Using bumble specimens from 1966 through 1980, and from 2012 through 2014, the researchers measured changes in tongue length, noticing a significant shortening.
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“It’s one of the best examples of the effect of climate that I’ve seen”, Sydney Cameron, an entomologist at the University of Illinois, said in a statement.
Nicole Miller-Struttman, from the University of Missouri, and colleagues recently studied the decline of these long-tongued bumblebees, focussing on populations throughout high-altitude sites in Colorado where two species of long-tongued alpine bumblebees are known to live. She is the lead author on the study, which is published today in Science Magazine.
Great for the bees, but awful news if you’re a flower – the shrinking could have catastrophic effects on the long-tubed flowers that the bumbles used to pollinate. “It suggests that these bees may have an especially low effective population size and that they could have been through an evolutionary bottleneck, allowing very rapid change in these traits”.
It seems that the plucky bees have simply evolved so as to be able to feed off more types of flowers, apparently in response to a decline in the amount of flowers generally in the mountains (of Colorado, in this case). “Thus, even while using positive factors of some hundred plants throughout the talk, whole healthy food helpful information on alpine stumble bees on Pennsylvania Mountain have disappeared by 60per cent because the 1970s”, they will jot.
Numerous bumblebees that first arose sport tongues about half the length of their bodies, having evolved special relationships with particular long-tubed flowers. Alpine flowers grow less well when summer minimum temperatures exceed 3.25°C, and the soil doesn’t cool off and dries up as a result.
The researchers are concerned about what this decline could signal for larger trends across bee populations and flower ecosystems.
The team then set about determining what could have caused the shift.
In recent years the bumblebees have had to rely more and more on those shorter flowers.
The warmer summers have reduced the number of the deep flowers.
Galen said, “It speaks to the magnitude of the change of the climate that it’s affecting the evolution of the organisms”. Bees are essential for pollination and if they stop visiting certain flowers, those flowers could potentially die off.
Then, the researchers examined possible mechanisms for this change.
This study also highlights a common problem for mountain or other remote refuges-as the climate warms, the places where plants and animals thrive move slowly away from the areas we’ve designated for their conservation.
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Miller-Struttmann adds that while it’s good news the bees are adapting, it’s impossible to say how much more stress they can handle.
