SG: ECOLOGICAL DRIVERS OF LIFE HISTORY SHIFTS IN INVASIVE SOCIAL WASPS
|
AWARD NUMBER
008066-002
FUND NUMBER
33235
STATUS
Closed
AWARD TYPE
3-Grant
|
AWARD EXECUTION DATE
3/31/2016
BEGIN DATE
7/1/2016
END DATE
6/30/2019
AWARD AMOUNT
$149,929
|
Sponsor Information
SPONSOR AWARD NUMBER
SPONSOR
SPONSOR TYPE
FUNCTION
Organized Research
PROGRAM NAME
Proposal Information
PROPOSAL NUMBER
15070871
PROPOSAL TYPE
New
ACTIVITY TYPE
Applied Research
PI Information
PI
Rankin, Erin
PI TITLE
Other
PI DEPTARTMENT
Entomology
PI COLLEGE/SCHOOL
College of Nat & Agr Sciences
CO PIs
Project Information
ABSTRACT
Invasive species are one of the main drivers of global environmental change. Consequently, there is growing interest in understanding how invaders damage ecosystems and in developing management strategies to minimize their effects. Through manipulative field experiments and native-introduced range comparisons, this research will investigate how and when invasive yellowjackets express variation in their life cycle, specifically, whether their colonies die back (senescence) each year, or are perennial colonies. This project contributes to understanding of life cycle variation in insects, how such flexibility mediates ecological processes at the landscape scale, and what factors interact to influence perenniality. The research will help inform predictions as to how impacts of species invasions may respond to climate change. Furthermore, this project will provide insights into transmission of common diseases of wasps and their bee prey. As yellowjackets can be public nuisances, revealing the causes of perenniality may lead to the development of control methods that prevent the emergence of perenniality in this species and potentially in other species. In addition to providing research opportunities for undergraduates, the researchers will develop an educational activity on invasive social insects for K-6 children about the biology and potential hazards posed by social wasps.
This project focuses on invasive social wasps that have structural effects on the ecosystems that they invade. These wasps express plasticity in key life history traits (e.g. annual or perennial colony phenology), which greatly magnifies their ecological impacts. The researchers explicitly test how ecological and climatic factors interact to affect shifts in invader life history traits and ultimately modify invasion impacts. Specifically this research investigates how yellowjacket foraging behavior and colony phenology shift in response to diet subsidies, artificial warming of the nest to simulate mild climate, or both subsidies and artificial warming. Coupling such manipulations with landscape-scale prey population sampling, this project also quantifies subsequent invasion impacts on native prey. These experiments will provide insights as to how yellowjackets may respond to changes in pollinator populations and climate change. Furthermore, researchers will determine whether wasp consumption of honey bees influences pathogen load; this is particularly important as honey bee pathogens are increasingly detected in non-honey bee species. Pathogen screening will help distinguish whether (a) wasps increase their pathogen load by consuming bees, (b) whether wasps transmit pathogens through predation and raiding of beehives, and (c) identify differences in pathology between annual and perennial colonies. Understanding the factors affecting life history is vital for predicting how trait evolution or plasticity may respond to future global climate change.(Abstract from NSF)
|