Of insects, plants and streets

Me, taking notes with a pencil on my paper fiel book, about this beautiful Banksia.

 Three months have passed since my fieldwork started. I don´t think there is anyone luckier than myself in Sydney. Ever since that day in September, I get to travel around this amazing city, observing and collecting its spectacular flora and the insects associated to those flowers. Very interesting phenomena have started showing their way across a lot of ecological noise, so all this work is paying off (or at least that is how it feels).

A European Honeybee having a feast on Melia azedarach, the white cedar tree in Sydney

Several are my questions, but all of them can be summarized in a single and very broad one: what happens with floral visitors when cities grow? Well, as simple as this question might seem, lots of different interactions between plants, insects, urban environment, human beings and other animals make it an authentically tough one.

A hoverfly, one of the least known insects that visit flowers, and works hardly as a pollinator, doing its job in a peach tree

Modern cities range all the way from highly polluted, densely populated metropolis (Mumbai, Lima) to carefully planned, environmentally efficient cities (Vancouver, Copenhagen, San Francisco) according to the Siemens Green Cities Index. This means that the impact of each one of these artificial landscapes has a very unique impact on their surrounding natural environment. Understanding what are the important aspects of this urban-environment relationship, especially regarding plant-pollinator interactions is my concern. Although the global picture is extremely important, and always kept in my mind as the ultimate goal, a starting point cannot be that ambitious, so Sydney is my square one (and it is still extremely ambitious, believe me).

A bright blue sky, is the perfect background for this pink Gravillea and its visitor, a red ladybug

 Things as simple as the amount of potted plants in a balcony or the fact that a park has its green areas covered by grass instead of gardens with visible soil, can make a huge difference for the insects that could be the potential pollinators in that city. Life histories of insect pollinators are not simple, in fact they are extremely complex and diverse. Just speaking about bees, Sydney has solitary and colonial species, ones that build their nests in the ground, others in debris and some that do it in walls or tougher structures. There are also feeding preferences, so some species of plants might be the only thing the individuals of a determinate species of bee are looking for. To make it even more complex, plants might not accept any visitor, limiting their valuable rewards (pollen, nectar and in some cases particular saps) to a single specie that has the right fit, an astonishing example of co-evolution between insects and angiosperms.

Ms. Paula Salonen has travelled all the way from distant Finland to work in this project with me, many thanks to her and  the invaluable work she has done

 I have been asked many times and by many: what is exactly what you do? I spend long hours trying to explain with certain amount of detail but not too much biology jargon, and seven or eight times out of ten I get frowned faces and distant looks. The rest of the occasions I have to deal with absolute enthusiasts who happen to understand and sympathize with my research, and I can´t stop getting expressions of amusement and interest. I wish the latter was more common but in order to draw a coherent picture of what I do, I must bring my interlocutor to a very specific sciency context, and this usually bores them to death, and makes them stop listening.

This is how a collected voucher looks like once it has been processed in the lab and it is ready to be analyzed for a complete botanical description and storage in the Museum of Natural History

 So I am writing this new post, full of pictures of my last three months work, for everyone who wants to know what does the job of an urban ecologist feels like. Starting early in the morning, we pack our stuff in the lab, and go to the field sites (all of them which are within greater Sydney area). We look, measure, trap, collect and describe both insects and plants in each site. After that we go back to the lab and organize all this information systematically. We then look for patterns, analyze them, and test the hypotheses we once wrote down in a piece of paper. Basically, that is science. Basically, that is what I do, day after day, and I can´t tell you how happy it makes me.

Amazing beauty in Sydney´s tiny herbs

 As said many times before in my blog, pollination is very important for human beings. A lot of our food is produced only after an insect cross-pollinates a flower, but not all our food is produced like this, and not only human food production is why studying insect pollinators is important. Let´s not fall into that trap. Insect pollination is probably more important for maintaining the genetic diversity of most plants in our forests, parks and gardens than it is for humans. Also, Insects are an extremely diverse and uniquely successful group of animals, well worth of our attention, dedication and hard work. I will wake up happily for the remaining three or four or five or six years of my PhD, and go out to the fields and back to the lab to do more science about insects, plants and streets.

An European honeybee marked for us to track and analyze the effects of the environment on her health