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Contributed Talk

Session: : Climate Change: Communities 3

COS 54-4 - Thermal and desiccation tolerance of urban bees across 10 US cities

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
8:45 AM – 9:00 AM PDT
Location: C125-126
Abstract: Predicting the consequences of climate change for ecological communities is important for understanding and mitigating potential losses of ecosystem services, such as pollination. Common approaches focus on modeling the current or past distribution of particular species, the climate within those distributions, and then predicting range shifts under climate change scenarios. Most of these approaches focus on temperature, although some include precipitation. Predictions based on physiology are potentially more powerful, but remain rare and focused on temperature. Here we investigate the effects of climate change on both thermal and desiccation stress in diverse bee communities, using urban warming as a proxy for global climate change. Specifically, we describe initial measurements of thermal and water content limits, as well as field body temperature and water content, of >30 taxa of bees from 10 US cities across a range of temperature and aridity, identifying how bees differ in their sensitivity to increasing body temperature or declining body water content. We find significant and substantial differences in both thermal and water content limits, with carpenter bees (Xylocopa) able to withstand high temperatures but relatively little desiccation, whereas certain sweat bees (Agapostemon, Lasioglossum) show the opposite pattern. Others, like bumble bees (Bombus) show intermediate tolerance of warming, but little tolerance of desiccation. Moreover, we find that although most individuals of most taxa are able to maintain water content across a range of conditions, some individuals of certain taxa (e.g. Apis, Bombus, Lasioglossum, Xylocopa) show marked dehydration at warmer temperatures. Overall, our initial results point to particular taxa that may be more sensitive to climate change, highlighting the need for targeted conservation as well as strategies to maintain pollination services provided by bees in urban and changing climates.