46 A Well-Curated Bee In A Museum Is Worth A Thousand Pictures (in English)

Speaker 1: From the Oregon State University Extension Service, this is Pollination, a podcast that tells the stories of researchers, land managers, and concerned citizens making bold strides to improve the health of pollinators. I'm your host, Dr. Adoni Melopoulos, assistant professor in pollinator health in the Department of Horticulture. Dear listeners, I'm not sure if you got the great news last week, but the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research launched its pollinator health fund by announcing 16 grants totaling $7 million for research to address declining pollinator health.

This is really great news and there are some wonderful projects, including two projects at Oregon State University, some of which are going to make sure that pollination stays in the air for the next four years. Today we're going to be talking to Dr. Chris Marshall, who is the recipient of one of the grants that included myself and Dr. Ramesh Segele, the Xerces Society, and Oregon Department of Agriculture. Dr. Marshall is the remarkable curator at the Oregon State Arthropod Collection, located here at Oregon State University.

He joined the museum in 2006 after he earned his Ph.D. in entomology at Cornell, followed by his fellowships in the Smithsonian and the Field Museum in Chicago. So today he's going to be talking about his component of the project, an interactive bee atlas for the Pacific Northwest, but he's also going to get into the role of museums in our understanding of pollinators. Dr. Marshall is also going to drop some great tips for those of you who are part of the Oregon Bee Atlas, another part of this grant. These are our dedicated volunteers who are training to survey the bee biodiversity in the state of Oregon. Hope you enjoy the show. What role do museums play in our understanding of pollinator biodiversity to start with?

Speaker 2: We play a few roles. One is a really critical foundational role in understanding pollinator diversity. Museums natural history collections or research collections around the country and the world, we are the repositories of the actual specimens. So we're the place where a scientist who's interested in understanding a species across a large geographic range or across a large timeline can relatively easily obtain that material in one place and examine it and come to an understanding of that species, that genus, that fauna, that group.

Speaker 1: Because they can have like all of those specimens like laid out before their eyes.

Speaker 2: It's right. So in some regards, we like to think of field biologists and science as being something that takes place either in the field or in the laboratory. And that's really true. A large portion of modern day science takes place in those environments. One of the limitations of that and of biodiversity science is that biodiversity, your ability to sample biodiversity and examine it and describe it and think about it. When you're in the field, you can only see a small piece of the entire range of a given species of its habitat. You only sample for a small timeline within the life history of that species within the evolutionary history of that species. Oh, right.

Right. And so to be able to put the whole scale of a species or an entire fauna under a lens that a scientist can see and examine it. You need a lot of little points to look at it. And museums are a classical way or a wonderful way that a researcher can get a feel for species across its entire range, can look at all the species within a given location and see samples of that species from throughout its season over long periods of time. And that's really a benefit that you can only get this way. We just have here at the Oregon State University, our collection, our university collection is about three million specimens large.

Holy moly. Which is actually relatively, it's a good size university collections for insects. Many of the big public museums, the Smithsonian, the National Academy of Sciences, California Academy of Sciences have much bigger insect collections. But for university collections, three million is a good sized university level research collection. But when you think about it, if you were to go out, especially for unusual species or rare species, if your goal is to understand that species and you have to get out in the field and see it alive functioning in its ecosystem, that's a great goal.

But your ability to do it can be very difficult to get enough information to see that. If you come to a museum, you have the capacity to take advantage of specimens that might have been collected over the last 150 years. When they may have been more abundant. They may have been more abundant. And even if so, you're taking advantage of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of man hours of people being out there surveying biodiversity.

And so you can use, take advantage of that effort. You probably can't afford to basically replicate that or even could replicate it because it's historic. You can't go back in time to the 1930s or the 1950s when habitats were maybe different. But this allows you, this data set allows you to really probe species and probe fauna in a way that can't be done in a contemporaneous timeline with a small or an effort that basically is limited by a few different locations. You just, it's an order of magnitude, if not more in its capacity to show you biodiversity. Okay.

Speaker 1: So there's a lot more in these records than just a point you, this species found here. What else can you get off a specimen? Like if you have a specimen, what's well, so this value?

Speaker 2: The specimen itself has a ton of value to it. The common classical analogy is if a photograph is a thousand words or then a specimen is, you know, thousands of photographs.

You, right? So the specimen is a physical object. And when that, when linked with that label information that we have on all our specimens, you can place that specimen in a particular place and time. So you can begin to understand something about where and when the, the, that species exists on earth.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. I can see that you've got some specimens in front of me. They got a little label underneath and they tell where they're from.

