Bees: Biodiversity, biogeography

蜜蜂：生物多样性、生物地理学

• 批准号: RGPIN-2015-03764
• 负责人: Packer, Laurence
• 金额: $ 4.3万
• 依托单位: York University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2016-01-01 至 2017-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=612555
• 关键词: Bees; Biodiversity; biogeography

Bees are essential components of almost all terrestrial environments through their pollinating activities, including many agricultural crops. Gaining an understanding of the taxonomy, ecology and evolutionary history of bees is important. We investigate these topics in a variety of ways. 1. The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the oldest and driest deserts in the world: over large areas, rainfall is measured in mm per decade and often does not reach double digits. Even on the edge of the absolute desert there are plants and bees, and one particular genus predominates, yet most of its species remain undescribed. We will describe these species and assess the degree to which they specialize on single species of host plants (some seem to). The adaptations of bees to their floral hosts is indicated by extreme modifications of their mouthparts, with these unusual characteristics arising independently multiple times seemingly to permit access to nectar from nectaries that are deep, presumably to avoid evaporation in the arid environment.  We will compare the patterns of speciation of the bees and the plants and interpret both with dated evolutionary trees which will enable us to assess the impact of past geological events and palaeoenvironmental conditions upon the mutualisms. 2. Cuckoo bees lay eggs in the nests of other bees and might be expected to be more sensitive to a deteriorating environment because they, in effect, occupy a higher trophic level. However, they are usually taxonomically difficult. We will use integrative taxonomy on New World species of the genus Epeolus, produce identification keys for all North America species and perform morphological and molecular phylogenetic studies of the genus and its hosts and use dated phylogenies to assess the extent to which speciation of the hosts impacted that of the cuckoos. We will investigate the extent to which host chemicals are matched by the cuckoos so as to decrease the chances their activities are detected. This chemical matching would place constraints on cuckoos that switch-hosts and we will assess this with our evolutionary trees. 3. Evolutionary trees for bees based upon morphology often conflict in fundamentally important ways from those obtained from DNA sequence data. We will try to resolve this conflict by assessing the impact of taxonomic outliers (rogues).  We will also amalgamate all available morphological data for the first time - surprisingly, this has not been done previously.  We will analyse the resulting data exhaustively and combine it with molecular data.  This work is facilitated by the enormous research collection we have built up - ~30% of the world's 20,000+ species of bee and 90% of the 482 genera.  We will add data from the bee's closest wasp relatives. Students working in my laboratory will be exposed to an enormous diversity of bee research and collaborate with experts within the department, nationally and internationally and use state.

蜜蜂通过授粉活动成为几乎所有陆地环境的重要组成部分，了解蜜蜂的分类、生态和进化历史非常重要。 1. 智利的阿塔卡马沙漠是世界上最古老、最干燥的沙漠之一：大片地区的降雨量以每十年毫米为单位，通常不会达到两位数，即使在绝对沙漠的边缘也有植物和植物。蜜蜂，其中一个特定的属占主导地位，但其大多数物种仍未被描述。我们将描述这些物种并评估它们对单一寄主植物物种的专化程度（有些似乎如此）。它们的口器发生了极端的变化，这些不寻常的特征多次独立出现，似乎可以从深处的花蜜中获取花蜜，大概是为了避免在干旱环境中蒸发。我们将比较蜜蜂和植物的物种形成模式。并用过时的进化树来解释两者，这将使我们能够评估过去的地质事件和古环境条件对互利共生的影响。 2. 杜鹃蜂在其他蜜蜂的巢中产卵，可能对恶化的环境更加敏感，因为它们实际上占据了更高的营养级。但是，它们通常在分类学上很困难。新世界的 Epeolus 属物种，为所有北美物种生成识别码，并对该属及其宿主进行形态学和分子系统发育研究，并使用已注明日期的系统发育评估寄主的物种形成对杜鹃的影响程度，我们将调查寄主化学物质与杜鹃的匹配程度，以减少它们的活动被检测到的机会。切换主机，我们将用我们的进化树来评估这一点。 3. 基于形态学的蜜蜂进化树通常与从 DNA 序列数据中获得的进化树存在根本性的冲突，我们将尝试通过评估分类异常值（流氓）的影响来解决这一冲突。我们还将合并所有可用的形态学数据。令人惊讶的是，这是第一次，我们将彻底分析所得数据并将其与分子数据结合起来，我们建立的大量研究集合促进了这项工作。世界上 20,000 多种蜜蜂中的约 30% 以及 482 个属中的 90% 我们将添加来自蜜蜂最近的黄蜂亲戚的数据。 在我的实验室工作的学生将接触到各种各样的蜜蜂研究，并与该部门、国内和国际以及使用国家的专家合作。