Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: How do Species Interactions and Ecological Communities Respond to Artificial Light at Night?

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2024, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment, and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Many organisms restrict their activities to a particular part of the daily cycle of light and dark.

When two species are active at the same time, they are more likely to interact. Thus light, through its influence on daily activity patterns, can affect the network of interacting species that make-up a community. The rapid spread of electric lights over the past century has illuminated the night sky and dramatically altered the light cycles that organisms experience.

Artificial light at night (ALAN) disrupts the activity patterns of organisms, but it is unclear how species interactions and the communities they exist within are affected by light pollution. The fellow will address these knowledge gaps by investigating whether ALAN alters the interactions between night-blooming plants and nocturnal hawkmoth pollinators.

The findings will increase our understanding of how an increasingly bright world will impact plants and insects, and the important pollination services they provide. The project will include mentoring and training of undergraduate students, as well as community outreach to educate the public about light pollution.

Successful interactions between night-blooming plants and hawkmoths require temporal synchrony between the plant’s release of floral scent and the hawkmoth’s ability to detect and respond to it, both of which are controlled by light-sensitive circadian clocks. For hawkmoths, this project will evaluate how the molecular, physiological, and behavioral daily rhythms that underlie their ability to respond to floral scent are impacted by ALAN.

Moreover, the fellow will also investigate whether ALAN impacts the scent that plants emit to attract pollinators. Because we cannot fully understand the consequences of ALAN by observing a single species, the fellow will perform a manipulative field experiment to examine whether ALAN rewires the network of interactions in a community that contains night-blooming plants and free-living hawkmoths.

The fellow will receive training in transcriptomics, sensory biology, and community ecology. To broaden participation in science, the fellow will mentor students as they conduct independent projects and teach data science workshops to build enthusiasm for reproducible data-driven research. Both activities will recruit undergraduates from underrepresented groups to arm them with skills that will propel them to future careers in STEM.

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.