Speaker 2: You can tell where they're from. You can tell when they were collected. Most, most specimens have that. That's our pretty much basic information that we'd have on a specimen is where and when it's from.

That's a very important thing. We'll have who collected it. Sometimes we'll have host record information or associated biology on those labels. Host record?

What do you mean? So host record for many insects are found in association with other organisms. And those could be, for example, caterpillars that are found on a plant, bees that are pollinating a flower, or in the case of say parasites or symbionts, you might actually find, you know, a tick on a, on a host, the parasite on its host organism. And that information, the label, the label data on the specimen is aimed at telling a researcher after the fact, where would they find, what is the habitat? What is, what is the location of this species, this specimen? Where did it, where did it live?

Speaker 1: I can see on some of these specimens, it says, it can, it says what flower this bee was on. Correct. Okay.

Speaker 2: No, so that on any one specimen that, that data has limited value. But if you had lots of independent observations of that bee on a certain flower, you would begin to understand that maybe there was some sort of biological link between those two organisms, the flower, and that it might not be direct, it could be indirect. They both share the same habitat, but it could be much more, it could be much, a much more formal relationship in terms of this bee might be a major pollinator for that plant. Or this, this plant may be a critical part of the ecosystem that allows that bee to inhabit that area.

And without that flower, maybe those, you don't find those bees. The ability to understand co-occurrence between biodiversity records is, is the ground data for understanding community level ecology in terms of what are the connections that we see between organisms in an ecosystem. And museum specimens, sometimes directly on the label and indirectly on the specimens themselves can hold clues to those connections. So the, so in, in, in addition to just the label, the specimens themselves have pollen on them. They have residues on them. They might have pesticide residues on them or pathogens in them.

I'll be darned. And so each specimen has, with it is a small sample in some regards of the ecosystem at a given place and time. And so scientists are really, are really good at finding ways to ask questions about the world, the natural world around us.

And one resource that is becoming more and more clear is that natural resource, natural history museum specimens, in, in some cases, provide the ability to sample past ecosystems in a way that you might not have thought of before. Okay.

Speaker 1: That's really cool. And I, you know, that I'm just having my head, that image of one picture and pictures, a thousand words, and this is a thousand pictures. I can see how you can really, this one little specimen I'm looking in front of me has a lot you can get lots and lots and lots of information from it.

Speaker 2: I mean, the other thing I should point out here is, is, and we haven't, I haven't mentioned yet is that the specimens themselves are not just important in terms of where and when they were collected and what they have in them. But these specimens are the very objects that allow one type of scientist, taxonomists, to understand biodiversity taxonomically in terms of understanding how the different bees in our community are broken into genera species, subspecies, and, and have a feel for the natural variation that takes place within and between different species. And we can only see that with, with, with specimens from across the geographic range of those species of the organism. And so having the capacity to go to a museum and see not just one specimen or two specimens, which you, you might do.

Many people think of us as kind of like a stamp or coin collection where you'd see one and you've, you've got them. You've got them. Yeah.

Right. In fact, pre evolutionary collections before evolutionary theory was, was important. Many collections would have very small series of one or two, three specimens per species, simply because that was, that was, that was the goal was to have a reference specimen for each of the species. The long series within the species allow us now and we, we, we rely on those series to have a good understanding of the variation within the different species. And, and it's, it's, it's that ability to compare the specimens across these, these groups that, that show us when we have different species or unknown species. And now in the post molecular sequencing world, these specimens are, are allowing us to even move past the, them examining only the anatomy of the specimens, but beginning understand the DNA sequence within a species.

Speaker 1: So you can get some DNA out of these old bees.

Speaker 2: It, it's yes.

Speaker 1: The short answer is yes. The short answer is yes. You know, 10 years ago, the general, this is a field that's rapidly advancing. And 10 years ago, the idea of getting good quality DNA out of DNA sequences out of older museum specimens, say more than 15 or 20 years old, was very challenging and very costly

Speaker 2: and highly prone to contaminations and, and all sorts of problems. Next gen sequencing techniques, which, which have been built, building up that are used for sequencing entire genomes are allowing us to obtain much higher quality DNA sequences out of older and older museum specimens because they're built up on technology that is less prone to problems of degraded DNA. They can build up the, the sequences off of tiny fragmented pieces of DNA. I mean, and, and so yes, they do hold a lot of DNA.

It's still easier and more cost effective to have fresh material, but it is becoming those, the technology is advancing, the price is dropping, that's becoming much more easy. And for important questions, it's completely doable.

