|
Joan Díaz-Calafat@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social |
7 followers 7 following 16 posts
Biologist fond of critters and their interactions with other forms of life 🌲🌻🐝🐜 PhD student (SLU). Forest ecology, pollination and climate change. 🏳️🌈🐝
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
We still need to figure out whether this pollen reaches any flower stigma and fertilization takes place. But this is as much as we could get from citizen science data for now 😉
Read more about all this reseach here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Regarding their potential as pollinators, we found that *at least* 42.7% of the individuals in pictures carried pollen attached to their podies. This is likely an underestimation, as most pictures were taken dorsally, and pollen attached to the wasps' ventral side was not visible 📸Alexander Fateryga
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
In any case, plenty of food for thought for future research on the ecology of this rather unexplored group of insects!
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
(3) Possible differences between males and females in their sensory abilities related to the location of forage, or (4) the diverging sample size between sexes in our data, where females were observed at a much lower frequency than males.
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
(2) differences in the resources sought by each sex: males may focus on energy-rich resources for continuous flight in search of mates, and females on protein-rich resources that maximize offspring production ➡️➡️➡️
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Regarding the rest of the differences in plant visitation, we hypothesize that they may be caused by (1) differences in foraging range: males can fly and females can't, ➡️➡️➡️
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Apiaceae display open floral systems (i.e., nectar and pollen fully exposed, with no floral restrictions) making them easily accessible to a large diversity of insect visitors, especially those with short mouthparts which are unable to access narrow tubular corollas. 📸 Faluke
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Even though the most-visited plant families remained, there were some differences. The top 3 for males was 🥇Apiaceae, 🥈Asteraceae and 🥉Euphorbiaceae, while females went for 🥇Apiaceae, 🥈Fabaceae and 🥉Asteraceae.
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
However, males and females seemed to visit different flower communities 🤯 The diet of male and female Mutillidae differed by 43.48% (red dot), which was significantly more than what was expected by random chance (grey area, 9999 permutations).
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Overall, velvet ants are generalist flower visitors of a wide range of plant families. Apiaceae, Asteraceae, Euphorbiaceae, Rhamnaceae and Fabaceae were the most visited flowering plant families.
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
We recorded all velvet ant and plant species from these pictures, and built bipartite networks to visualize flower visitation patterns. We got 40 velvet ant genera (~125 spp) across 37 plant families (~200 spp). 📸 doi.org/10.1111/jen....
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Together with Daniel Parejo Pulido and Jairo Robla, we went through 63,433 photographic records from citizen science platforms worldwide, as well as other unpublished records, to shed some light on this. 📷 doi.org/10.1111/jen....
1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
But there are still many things we don't know about these wasps! Despite their parasitic nature, velvet ants visit flowers and may be potential pollinators. But we don't know whether they prefer any specific plants, or how much they contribute to pollination.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Then, females parasite a wide range of insects, laying eggs on their larvae, so that the offspring can feed on them as well as on the nest provisions. 📷 Su et al. t.co/5zEEaUFDQ5
1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
In some cases, while mating, winged males will carry the wingless females. This is called phoretic mating. 📷 Jason D. Roberts in t.co/sx6ai0nQJ5
2 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
|
|
Joan Díaz-Calafat
@jdiazcalafat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Velvet ants (Mutillidae and Myrmosidae) are pretty cool creatures! Despite their name, they are actually wasps, and not ants. (Most) males are winged, and females do not have wings.
1 replies 3 reposts 13 likes