The development of genetic markers has revolutionized molecular studies within and among populations. Although poly-allelic microsatellites are the most commonly used genetic marker for within-population studies of free-living animals, biallelic single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, have also emerged as a viable option for use in nonmodel systems. We describe a robust method of SNP discovery from the transcriptome of a nonmodel organism that resulted in more than 99% of the markers working successfully during genotyping. We then compare the use of 102 novel SNPs with 15 previously developed microsatellites for studies of parentage and kinship in cooperatively breeding superb starlings (Lamprotornis superbus) that live in highly kin-structured groups. For 95% of the offspring surveyed, SNPs and microsatellites identified the same genetic father, but only when behavioural information about the likely parents at a nest was included to aid in assignment. Moreover, when such behavioural information was available, the number of SNPs necessary for successful parentage assignment was reduced by half. However, in a few cases where candidate fathers were highly related, SNPs did a better job at assigning fathers than microsatellites. Despite high variation between individual pairwise relatedness values, microsatellites and SNPs performed equally well in kinship analyses. This study is the first to compare SNPs and microsatellites for analyses of parentage and relatedness in a species that lives in groups with a complex social and kin structure. It should also prove informative for those interested in developing SNP loci from transcriptome data when published genomes are unavailable.
Individual pollinators that specialize on one plant species within a foraging bout transfer more conspecific and less heterospecific pollen, positively affecting plant reproduction. However, we know much less about pollinator specialization at the scale of a foraging bout compared to specialization by pollinator species. In this study, we measured the diversity of pollen carried by individual bees foraging in forest plant communities in the mid‐Atlantic United States. We found that individuals frequently carried low‐diversity pollen loads, suggesting that specialization at the scale of the foraging bout is common. Individuals of solitary bee species carried higher diversity pollen loads than did individuals of social bee species; the latter have been better studied with respect to foraging bout specialization, but account for a small minority of the world’s bee species. Bee body size was positively correlated with pollen load diversity, and individuals of polylectic (but not oligolectic) species carried increasingly diverse pollen loads as the season progressed, likely reflecting an increase in the diversity of flowers in bloom. Furthermore, the seasonal increase in pollen load diversity was stronger for bees visiting trees and shrubs than for bees visiting herbaceous plants. Overall, our results showed that both plant and pollinator species’ traits as well as community‐level patterns of flowering phenology are likely to be important determinants of individual‐level interactions in plant–pollinator communities.
It is important to understand how biodiversity, including that of rare species, affects ecosystem function. Here, we consider this question with regard to pollination. Studies of pollination function have typically focused on pollination of single plant species, or average pollination across plants, and typically find that pollination depends on a few common species. Here, we used data from 11 plant–bee visitation networks in New Jersey, USA, to ask whether the number of functionally important bee species changes as we consider function separately for each plant species in increasingly diverse plant communities. Using rarefaction analysis, we found the number of important bee species increased with the number of plant species. Overall, 2.5 to 7.6 times more bee species were important at the community scale, relative to the average plant species in the same community. This effect did not asymptote in any of our datasets, suggesting that even greater bee biodiversity is needed in real-world systems. Lastly, on average across plant communities, 25% of bee species that were important at the community scale were also numerically rare within their network, making this study one of the strongest empirical demonstrations to date of the functional importance of rare species.
Many ecosystem functions result from mutualisms, yet mutualism-based functions have rarely been studied at the scale of whole mutualist networks. Thus, it is unclear how much biodiversity is needed to provide function to an entire network of partner species. Here we use 23 plant-pollinator networks to ask how the number of functionally important pollinator species depends on the number of plant species studied. We found that, because of complementarity among pollinators in the plants they pollinate, 3-13 times as many pollinator species were needed to pollinate an entire network as compared with a single plant species. Furthermore, many pollinator species that were rare within the network as a whole, and therefore not important pollinators on average, were important to the pollination of particular plant species. By not measuring function across entire mutualist networks, ecologists have likely underestimated the importance of biodiversity, and particularly of rare species, for ecosystem function.
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