Speaker 1: Okay. So walk us through, you know, we have lots of people, we'll talk about this in a minute, volunteering to collect new specimens, walk us through what are the important elements of a properly curated pollinator specimen, what's essential, what's desirable, and what are some of the common mistakes that somebody going out for the first time is going to make.

Speaker 2: Right. And so oddly enough, you know, I think that the, the biggest mistake or the biggest challenge that people have when they, when they start working on a collection and it's, it's completely understandable is they, they are entranced by the beauty of the organisms. And they want their specimens to be beautiful. And that's great. I think it's a wonderful, I mean, large parts of why we love biodiversity and we conserve biodiversity come from, I believe, an aesthetic beauty of the world around us.

And so I'm, I'm very pro that. However, the real power of, of a scientific specimen comes from the ability for the specimen to be examined and the link between that label data that we talked about a minute ago. And so it's critical for the specimen to have be, be 100% associated with the place it was collected and the time it was collected at. That's, that's the bare minimum.

And so you ask about what's the bare minimum, every specimen in our collection has a locality, a bit about where it was collected and, and the time it was found. And so in this day and age with cell phones, most people are walking around with a global positioning system, a GPS unit in their pocket. There are free apps that they can put on their phone with online tools like Google Earth and even basic maps on Yahoo maps. You can pretty quickly locate a longitude latitude for a specimen that you might have collected. Even if you were out of cell phone region, you can find some sort of long lat. But at the very basic, I tell students who are starting out, think about a very short way of describing to someone who wants to go back and find a second specimen of the one you found.

How would you describe that to them? So it might be, you know, you might have the most accurate you could have is be like three miles, I was, I was hiking and I was three miles north of Maple Creek. And as long as you think that that location will be interpretable by somebody in 50 years, I think that's a reasonable bit of label. But remember, your specimen might not be, might not be here in Oregon. It might not be the researcher might be in Russia or might be in South America.

Speaker 1: Maple Creek, there's a million Maple Creek.

Speaker 2: And so, so I encourage people to just, you know, be a little, be a little redundant, you know, write down USA, Oregon, Benton County, Maple Creek, three miles south of Mary's Peak. The more information you put, the better. If you, if you want to be as short as possible to make the label as small, the best you can do is the long, longitude latitude plus the date.

Okay. Elevation can be important too. But again, from the long, longitude latitude and a topo map, a person can get the elevation. Right. Okay. So that's really important. How the specimen looks as long as the specimen is viewable. Yeah. It's, it's scientifically good. Yeah. So beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Speaker 1: Oh, so spending 10 minutes like getting everything.

Speaker 2: If, if, if a, if a person needs them to be beautiful because that's what motivates them, I'm all for that. Yeah. But I would say the biggest fear I have is that people, people don't want, they basically put mounting their specimens to the end. They don't associate the label information right away. And it's because they want to do it perfect so that they look beautiful.

Speaker 1: Oh, so they do aesthetics over getting the key part of the information on there.

Speaker 2: And, and so I would encourage people to get the key information on there first or get some specimens done scientifically first. And then worry about making a beautiful display specimen second. Gotcha. Right.

That's what I would recommend. And I, I tell you that because we often, every year people approach us with the bring in material that they collected 20 years ago that they beautifully mounted, but the label data is not there. And we can't really, we don't have a place for that kind of material in the collection.

Speaker 1: No, so they might have put a lot of effort into it. And now it really doesn't have that much value. Correct.

Speaker 2: And so it can be utilized sometimes in teaching for education purposes. But even then we like to educate our students with material that has label data because it gets it in their mind that, that the label and the specimen together constitute the specimen, not just the specimen. That's a good point. That's great. So we try and use, we try our best to use labeled material when working with students and workshops, because it's important for people to see those two things together. I, that's my belief. I think some people, if we were teaching insect anatomy, just for the sake of insect anatomy, we might use unlabeled material or doing very basic level work. But it's good to see the label. I think so.

Speaker 1: So as a curator, if somebody comes in, what is a dream collection look like? If somebody, I am a naturalist walks in the door with a collection.

Speaker 2: What's like, you know, so we receive a lot of collections every year, some very large and some small. And, and the underlying kind of value that we see in those collections usually has to do with the care with which those specimens and labeled data were generated and the sort of what those specimens bring to the underlying value of the overall collection that we, that we manage, that we curate. So do they add new, new species and new genera and new taxa that we don't have or we have poorly represented in our collection?

