This research is the first detailed investigation of olfactory eavesdropping, espionage, in stingless bees. It evaluates how such espionage occurs in the field for natural food sources and how strategies such as changing odor-trail length may provide counter-espionage protection. The ultimate goal is to determine whether olfactory espionage may have driven the evolution of concealed symbolic communication inside the nest. For example, honeybees can encode the distance and direction to food through a special waggle dance performed inside the nest. Some stingless bees species may encode distance through sound pulses given inside the nest. Why did such sophisticated communication evolve, given that most social insects rely mainly on odor communication? Olfactory espionage may have played a role, driving communication into the protected fortress of the nest.
Integral to this project is the goal of providing educational opportunities for San Diego-area minority and underprivileged high-school students, undergraduates from two-year and four-year colleges, and a graduate student as participants in a research experience that will teach the scientific method at different levels of sophistication, and enhance student teaching abilities. This will be accomplished through coursework, the ORBS (Opportunities for Research in Behavioral Sciences) Program developed by the P.I. to involve students and faculty at high schools and community colleges, and the e-lab. The ORBS program addresses the specific needs of minority high-school and community-college students while partnering them with four-year university students as models for their goal of advancing to higher education.
Intellectual Merit: The research will increase our understanding of the role of eavesdropping and espionage in the evolution of animal communication. It begins to examine the question of whether espionage led to the evolution of communication systems incorporating counter-espionage strategies.
Broader Impacts: The project will integrate research and education by examining the evolution of olfactory eavesdropping while providing graduate training, supporting undergraduate university, community-college, and high-school science education, and increasing minority participation in the Behavioral Sciences. Funds will (1) support one graduate student and that student's progress towards a scientific career, (2) train young Brazilian scientists, (3) support ORBS and enable students to acquire field experience and to present their results at conferences, and (4) support a yearly ORBS symposium and associated publication. This symposium provides an annual venue in which San Diego minority science-education programs will meet to share resources, recruit ORBS participants, and foster regional interest in the Behavioral Sciences.
Social bees have a major role as critical pollinators in a wide variety of ecosystems. In tropical areas around the world, stingless bees are pollinators for crops and native plants. However, their biology is relatively poorly understood, even though they have such a key ecological role and offer fascinating insight into the biology and properties of complex social systems. For example, because of this NSF funding, we have learned that stingless bees can determine the distance to and height of food sources in the tall rainforest canopy by visually measuring the optic flow that they experience, allowing them to accurately return to a blossoming tree. Such accuracy is important because stingless bees face stiff competition for food sources like flowers with rich nectar. In fact, some species can use olfactory eavesdropping to "spy" on the recruitment odor trails of species that have found good food sources, rather than searching for their own blossoms. However, this is not always an easy strategy because aggressive stingless bee species will fight back! In this "war" of bees, how do individuals balance colony needs with the risks of such conflict? Primates such as humans use a process called "conflict monitoring and cognitive control" through which neural units allow individuals to solve such problems. It turns out that individual bees, acting like these neural units, let the colony solve this eavesdropping dilemma. This NSF sponsored research allowed us to discover that stingless bees can use olfactory eavesdropping on aggressive species and are attracted to low levels of the food recruitment odor trail left by such species. However, when the odor concentration increases, indicating a higher likelihood of conflict (more bees), the eavesdroppers were repelled, not attracted. Using a mathematical model, we show that bees use conflict monitoring and cognitive control to optimize colony food intake and demonstrate that bees, as individual units within a superorganism, are far more sophisticated than we suspected. In addition to this basic science research, science outreach was a key aspect of this project. NSF supported the research of two PhD students, provided research experiences for over 17 undergraduates (of which four were Latino students) and seven high school students (of which six were African American and Latino students). In total, NSF funding provided 17 female students with in depth research experiences and resulted in 15 peer-reviewed scientific publications, to date. The Teaching Bee website (http://www-biology.ucsd.edu/labs/nieh/TeachingBee/teachingbee.htm) showcases the free curricula developed through this project for science educators at junior high, high school, and college levels. We also designed a curriculum that meets three National Science Standards and teaches high school students about the importance of bees and the dangers that they face. Bee populations are in global decline and people care. Thus, students have been quite receptive to this program, which raises such awareness while teaching them about the scientific method.
