10.25338/B8VS52
Mola, John
0000-0002-5394-9071
United States Geological Survey
Miller, Michael
University of California, Davis
O'Rourke, Sean
University of California, Davis
Williams, Neal
University of California, Davis
Data from: Wildfire reveals transient changes to individual traits and
population responses of a native bumble bee (Bombus vosnesenskii)
Dryad
dataset
2020
genetic mark-recapture
pollinators
Bombus vosnesenskii
National Science Foundation
https://ror.org/021nxhr62
Graduate Research Fellowship 1049702
National Science Foundation
https://ror.org/021nxhr62
DEB-1354022
2020-04-29T00:00:00Z
2020-04-29T00:00:00Z
en
95161444 bytes
4
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
1. Fire-induced changes in the abundance and distribution of organisms,
especially plants, can alter resource landscapes for mobile consumers
driving bottom-up effects on their population sizes, morphologies, and
reproductive potential. We expect these impacts to be most striking for
obligate visitors of plants, like bees and other pollinators, but these
impacts can be difficult to interpret due to the limited information
provided by forager counts in the absence of survival or fitness proxies.
2. Increased bumble bee worker abundance is often coincident with the
pulses of flowers that follow recent fire. However, it is unknown if
observed postfire activity is due to underlying population growth or a
stable pool of colonies recruiting more foragers to abundant resource
patches. This distinction is necessary for determining the net impact of
disturbance on bumble bees: are there population-wide responses or do just
a few colonies reap the rewards? 3. We estimated colony abundance before
and after fire in burned and unburned areas using a genetic mark-recapture
framework. We paired colony abundance estimates with measures of body
size, counts of queens, and estimates of foraging and dispersal to assess
changes in worker size, reproductive output, and landscape-scale
movements. 4. Higher floral abundance following fire not only increased
forager abundance, but also the number of colonies from which those
foragers came. Importantly, despite a larger population size we also
observed increased mean worker size. Two years following fire, queen
abundance was higher in both burned and unburned sites, potentially due to
the dispersal of queens from burned into unburned areas. The effects of
fire were transient; within two growing seasons, worker abundance was
substantially reduced across the entire sampling area and body sizes were
similar between burned and unburned sites. 5. Our results reveal how
disturbance can temporarily release populations from resource limitation,
boosting the genetic diversity, body size, and reproductive output of
populations. Given that the effects of fire on bumble bees acted
indirectly through pulsed resource availability, it is likely our results
are generalizable to other situations, such as habitat restorations, where
resource density is enhanced within the landscape.
Full data description provided in text. Data was collected at McLaughlin
Reserve before and after wildfire. Genetic data is provided as called
genotypes and inputs to program COLONY.
All further code for generation of the manuscript figures and results can
be found on github at https://github.com/John-Mola/bb-response-to-fire A
README file is provided