Do they add new distributional records for species that might be very common and we have lots of, but these specimens are collected and are voucher, are able to voucher that a given species is known from an unusual place. Voucher, what does that work? Vouchers is our, is a fancy way of saying stands as an empirical, testable observation. So it, it's the voucher for the observation. So you'll, the observation meant be something that appears in a publication or that we say something like, you know, this species lives in Bend, Oregon, or this, okay, this species lives in Hawaii. The, the specimen is the voucher that, that is testable, that stands behind that statement. Right. So if I said to you, I saw a giant pink bird in Corvallis, Oregon yesterday, you would say, what, how, back that up. There are no giant pink birds in, in Corvallis that are real.

Speaker 1: No, I saw it too. A lawn ornament.

Speaker 2: And those, those vouchers are what make the difference between a testable scientific observation and, and not necessarily a wrong observation, but one that is, is, is the only proof of it is what I've said. So it stands behind it. It, it serves as a voucher for it. And, and if we're going to understand where species are distributed and possibly how those species distributions are changing over time, maybe or maybe not, we need well-vouchered observations to base those decisions on and the specimens serve as those vouchers.

Speaker 1: So a really good dream collection would have like, it may be a species that you already have in the collection, but it's from a place you've never seen before. Correct.

Speaker 2: And what a lot of amateurs and hobbyists provide for us is remember these collections, independent observations from their location, where they happen to live or where they happen to go are often not vouchered. So we might, we might have good reason to believe that a species lives in Eugene, Oregon, because we know it occurs in Ashland, Oregon.

We have vouchers from Ashland and we have vouchers from Corvallis. And so we could infer that the species is also found in Eugene, but we might not have a voucher for a specimen in Eugene and someone who brings us a specimen from Eugene, that provides an empirical point on the map of the distribution that, that is, that kind of puts the flag in the ground, so to speak, for the species in that habitat. And so, and they might also provide us a observation in time. So we might, the last known specimen we have from Eugene might be from 1957. And they might bring in a specimen of 2017 that shows us that the species was there in 1957 and in 2017.

And so these, these observations are where you can actually go back to something concrete and confirm that the observation was true. Right. And not just a statement. Right. Right. So, so these are, they're very critical.

Speaker 1: Somebody misidentified it and you say, oh, it's an old, and you go back and act because it's vouchered. I can go back and say, oh, no, it wasn't that. It was something else. You get a good taxonomist in to clear it up. Correct.

Speaker 2: Also, these, these observations for these observations for common species and rare species can be incredibly important. We see that rare species may not be endangered. They might just be rarely seen. And so the number of observations we have are pretty small. Amateurs, one observation that amateur brings in with a voucher might add, you know, a very important scientific point onto a very rarely seen species that maybe isn't endangered, but is rarely seen.

And, and, and that's an important contribution. But common species, we shouldn't, we shouldn't forget that, that, that common species can disappear very quickly and appear very quickly. We have a number of cases around North America and around the world where once widespread species seem to vanish over a relatively small amount of time. We also have cases where new immigrants to an area, new species come in and seem to spread pretty quickly. Sometimes they spread really quickly and then they kind of recede back into, you know, the, the, they become less abundant and museums can kind of, they can't show that's perfectly, but they, you can, if you look over a long enough time, you can see the sort of, there were no records until 1983. Did it show up in 1983? Probably not. It probably was there in low levels prior to that.

But then you see it all of a sudden appear in the, in collection material. And so we can provide a documentation of those events. And I just think that's really important if we want biodiversity be a scientific, based on scientifically confirmed observations. If we want it to be rigorous, we really need to have specimens supporting a large number of our observations.

Speaker 1: Well, let's take a break. That's great. And let's, let's talk a little bit more after the break about an initiative that you recently are going to be getting off the ground here in Oregon to help kind of mesh all this together for our bees.

Okay. Well, we're back. And as you know, listeners, our breaks, we talk about lots of stuff.

It was a really good break. Okay. But back to we want bees.

In the museum. Okay. So it was really exciting last week, or maybe by the time of listeners here will be two weeks. OSU was awarded funding from the Foundation for Agricultural Research, the first ever pollinator health fund to develop an atlas for the bees in our region. Can you explain your role? You're one of the PIs in this study, your role in this atlas.

Speaker 2: Well, so our role is to work the Oregon State Artifact Collection is to work to try and integrate, as we talked about before the break, the specimen data and the specimens in a very integral way with the project. And that means two things, two, two kind of foundational level things.

