NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2020: The effect of land use change on Caribbean hawkmoth pollination behavior

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will use biological collections in innovative ways. For this project, the fellow will use pollen taken from insects in biological collections to assess how the pollination behavior of these insects has changed in response to habitat loss.

Pollination is critical to both natural and agricultural ecosystems, but land use changes can cause both the loss of pollinator species and changes in pollinator behavior that affect the quality of pollination they provide to plants. Documenting changes in pollinator behavior is necessary to accurately predict changes in the future but is limited by the difficulty of inferring species interactions in the past.

This research will help resolve this difficulty by being the first use of pollen carried by historically collected moths, and one of very few studies to use historical collections to reconstruct plant-pollinator interactions. To broaden the impact of the work, the fellow will mentor undergraduate students in research, conduct public outreach and classroom demonstrations related to the research.

As the study system, the fellow will investigate plant-pollinator network change over the past 75-years in the Caribbean, which has experienced significant but variable habitat loss over this time period. The fellow will focus on the pollens carried by hawkmoths (Lepidoptera: Sphingidae), which are prolific pollinators that accumulate less biased pollen loads than other pollinator groups and are well represented in collections.

As a modern comparison, the fellow will also collect pollen loads from wild hawkmoths in Jamaica. The fellow will non-destructively remove the pollen from pinned hawkmoth specimens by locally rehydrating proboscises, then identifying the pollen loads via DNA meta-barcoding. This technique will allow for reliable, standardized identifications that do not rely on pollen reference libraries from historical plant communities.

Using this pollen, the fellow will test the competing hypotheses that hawkmoths will either specialize on plants they match morphologically or opportunistically visit a wider range of flowers. In the face of habitat loss, higher specialization will reduce the overall resilience of plant-pollinator networks but will likely maintain rare and threatened plants.

During this project, the fellow will learn cutting-edge molecular and network-analysis techniques. The project activities will also allow the fellow to engage in outreach and scientific mentoring opportunities both at their host institution and with local scientists in Jamaica during field collection.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.