I quite enjoy writing about what I read, as well as the stories behind the papers I wrote, because there is always much more than what its finally printed. I post here two pieces recently published in other blogs / journals and a new story behind a paper with a looong history.
1- A book review of one of the books about bees I enjoyed the most: The Solitary Bees: Biology, Evolution, Conservation. by Danforth, Bryan N., Minckley, Robert L., and Neff, John L.: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/evo.14067
2- The story behind an R package we wrote to better understand species coexistence: htttps://methodsblog.com/2020/08/18/package-to-infer-species-coexistence/
3- A story behind a recently published paper or “Why some bees have big brains?”
Today we publish a paper I am quite proud of, as we break new ground after a very long journey. In a nutshell, we investigate bee brain evolution and show that some surprising results.
Back in 2009 I read “pollinators cognitive ecology” book and I started working with Daniel Sol on cognitive ecology of birds. The seed was planted. Fast forward a couple of years, I assaulted Marc Seid in an Entomological Society of America conference to ask about extracting brains of hymenopterans. He kindly invited me to his lab and I learnt the technique, but that was nothing we can do as a side project without proper funding. In 2015 we finally got funding and Ferran Sayol (the lead author) spent some time with Marc dissecting bee brains. That was a lot of work, complemented with more brains from Europe in the subsequent years. Overall, we weighted brains for > 100 bee species. Probably, we multiplied by 10 the amount of data existing on bee brain size. This is already a huge step forward! The next hurdle was getting a proper phylogeny of those 100 species, which required further collaborations. At the end, all the pieces fell finally together!
First, we show that sociality do not require larger brains. This is not surprising, as it was suggested before for other insect groups, and even for vertebrates it’s controversial. Surprisingly, being specialist do requieres having bigger brains. This was unexpected at first based on what we know for vertebrates, but it may be more intuitive than we think. For bees, navigation skills for locating and remembering resources is essential, specially if you are specialised in a few resources. However, handling different types of flowers is not as challenging as eating very different resources such as insects, grain, etc… Moreover, parasitic species tend to have also larger brains (but our sample size is tiny for those), which reinforce the idea big brains are needed for navigation and location of nests. Have a look at the paper, It’s very cool!
Sayol, F., Collado, M.A., Garcia-Porta, J., Seid, M.A., Gibbs, J., Agorreta, A., San Mauro,
D., Raemakers, I., Sol, D., Bartomeus, I. (2020) Feeding specialisation and longer generation
time are associated with relatively larger brains in bees. Proc. R. Soc. B 20200762
Bartomeus lab 