One is we want to bring the historical records of the bees that are in the collection to make them a mental being examined as part of an atlas. And that can be that's both graphically. So you can see them like you think of an atlas road roadmap. You can see them on a map online. But also that map would be interactive so that the underlying the points and the distributions on that map, you would have access to the specimens to the specimen records. The records themselves, the source of where that observation came from.

And that would basically allow a person to examine critically the basis for the points on the distributional map for themselves. So that's the first part. That's dealing with the historical material in the collections. But we see ourselves as also, so museums sit in a very unique situation as we talked earlier a little bit, is that we allow biodiversity to be examined over time. And my role as curator, I don't limit myself to the historical vantage point.

I also look forward. So I'm also always looking out for researchers 100 years from now, 50 years from now. And so we also want to build this atlas interactive, not just for the user who wants to use the data, but also for the researchers who want to add to that atlas for future researchers used. And so the goal for us is to create a structure whereby we can archive new records coming in as part of the overall collaboration between ODA, Xerxes and other partners in this overall B project. That we can create the observational record such that the observational record can be linked to its original source.

And if that original source is a specimen in the museum, you'd be able to find out information about that specimen. And so that's where we really see ourselves is we're trying to create the archived basis, a very rigorous basis to a subset of the data. Some of our data is fundamentally going to be hard to archive because we will have and be making use of some observational records that don't have a specimen or for which the specimen isn't saved. But the core observations, the important observations that flesh out the atlas will be vouchered with mostly specimens and in some cases photographs. And in some cases, just references to literature publications where a researcher has published an observation and we're not certain we don't have necessarily confirmation of it.

But in some cases, those publication records can be can be important. They can be even sometimes outliers where you might someone might have said that they saw a certain bee on a certain plant in a certain place. And we don't have a confirmation of it yet. But we want to include those because those types of observations are ones we'd like participants in the atlas to see if they can't find a confirmation for those observations. And so this atlas will stand as a record of what we have done and hopefully as a basis for understanding where we might go look for more records or need more records. It'll be a it'll be kind of our a document that that if done correctly will will be around for decades.

Speaker 1: OK, so interactive and an atlas. So this is going to be in some sense, it's going to live as a website. There will be some kind of way somebody could log on or visit the visit the atlas and be able to look at these.

Speaker 2: Correct, I think I mean, so we're in a time period where in this day and age where there's lots of websites, websites are out there and the the core data that generates those websites is generally shared to a certain degree. And so and our intention is to share the data. We're not going to hoard the data or sharing the data. We will provide a portal into that data that we hope will be will cater to the regional user base that we have and provide information that that where they find this interactive atlas is a place where they can get the information they want easily. But we will be sharing this information to other portals as well.

And so my our job is to provide a very Pacific Northwest focused experience for these data that that caters to our local our local needs. But that is also fundamentally allows the researcher to see where and when an observation is based on a vouchered specimen or a photo or unvouchered. And that just is something that's so core to what a museum offers is we want to make sure that that's very clear that that's what we'll be providing is this sort of vouchered record. Now, I should point out to the task of creating these types of data sets is huge. And so this is this this grant offers us the opportunity to basically capture those records each of these little specimens.

And we have, you know, tens of thousands of specimens of bees in the Oregon State Artifact collection. Each one has a tiny label that a student or a digitizer or a volunteer has to read that label and type that into an appropriate field so it can be entered into the database and thus served into a format that is that will generate the website.

Speaker 1: And I see here you've got a cabinet and sorry you have a drawer of one of the two groups that you are going to be digitizing. Right.

Speaker 2: And so it's doing because of the cost involved in time and translated into labor and money. The OSAC is going to use two relatively well known and and and well defined portions of the beef on a to build the infrastructure. And that's going to be the mega kyle de and the bumblebees. So these are the leaf cutter and the mason bees and the bumblebees.

And we chose those groups for two very specific reasons. One is we felt the bumblebees were a relatively small group that was really well understood taxonomically in general. And and we also felt that that our user group and and people in general have a good understanding of bumblebees in their own communities and backyards. And we thought this would be a really good way to engage people with the Atlas at the onset.

People could use the Atlas to find out what bumblebees they might find in their own backyard. What species were abundant and pretty common across the Pacific Northwest and Oregon in particular. And what ones were maybe not so abundant across Oregon in particular. And so we we thought that that was really a good group to focus on first and also take advantage of ongoing projects related to bumblebees here in Oregon and around the country. Secondly we chose the mega kyleids which is a less well understood group of really important group for pollination.

