Sad to hear of the passing of Robert Ricklefs - a giant of Ecology who simultaneously pushed forward big ideas at multiple biological levels yet took time for detailed natural history .. McGill does a nice job summarizing his impressive contributions 🌐🧪 dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2026/06/11/r...
How do you turn a purple flower white?
Another from lab, led by @damianmicroeco.bsky.social and Emily Glasgow, with big contributions from Martin Henry, Margaret Li, and Amanda Peake.
Mendelian Polymorphisms for the Win!
#evolbio #plantscience
This was a lot of lugging potted plants around, not to mention reviewing thousands of motion-detection video clips of bees and birds (and wind, etc), for several field seasons that spanned a global pandemic. Shout out to all the students who made this happen.
It was fun to work on this meta-analysis of resurrection studies involving plants with Lillie Pennington, Steven Franks, Jill Anderson, and @elenahamann.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1002/ajb2...
We were surprised to find that bees (mainly Euglossa and Eulaema spp.) were just as active pollinators at the higher elevation sites. But hummingbirds visited more frequently at high elevation and were a lot more efficient at moving pollen, which tipped the scales towards them as the best pollinator
In my lab's latest, we experimentally test the decades-old idea that plants switch from bee to hummingbird pollinators in tropical mountains because bee activity declines in cool cloud forest conditions nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
What is Plant tissue culture, and how will it potentially be useful for conservation? Plant tissue culture is the application of advanced horticultural techniques in a sterile, in vitro environment to propagate new plants.
There may be cases where bee inactivity in montane conditions plays a role, but we show that's not necessary in order for hummingbird pollination to be favored. This can help explain why transitions to hummingbird pollination have been so common across so many plant lineages.
Led by PhD student Pedro Juárez, we reciprocally translocated flowering individuals of two sister species of spiral gingers across an elevational gradient in Costa Rica. One lowland species with ancestral orchid bee pollination and it's hermit hummingbird-pollinated cloud forest sister.