| Bee-ware ... the future
stings |
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| Written by Frances Olimpo - Copy Editor
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| Wednesday, 01 June
2005 |
Photo: Frances
Olimpo
Sitting on the gentle warmth of a checkered
blanket beneath the afternoon sun, there is more than just the
tangy scent of barbeque adrift in the air.
A
tiny glimpse of yellow and black, a sudden hum near your ear,
and the muscles on almost anyone's neck tense in anticipation
for that delicate tickle to turn into a painful sting.
Unless, that is, you're Amro Zayed, a member of
York professor Laurence Packer's team whose pioneering
research centers on conservation genetics of bees.
"I've
been stung many times ... I feel in a little way it's karma; I
mean, I have to kill a few bees to get their DNA — the least I
could do is let them sting me," Zayed jokes.
Working
together in the department of biology, the Packer lab has
already completed a three-year research study in Chile funded
by National Geographic. This past February, they successfully
published their findings in Conservation Biology, one of the
world's leading scientific journals on the subject, and
another article is expected to appear in Conservation
Genetics.
Their work is groundbreaking as it is the
first to use genetic data to examine and compare population
sizes and connectedness of certain bee species in order to
discover and address the alarming possibility of their
extinction.
The team found that "specialist" bees -
bees that can only collect pollen from a single type of flower
- live in smaller, more isolated populations. This puts them
at a higher risk of going extinct.
"Bees are the most
important pollinators. They are needed to pollinate
wildflowers and food crops, and without them, the world will
be uglier and hungrier," Zayed explains. "Many of the world's
20,000 species of bees are specialists, and we need to
understand their genetic diversity to help us conserve their
populations."
Although there are other "generalist"
species of bees that are able to pollinate many different
plants, he stresses the importance of conserving the smaller
populations of specialist bees from extinction because of the
mutual dependency upon their host plants.
"We
don't want finicky bees to die out because once they're gone,
they're gone. And some flowers need pollination specifically
from that bee. In some cases, if the specialist bee dies, then
the plant will go extinct with it."
Examples of plants
that are dependent upon specialist bees include many species
of tropical orchids.
Without specialist bees, ugly will
hardly describe what the future holds for us when we consider
the interconnectedness and the fragility of the world's
ecosystem. Declines in pollination have been observed
throughout the globe, and without bees to pollinate plants,
plant populations will be threatened as will everything else
that depends on them, and from there the domino effect will
continue.
Zayed's latest project is another
conservation genetic study, the same as what was performed in
Chile, this time examining bees that feed on evening primrose
in North America. He will visit many regions across the
continent, starting from the southern charm of Georgia's
Appalachian mountains and ending in the Oak Ridges Moraine in
southern Ontario.
Although Zayed has had the
opportunity to travel to different countries around the globe,
it is clear that his entomological passion has helped him view
these places with different eyes.
"Insects are
beautiful and fascinating. It's a whole other world that most
people don't take the time to look and observe," he says.
Heeding his advice, maybe it's time that we all stop
and smell the roses, while we still
can.
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