And there is a growing interest in cavineesting bees and mason bees for pollination. But they really are emblematic of a of kind of getting your hands dirty a little bit with real biodiversity. They're much harder to see for people in the environment. They're smaller. They're much harder to identify for people. And I when I say much harder to identify I actually this is this is taking the gloves off.

So you're amateur you're amateur entomologists in some regards. This is where they're going to really get to experience the challenges of taxonomy. There are groups within the mega kyleid that are just simply not well understood by scientists. And so we could we could shy away from those groups if one choice is to shy away from and only focus on things that are really well known. But in this case I think that this is an opportunity to let a wider audience participate in how science works with these local fauna.

There's this portions of the mega kyleid that are well known and are not hard to identify and other portions that get a little murky. And we don't want to scare people away. We actually want them to kind of recognize that there's going to be species and genera in their backyards that that they are going to feel comfortable with.

And other ones they're not going to feel so comfortable with. And then hopefully the Atlas might be able to be a tool for them to kind of navigate that those challenges. And so I think in both cases we're offering two kind of different experiences with two groups of bees that should let people kind of focus on the areas where they feel most comfortable. Are they kind of person who wants to add observations to a well known fauna. This is kind of analogous to bird watching or are they the person who wants to go out and kind of explore really challenging groups. Are they are are they a person who goes out and studies lichens. You know lichens or groups of barbarian diversity that are that are so amazing if you take the time to look.

Speaker 1: That should really challenge should be the new slogan is like do you like birds do you like lichens. Everything you want in the Oregon be Atlas. Right.

Speaker 2: Well I just I just I just have to say is like people have shied away from the native bees largely because they're challenging. They really are. And I think the workshops that are taking place with the Atlas are one way to get people more comfortable. The other way is to provide them some tools to see what's historically been done and where things are adding in and then hopefully the Atlas will link into.

Areas where they can feel comfortable that maybe they know the genus or they know they know that the species they have in the backyard is one of six or seven hard to identify species. And I think that's fine. I think that's fine. You can't expect to some parts of biodiversity are just really hard. And and and that's biodiversity. That's that's it. Right.

Speaker 1: So OK. So one one last part of the grant and the project that you're going to be embarking on is working to develop a checklist of the bees of Oregon. What's what's a checklist to begin with.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Checklists. Is a list of the species that occur in a given area. And checklists can be very brief and casual and taken at face value. But checklists can also be incredibly annotated and informative and backed up with lots of data about how the checklist was constructed and the challenges associated with that checklist in in areas where there's uncertainties and not uncertainties.

Our goal is to is the latter. So our goal is to create a authoritative checklist that will include information about the names of the species that occur in our area that we know occur that we think might occur. And that creates a baseline that people can begin to then examine what they have in their own region. Yeah. So it can be incredibly difficult. Some of these groups that we're going to be working on are groups that are distributed globally or at least nationally along the West Coast sometimes even globally.

And if there is no. Synthetic work or revision on those groups. It can be a challenge to figure out and identify material in your own region because the because you can't you're not necessarily sure. You can't use necessary field guides or keys or diagnostic tools

Speaker 1: that could be from all over the place.

Speaker 2: And you don't know and you might have species that are undescribed in your local area. You might have the the populations that live in your area might be different enough that they don't work nicely with the field guides that are in that exist. And so the checklist tries to navigate that system for us. And but I think people need to realize the checklist is a time stamp on where we're at right now with understanding our local fauna. And and it will change over time for a number of reasons. One is new species might show up. We might discover new species in our area that need to be added to the checklist or species that are not necessarily new. But are we didn't know occurred here.

So we might them. But we also might have invasive or non native bees show up that need to be added to the list. We also might find that historical material was misidentified and we need to update our checklist because we were we were uncertain about the names. And in particular with regard to these messy areas in biodiversity. Some of these mega kylids molecular data and ongoing taxonomic and systematic information about those bees is liable to change our understanding of the species limits within those taxa. And when that happens in order to reflect that new better understanding of the species of the of the group. We update that by modifying the names. If that updated list doesn't come with the tools for the researcher to see what why the changes happened. Right.

Speaker 1: It can be very frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. People. And so our goal is to provide a checklist that allows.

Speaker 2: A diverse array of stakeholders in bee diversity in the Northwest to not just grab a name off the list. And be like well that one doesn't occur here. This one does occur here. But to understand the research and specimen data and support for why we believe that species does occur here and where it occurs within the state. And I think these can be really important for especially for people just getting into a project or beginning an ecologist doing a pollination study.

