Could an Orca Give a TED Talk?

Karen Bakker

Landscape structure and farming management interacts to modulate pollination supply and crop production in blueberries 

Ramírez-Mejía et al., 2023.

Deployment of beehives in blueberry fields can buffer, but not compensate for the negative effects on honeybee abundance produced by surrounding large scale none-flowering crops. Such compensation would require high-quality beehives by monitoring their health and strength. The contribution of honeybees to crop production is not equal across production metrics. That is, higher abundance of honeybees increases the number of berries produced but at the cost of smaller and more acidic fruits, potentially reducing their market value. Growers must consider this trade-off between fruit quantity and quality when actively managing honeybee abundance.

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.14553

Inside Big Botany 

Timothy Morton

Power laws in species’ biotic interaction networks can be inferred from co-occurrence data

Galiana et al.,  2023

Inferring biotic interactions from species co-occurrence patterns has long intrigued ecologists. Yet recent research revealed that co-occurrences may not reliably represent pairwise biotic interactions. We propose that examining network-level co-occurrence patterns can provide valuable insights into community structure and assembly. Analysing ten bipartite networks of empirically sampled biotic interactions and associated species spatial distribution, we find that approximately 20% of co-occurrences correspond to actual interactions. Moreover, the degree distribution shifts from exponential in co-occurrence networks to power laws in networks of biotic interactions. This shift results from a strong interplay between species’ biotic (their interacting partners) and abiotic (their environmental requirements) niches, and is accurately predicted by considering co-occurrence frequencies. Our work offers a mechanistic understanding of the assembly of ecological communities and suggests simple ways to infer fundamental biotic interaction network characteristics from co-occurrence data.

https://n9.cl/ggtmr

 Nature Beyond the Limits of Human Perception | Doris Mitsch