Approximately 80% of flowering plants on Earth exhibit adaptations for pollination by insects, mostly bees, and thus the majority of terrestrial ecosystems depend on bee pollination services. Like most insects, bees rely more on chemical signals than on any other sensory modality to locate and identify mates. Understanding how bees use chemicals to communicate with each other, and how they detect and encode plant-derived volatile chemicals, is critical for studying and protecting valuable pollination services. Euglossine bees include some of the most important wild insect pollinators of tropical America. Male euglossine bees do not produce their own pheromones, but instead gather and accumulate chemical compounds from plants to subsequently present to females during courtship display. Male-gathered chemical signals are divergent among closely related species, suggesting that they play a key role in the maintenance and formation of new species. This project investigates how euglossine bees use chemical compounds to locate and identify genetically compatible mates, and aims to characterize the genetic mechanisms of chemical sensory detection and encoding. Teasing apart the evolution and function of chemical signaling in economically important bee species will help us understand and ultimately preserve the vital functions these animals provide to society.
Most insects rely on chemical signals (semiochemicals) to gain precise information on the location, identity, and quality of potential mates. Despite the importance of semiochemicals across the insect phylogeny, the mechanisms that control signal chemistry and signal detection remain poorly understood. Moreover, whether insect semiochemicals mediate reproductive isolation, speciation, and lineage diversification remains surprisingly unexplored given the vast diversity and ecological dominance of insects on Earth. Euglossine bees do not produce their own pheromones, but instead gather and accumulate compounds from orchid flowers, fungi, and other resources. This project aims to (1) describe the diversity of semiochemical phenotypes across the phylogeny of euglossine bees, (2) investigate whether and how divergent selection on chemosensory traits mediates reproductive isolation, and (3) characterize the genomic architecture and functional diversity of olfactory receptor genes expressed in antennae of related species of euglossine bees. The research will integrate diverse techniques from multiple disciplines, including behavioral ecology, chemical ecology, population genetics, functional genomics, and neuroethology to answer specific questions about the genetic basis, function, and evolution of chemosensory communication.