A new person doing a survey of their of a of an important land area within this region. These checklists can can dramatically affect the efficiency with which they can begin to get their handle on their own biodiversity. But they need to always be taken with a grain of salt and understood that new plate. You know we are going to find out new things. This is about discovery and finding new things. And when we find new things we can't just cling to what we had before because that's what we've been using. We have to update what we have to update our information as we learn more and more. And so that's the goal with this checklist is to use the Atlas create a checklist as tools that are. Stable enough and well supported enough to be trusted and be useful but flexible enough that we can modify them over time. As we as we need to.

Speaker 1: Well this is exciting. Next four years is going to be. I think we can get a lot more information on our native bees here in the Pacific Northwest. Looking forward we'll definitely have you come back on the show as the as the project develops. So the next segment I got questions for you.

I'm curious what your answers are. So let's take a break and we'll come back and I'll ask I'll ask them. OK we're back and you know we have one more thing I want to ask you about on these checklists. You were talking about like a checklist as a kind of hypothesis that somebody going out in the world can use as their starting point.

Speaker 2: Yeah it's a nice I think it's a nice way to if it's recognized as a hypothesis then it kind of creates a benchmark that we can all communicate about. And so it's a consolidated way that we can say look this is a this is our working hypothesis for what the local bee fauna. The regional bee fauna in for which this checklist applies is and that can be broken down and we plan to break ours down into a more regional you know not just Oregon but more county by county in these kind of regions so that with that working hypothesis. You know this this survey can serve you know people can go out in their backyard and they can test that hypothesis.

Speaker 1: We think this thing does not exist in this county and it's like no it does. It does.

Speaker 2: I got it. Or right. I mean if you find something you can easily add to the hypothesis. If if there's something in that county that is reported you can try and confirm it.

And after a certain amount of time it's you might conclude that maybe it doesn't occur there any longer. But these are this it's a very concise way for us to share a shared idea about what the fauna is and and and see the limits and then people can be like pushing and and adding and testing and refining that hypothesis. In a way that kind of gives it all it has some sort of coordination. So so I think it does have some ability to create goals and focal points across the region for people to kind of look at.

Speaker 1: So I I think it'll be really neat. Yeah I'm really excited. Great. OK. So I got these questions for you. OK. The first question is influential books or books that you would like to recommend something that you read.

Speaker 2: And you know in this day of like cell phones and websites I'm so online now. But it might have been a couple years ago. Yeah I tend to read a lot of

Speaker 1: I know one here's one journal articles. Lots of people ask me like volunteers in the Atlas ask is like what's a good basic book on insect morphology.

Speaker 2: Oh I tend to if a person is getting really excited about understanding insects. I think one of the books I like to get them get into their hands really soon is it is the standard college textbook for entomology which is board triple horn and along. I think is a new addition out. I'll have to check and see. And I don't know if they put this online if you can put a link to it.

We'll have a link to it. Yeah it's it's a pretty comprehensive textbook for North American insects and it doesn't cover. It doesn't get down into the species level but it has some great. Introductory sections that are that don't again don't pull any punches so it can be a single textbook that someone can have that can can get them into the literature for a wide array of insects. I am a person who actually likes to read field guides. So I am excited by lots of different types of biodiversity not just insects so field guides any sort of regional field guide.

I love to flip through. I think that I think that part of I think there's a physical unlike some of the online tools for identifying things. I think at least for me seeing a photograph in a book is still a little bit more impactful than seeing an image on a screen. And of course seeing a specimen is actually in the field is actually better but but field guides are a way where you start to build an expectation in your head about where something is going to occur and then you see it in the field. And you go right back to that that page in your brain about the of the field guide websites are oftentimes much they're so they're so inclusive that that they're not quite built for your local area. So I would encourage you know checking out local field guides. I would just say get out and hike get out in the field get out.

Speaker 1: So so so Dr. Marshall's reading recommendation is don't read out there.

Speaker 2: You know I or use a field guide and find something in the field guide that you want to see and then go see it go try and see it. That's that's what I I really like. I I'm a strong believer in goal oriented trips which I consider to be like little mini expeditions and you might fail. Expeditions might fail. You might not see what you're hoping to see but you will probably see something that's really cool. And if you do see what you're expecting to see you'll just feel great about it. You went out and in some regards you tested a hypothesis.

A field guide told you that this thing should be found in the Cascades in April. Well go test that. Go see.

Is it in April and if it is maybe you maybe you bring back a sample. And so it's a very for me it's a very goal oriented sort of endeavor. I love getting out there and hunting for things I've read about or things I've seen online to see if I can see them.

