Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Uncovering mechanisms of climate-driven range contractions in bumble bees

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. Bumble bees are important pollinators of native flowering plants and agricultural crops, yet many bumble bee populations are declining worldwide. Bumble bee ranges have contracted in response to climate change and warming temperatures. This project will investigate the biological drivers of these observed range contractions in bumble bees. This work will provide insight into how bumble bees are responding to climate change and enable predictions about how these essential pollinators may fare into the future. The research will also directly address key knowledge gaps that are known to be hindering the recovery of endangered bumble bee species. The fellow will employ a combination of field and lab techniques to ask how bumble bee body size and genotype interact with climate to influence dispersal, overwintering survivorship, and thermal tolerances across an elevation gradient at Mount Rainier National Park. The fellow hypothesizes that within species, larger body size will be positively correlated to dispersal distance, overwintering survivorship, and thermal tolerance, but that body size will be limited by the interaction between food availability and thermal tolerance at high elevations. This limitation may be a product of a combination of shorter growing seasons, fewer resources, extreme weather, and a limited ability of bees to forage on exceptionally cold days. The fellow will expand their work beyond traditional academic sectors by recruiting, training, and collaborating with community scientists to collect data on wild bumble bees at Mt. Rainier National Park. The fellow will also host workshops and events for community scientist volunteers, to ensure that this partnership is not a one-way extraction of data, but rather a bidirectional path of sharing knowledge, experience, and expertise. The fellow will further mentor undergraduate researchers to engage in independent research and will attend bioinformatics workshops, which, in combination with their existing expertise in organismal biology, will position the fellow to lead research on ecological and population genetic patterns at multiple scales. 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.