decreased with distance from remaining forests in an oil palm-dominated landscape. Larger forests can support more bees, highlighting the importance of conservation efforts in maintaining pollinator populations.
Article
Ecology
E. Pioltelli, L. Guzzetti, L. Tonietti, A. Copetta, P. Biella, L. Campone, A. Galimberti
Summary: Pollinator insects play a crucial role in pollination, but their population is declining. This decline is related to changes in their diet, which have severe implications for their health. To understand the nutritional ecology of pollinators, it is important to characterize the composition of flower rewards, such as pollen and nectar. However, pollen sampling is challenging due to operational difficulties and small amounts produced per flower. In this study, a novel tool called E-PoSa was developed, which uses a portable vacuum cleaner for pollen sampling. Compared to traditional methods, E-PoSa showed higher pollen recovery capacity and could collect a broad range of pollen from different flower morphologies. This cheap and easy-to-assemble tool can be used not only for pollen nutrition studies but also in various other contexts related to pollination ecology.
METHODS IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2023)
Article
Ecology
Alejandra E. Munoz, Manuel Plantegenest, Paul Amouroux, Tania Zaviezo
Summary: The study showed that establishing perennial native flower strips in agricultural landscapes can increase insect pollinator populations near the strips and improve crop yields. Wild bees and non-bee insect pollinators also play important roles in crop yields.
BASIC AND APPLIED ECOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Ecology
Joice Iamara-Nogueira, Natalia Targhetta, Gina Allain, Adriano Gambarini, Alessandra R. Pinto, Ana Maria Rui, Andrea C. Araujo, Ariadna Lopes, Brenda Pereira-Silva, Bruna Bertagni de Camargo, Caio Graco Machado, Caio Missagia, Carolina Scultori, Danilo Boscolo, Erich Fischer, Evellyn Silva Araujo-Oliveira, Henrique Gava, Hipolito Ferreira Paulino-Neto, Isabel Cristina Machado, Isabela Galarda Varassin, Ivan Sazima, Jeferson Vizentin-Bugoni, Jessica Luiza Sousa Silva, Julia de Oliveira Ferreira, Juliana Narita, Juliana Silveira dos Santos, Kayna Agostini, Leandro Freitas, Luciano Elsinor Lopes, Ludimila Juliele Carvalho-Leite, Marcelo Tabarelli, Marcia Alexandra Rocca, Marcia Luzia Malanotte, Maria Alice S. Alves, Maria Bernadete F. Canela, Maria Rosa Darrigo, Marina Muniz Moreira, Marina Wolowski, Marlies Sazima, Mauro Galetti, Milton Cesar Ribeiro, Milton Groppo, Miriam Kaehler, Milson dos Anjos Batista, Oswaldo Cruz Neto, Patricia Alves Ferreira, Pedro J. Bergamo, Pietro K. Maruyama, Raquel O. Bueno, Roberta L. B. Leal, Rogerio Rodrigues Faria, Simone Bazarian, Tiago Malucelli, Silvana Buzato
Summary: The interaction between flowering plants and nectar-feeding vertebrates in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest is diverse and important. This dataset provides detailed information on the interactions between 515 species of flowering plants and 129 species of potential pollinators. It also includes information on the characteristics of both plants and vertebrates that are relevant to their interactions.
Article
Entomology
David F. Cook, Muhammad S. Tufail, Sasha C. Voss, Robert A. Deyl, Elliot T. Howse, Jacinta Foley, Ben Norrish, Neil Delroy, Sunil L. Shivananjappa
Summary: Avocado pollination is a major concern for producers due to low fruit-set. Most Australian avocado producers rely on honey bees for pollination, but there are risks in relying on one species. This study found that hover flies and blow flies visited avocado flowers, with one blow fly species (C. dubia) having a higher pollination rate than another (C. albifrontalis). Blow flies improved avocado yield, but to a lesser extent than honey bees. This study suggests that blow flies could be a potential managed pollinator for Australian avocado production.
JOURNAL OF APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Chemistry, Applied
Elisa Ovidi, Stefania Garzoli, Valentina Laghezza Masci, Giovanni Turchetti, Antonio Tiezzi
Summary: This study identified differences in chemical composition between male and female flowers of Schinus molle, with sesquiterpene hydrocarbons being the dominant fraction. Compounds like beta-elemene, beta-caryophyllene, and gamma-eudesmol at low concentrations showed potential synergistic cytotoxic effects on human neuroblastoma and leukemia cell lines, with leukemia cells being more sensitive to the treatment.
NATURAL PRODUCT RESEARCH
(2021)
Article
Biodiversity Conservation
Fabrizia Ratto, Tom D. Breeze, Lorna J. Cole, Michael P. D. Garratt, David Kleijn, Bill Kunin, Denis Michez, Rory O'Connor, Jeff Ollerton, Robert J. Paxton, Guy M. Poppy, Simon G. Potts, Deepa Senapathi, Rosalind Shaw, Lynn Dicks, Kelvin S-H Peh
Summary: This article introduces three simple methods for assessing site-scale insect pollination, which can be used by non-specialists with limited resources. These methods were applied in a nature reserve in the UK to estimate the economic value of insect pollination services, and it was found that converting the reserve to arable land would result in the complete loss of insect pollination services.