Speaker 1: Volunteers who are in the Oregon B Atlas right now it's kind of like seeing everything. Yeah trying to get them trained up but I think a lot of people are excited by the prospect of like my goal is to go find the OSAC checklist says this county I ought to see this thing. I want to I want to challenge those guys. I want to go find it. That's going to be I think a lot of people are really excited and motivated by that challenge.

Speaker 2: Yeah I think I think you know a lot of these bees are a lot of insects in general are are heavily associated with little micro habitats and so right they're they're not you can't say the whole idea of common and uncommon and rare become you know you have to kind of break that apart and ask yourself what you mean by that because many times insects are rarely seen or rarely encountered not because they are rare but because a we don't see them they're either nesting underground they're in a life stage that is is either inside of a plant or in the ground or hidden from view and so they might only be visible or or conspicuous for a short amount of time in a very small micro habitat and the micro habitats we often walk by without seeing says we walk around largely filtering out these micro habitats and insects and I think that when you go out in the field once you finally see one you're going to see them much more abundantly than you thought they were before so

Speaker 1: okay my next next question is do you have a go-to tool a thing when you're in the museum that you like use a gazillion times it's just like you cannot live with if you had one thing on your desert island museum this is this is the thing you could not do without

Speaker 2: yeah I hate to say this because it can be really challenging but I really um I think for anyone who works on insects uh some form of ability to magnify the world is important and I do that in a few different ways so I don't know if this is a single tool if I had to be like if I had to be like sneaky about I'd say optics uh as I've gotten older I need uh lenses just to read the tiny little insect labels but many many people who work with insects it's common to have a hand lens uh with you in the field it's common to have a magnifying loop or um jeweler's glasses in a laboratory setting and it's it's pretty common to have not common it's almost necessary to have some form of a stereoscopic dissecting scope with good lights to see your specimens underneath if I were if you can afford to buy uh relatively inexpensive stereoscopic dissecting scope a used one or or whatnot um if this is something you're really getting excited about that's something that you should you should look into there it really just once you get to the point of trying to identify things to species uh and even genera is much easier you'll you'll be doing yourself a favor by seeing them and in some regards when you wait I think most people when they first start using a microscope whether you're a kid using pond water or you're doing a stereoscope um it it all of a sudden it becomes apparent to you that you are about to dive into entire universe that the the anatomy the by the the way and into the insect itself the body itself is a universe of complexity there will there are other creatures there you will see mice you will see nematodes you will see pollen you will see you know a whole host of other things on those specimens you you'll realize that insects are vastly more complex than most people think they are and it can be it can be humbling to see these insects at the size at a size where they basically you understand how complicated they are and so I totally urge people to try and get a chance to kind of equilibrate the scales the different scales here which is you know we tend to work in the world of big things and insects are a little thing

Speaker 1: all right and I have one last question for you do you have a favorite pollinator species is there somebody who you when you

Speaker 2: oh I'm gonna be like I'm gonna be like really um this is gonna hurt some people here um so I'm a coleyopterist I'm a beetle person okay that's um and I think beetles are under represented in our understanding of pollinators there are a number of really cool beetles some scarab beetles and some longhorn beetles that occur here in the northwest that are that are pollinators and you and and people interested in bees uh will will see them they'll be out and they're often on they're not as good flyers as some other insects like flies and bees which do the bulk the heavy lifting in terms of pollinator pollination but um they do a good job and you'll notice that they have many of the same adaptations that you would see with bees some even kind of resemble bees they they're often hairy um they pick up pollen so there's a number of of really kind of conspicuous beetles that you would see on these plants that pollinate them and and because I'm a coleyopterist I really you know I love bees I'm learning about bees I actually am a beekeeper myself I have hives at home of honeybees really like bees but I also have always liked beetles and there's there's two groups of uh beetles longhorn beetles in the leptorini and uh some scarab beetles that are not infrequently seen in association with uh plants and serve as uh useful pollinators for those plants and so maybe as a little side project I'll be sneaking some beetles into the the atlas here

Speaker 1: we'll see that's great well thanks so much for coming on the episode and we are looking forward to um tracking the atlas over time thanks so much for listening show notes with information discussed in each episode can be found at pollinationpodcast.oregonstate.edu we'd also love to hear from you and there's several ways to connect for one you can visit our website to post an episode specific comment suggest a future guest or topic or ask a question that could be featured in a future episode you can also email us at [email protected] finally you can tweet questions or comments or join our facebook or instagram communities just look us up at osu pollinator health if you like the show consider letting iTunes know by leaving us a review or rating it makes us more visible which helps others discover pollination see you next week