Diet breadth, coexistence and rarity in bumblebees
By Dave Goulson, G. C. Lye, Ben Darvill. Biodiversity and Conservation, 2008
140 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Factors that determine the relative abundance of bumblebee species remain poorly understood, rendering management of rare and declining species difficult. Studies of bumblebee communities in the Americas suggest that there are strong competitive interactions between species with similar length tongues, and that this competition determines the relative abundance of species. In contrast, in Europe it is common to observe several short-tongued species coexisting with little or no evidence for competition shaping community structure. In this study we examine patterns of abundance and distribution in one of the most diverse bumblebee communities in Europe, found in the mountains of southern Poland. We quantify forage use when collecting nectar and pollen for 23 bumblebee species, and examine patterns of co-occurrence and niche overlap to determine whether there is evidence for inter-specific competition. We also test whether rarity can be explained by diet breadth. Up to 16 species were found coexisting within single sites, with species richness peaking in mountain pasture at ~1,000 m altitude. Results concur with previous studies indicating that the majority of pollen collected by bumblebees is from Fabaceae, but that some bee species (e.g. B. ruderatus) are much more heavily dependent on Fabaceae than others (e.g. B. lucorum). Those species that forage primarily on Fabaceae tended to have long tongues. In common with studies in the UK, diet breadth was correlated with abundance: rarer species tended to visit fewer flower species, after correcting for differences in sample size. No evidence was found for similarity in tongue length or dietary overlap influencing the likelihood of co-occurrence of species. However, the most abundant species (which co-occurred at most sites) occupied distinct dietary niche space. While species with tongues of similar length tended, overall, to have higher dietary niche overlap, among the group of abundant short-tongued species that commonly co-occurred there was marked dietary differentiation which may explain their coexistence.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Insect Science, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f850ebce0c434734d3eb971357a74942a2189206
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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Citations in the corpus
- Effects of land use at a landscape scale on bumblebee nest density and survival (2010, background): “…feature on arable farms since they boost soil fertility, but the advent of cheap artificial fertilizers led to their abandonment; it has been argued that this change in farming may have played a significant role in driving bumblebee declines in the twentieth century (Goulson et al. 2005, 2008a).”
- Relationships among ecological traits of wild bee communities along gradients of habitat amount and fragmentation (2017, background): “The authors suggest that this was because social species need larger amount of floral resources to feed their numerous studies that have found that proboscis length influences the flower choice of bee species (Goulson et al. 2008, Garibaldi et al. 2015, Cariveau et al. 2016).”
- The PREDICTS database: a global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts (2014, unknown): “…263 Sakchoowong et al. 2008; 264 Yoshikura et al. 2011; 265 Hanley et al. 2011; 266 Connop et al. 2011; 267 Redpath et al. 2010; 268 Goulson et al. 2010; 269 Goulson et al. 2008; 270 Hatfield and LeBuhn 2007; 271 McFrederick and LeBuhn 2006; 272 Diek€otter et al. 2006; 273 Darvill et al. 2004;…”