CONSERVATION BIOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Biology
Tamara M. Fuciarelli, Selvi Patel, C. David Rollo
Summary: The study examines the sensitivity of forewing morphology, a sexually dimorphic trait in crickets, to ionizing radiation as an environmental stressor. The results show that male forewings are significantly more affected by the stressor than female forewings, likely due to their structural complexity.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RADIATION BIOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Agronomy
Shilei Lyu, Yawen Zhao, Xueya Liu, Zhen Li, Chao Wang, Jiyuan Shen
Summary: Litchi orchards need to control the male-to-female flower ratio to preserve quality and increase production. This study proposes an intelligent detection method for male and female litchi flowers suitable for low-power embedded platforms. By using multi-teacher pre-activation feature distillation, the student model improves its detection performance by learning from the intermediate feature knowledge of different teacher models. Experimental results show that the distilled student model has significantly improved detection accuracy and can be deployed to a low-power FPGA-embedded platform, meeting the application requirements of rapid detection and accurate statistics of male and female litchi flowers.
Article
Plant Sciences
Fangwei Zhou, Yingnan Chen, Huaitong Wu, Tongming Yin
Summary: This study selected Salix suchowensis as the research material, detected the expression of candidate reference genes in male and female flowers at different developmental stages using qRT-PCR technology, and evaluated their stability through five algorithms. The results showed that ACT and DnaJ could be used as reference genes, and the reliability of the screening results was further confirmed through an expression pattern analysis.
Article
Entomology
Yuki Mitaka, Eisuke Tasaki, Tomonari Nozaki, Taro Fuchikawa, Kazuya Kobayashi, Kenji Matsuura
Article
Plant Sciences
Kazuya Kobayashi
JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY
(2019)
Review
Ecology
Kazuya Kobayashi
POPULATION ECOLOGY
(2019)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Takahiro Otsuki, Daisuke Uka, Hiromu Ito, Genki Ichinose, Momoka Nii, Satoru Morita, Takuma Sakamoto, Maaya Nishiko, Hiroko Tabunoki, Kazuya Kobayashi, Kenji Matsuura, Kikuo Iwabuchi, Jin Yoshimura
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2019)
Article
Plant Sciences
Kazuya Kobayashi
JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY
(2020)
Review
Ecology
Kaoru Tsuji, Tadashi Fukami
TRENDS IN ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
(2020)
Review
Ecology
Masato Yamamichi, Daisuke Kyogoku, Ryosuke Iritani, Kazuya Kobayashi, Yuma Takahashi, Kaori Tsurui-Sato, Akira Yamawo, Shigeto Dobata, Kazuki Tsuji, Michio Kondoh
TRENDS IN ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
(2020)
Article
Ecology
Ayaka Agarie, Yasushi Miyaguni, Koji Sugio, Kazuya Kobayashi
ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2020)
Article
Ecology
Rahila I. K. Sumaiya, Momoka Nii, Takuya Okabe, Hiromu Ito, Muhammad Almaududi Pulungan, Satoru Morita, Kazuya Kobayashi, Mitsutoshi Setou, Kikuo Iwabuchi, Kenji Matsuura, Jin Yoshimura
ECOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY
(2020)
Article
Ecology
Sergio Alvarez-Perez, Kaoru Tsuji, Marion Donald, Ado Van Assche, Rachel L. Vannette, Carlos M. Herrera, Hans Jacquemyn, Tadashi Fukami, Bart Lievens
Summary: Floral nectar is commonly colonized by yeasts and bacteria, whose growth is influenced by their ability to utilize nitrogen sources, withstand high osmotic pressures, and balance carbon-to-nitrogen ratios. The phylogenetic relatedness of strains is associated with nitrogen assimilation variation, and nutrient source as well as isolate origin can predict the ability of acinetobacters to assimilate nitrogen-rich compounds. Inter-clade variation in the potential of acinetobacters as nitrogen scavengers suggests that nutritional dependences might impact interactions between bacteria and yeasts in floral nectar.
Correction
Ecology
Sergio Alvarez-Perez, Kaoru Tsuji, Marion Donald, Ado Van Assche, Rachel L. Vannette, Carlos M. Herrera, Hans Jacquemyn, Tadashi Fukami, Bart Lievens
Summary: A correction to this paper has been published.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Y. Miyaguni, A. Agarie, K. Sugio, K. Tsuji, K. Kobayashi
Summary: The study on Ryukyu dry-wood termite Neotermes sugioi found that despite the longer lifespan of queens compared to kings, the sex allocation in the species was biased towards males instead of females. It was also observed that intrasexual competition among siblings could not explain the male-biased sex ratio in the populations studied.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2021)
Article
Ecology
Ayaka Agarie, Yasushi Miyaguni, Koji Sugio, Kazuki Tsuji, Kazuya Kobayashi
Summary: Selfish genetic elements (SGEs) enhance their transmission efficiency at the expense of individual fitness, leading to intragenomic conflict over sex ratio distortion and the evolution of sex-determining systems. However, limited research in non-Dipteran insects has hindered our understanding of the role of SGEs in insect sex determination. In this study, cross-breeding experiments were conducted on Ryukyu drywood termites to detect SGEs and resistance genes, revealing male-biased sex ratios in Okinawa but not in Ishigaki.
FRONTIERS IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
(2023)