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SCIENCEFriday 25 September 2015

Study: Global warming, evolution are clipping bees’ tongues

SETH BORENSTEIN This photo provided by the magazine Science shows a Queen bumble bee collecting nectar from flowers of the alpine wildflower.
AP Science Writer Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Global warming and evo- praised it as well conduct- bee, shrank from 50 per- found the tongues dramat- the case.
lution are reshaping the ed and significant for the cent of all the bees to 20 ically shorter. “The silver lining is that (the
bodies of some American ecosystem of mountain percent, she said. They also found that the bees) are evolving very
bumblebees, a new study flowers. Because these were so iso- temperature in the area quickly,” Miller-Struttmann
finds. The team of biologists lated and so high — more had warmed by about 3.6 said. “The story may not be
The tongues of two Rocky studied the bees on three than 10,000 feet (3,000 degrees since the 1960s as rosy for the flowers.”
Mountains species of bum- isolated mountaintops in meters) — pesticides and and the type and amount Galen worries that without
blebees are about one- the Rockies, where they pathogens, often blamed of flowers had changed. long-tongued bees, some
quarter shorter than they had been the most domi- for bee declines, weren’t At first, the scientists figured flowers will falter. Also, she
were 40 years ago, evolv- nant species around. Not a problem, the scientists the flowers were evolv- said shorter tongue bees
ing that way because cli- so much anymore, Miller- said. Something else had ing with the bees, as often often “cheat” and bite a
mate change altered the Struttmann said. The longer to be an issue. They com- happens over long time hole in the flower’s side,
buffet of wildflowers they tongued of the two bees, pared the bees to those of periods in nature, but Miller- which doesn’t help the
normally feed from, ac- the golden belted bumble- 40 years ago or more and Struttmann said that’s not plant spread its seeds.q
cording to a study pub-
lished Thursday in the jour-
nal Science.
In one of these species,
the tongue had been half
the size of the bee’s body
— the equivalent of a hu-
man tongue going down
to the waist. But because
the flowers where the long
tongue is required have
dwindled, the bees didn’t
need that much tongue.
Keeping long tongues re-
quires bees use more en-
ergy, so the bees evolved
a shorter tongue that al-
lows them to sample a
wider variety of flowers,
said study lead author Ni-
cole Miller-Struttmann at
the State University of New
York, Old Westbury.
While biologists have
tracked how global warm-
ing has altered the devel-
opmental, migration, tim-
ing and other behavior in
plants and animals, what
makes this study unusual
is the physical changes in
the bees, said study co-
author Candace Galen at
the University of Missouri.
“It speaks to the magni-
tude of the change of the
climate that it’s affecting
the evolution of the organ-
isms,” Galen said. “It’s a
beautiful demonstration of
adaptive evolution.”
Sydney Cameron at the
University of Illinois wasn’t
part of the study, but