Groundbreaking study of fraternity hazing co-authored by Kent State researcher reveals little connection to group solidarity

Peer-Reviewed Publication

KENT STATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: KENT STATE UNIVERSITY’S NEWEST ANTHROPOLOGIST, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR ALDO CIMINO, PH.D., HAS MADE IT HIS LIFE’S WORK TO UNDERSTAND THE CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF HAZING, INCLUDING THE POSSIBLE GENERATION OF SOLIDARITY. view more 

CREDIT: KENT STATE UNIVERSITY

Even though it reaches deep into human history, hazing remains a puzzling behavior for social scientists. Why would people systematically abuse their own future allies by making them participate in extremely unpleasant group initiation practices?

For colleges and universities, hazing has been a pressing safety issue for decades, so much so that Ohio recently passed a revised anti-hazing law. For fraternities in particular, hazing practices can include intense calisthenics, servile labor, heavy intoxication, paddling and other ordeals. Although acknowledging that there are instances of hazing that have gone too far, some fraternity members believe that hazing rituals are necessary and important. They commonly say that it helps to develop group solidarity (e.g., a sense of belonging and dedication).

Historically, many anthropologists and other social scientists have also broadly endorsed the idea that hazing creates group solidarity. But does it? How does one even scientifically study such a claim? Most real-world hazing groups do not allow outsiders to observe their practices, let alone systematically study their outcomes.

Kent State University’s newest anthropologist, Assistant Professor Aldo Cimino, Ph.D., has made it his life’s work to understand the causes and consequences of hazing, including the possible generation of solidarity. He and his co-author, Benjamin Thomas, Ph.D., an industrial and organizational psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, recently published an article on this question in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. Their study reports an extremely rare field test of the relationship between hazing severity and group solidarity in an anonymous U.S. fraternity. (Note: It was not a Kent State fraternity.) They tracked six sets of fraternity inductees as they underwent the fraternity’s monthslong induction process. The results of their study contradict decades of functionalist accounts of severe initiations.

“Our results provide little support for common models of solidarity and suggest that hazing may not be the social glue it has long been assumed to be,” Cimino said.

About the Study

For Cimino, seriously evaluating the claim that hazing increased solidarity required a longitudinal study (a study done over time) and extended research access to a real-world hazing group.

“Getting this level of access to a hazing fraternity is practically unheard of,” Cimino said. “My ultimate success at doing so was likely a combination of perseverance, luck and what I represented to the fraternity. That is, my primary goal was and is to understand these practices. When outsiders come to talk to fraternities about their initiation process, they are typically there to scold or lecture them. In contrast, people willing to take them seriously and work toward an objective understanding are comparatively few and far between.”

The study period covered the fraternity’s approximately 10-week induction, with inductees filling out a survey at five time points. Each anonymous survey measured inductees’ self-reported ratings of the harshness and fun of their induction and self-reported ratings of solidarity. The process was repeated for six different induction groups.

“It’s important to note that the study measured solidarity in seven different ways, because if we measured solidarity in just a few ways, people were going to say, ‘you didn’t measure the right kind of solidarity,’” Cimino said. “So, we tried to cover as many plausible versions of ‘solidarity’ as we could.”

The researchers had separate measures of the harshness and fun of the induction because fraternity inductions are complex and not everything that takes place is hazing. Inductees may also experience all manner of enjoyable, non-hazing activities, like going to parties or learning about the history of the chapter.

“In our data, what appeared to be driving solidarity was having fun,” Cimino said. “Over time, inductees were definitely getting closer to one another and the chapter, but the harsh part of the induction – the hazing part – didn’t appear to be contributing much to that effect. What that implies is that people’s intuitive theories about what hazing accomplishes may be wrong. It also suggests that if hazing has a functional group outcome (a useful purpose), it might not ultimately be solidarity. It might be something else.”

One alternative function Cimino pointed out was the idea that hazing might select out less-committed inductees.

“A hazing process that is effective at motivating less-committed inductees to leave might not be equally effective at making inductees feel group solidarity,” he said.

Cimino’s Journey Toward a Scientific Understanding of Hazing

Previously a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he earned his doctorate, Cimino joined Kent State’s Department of Anthropology, in the College of Arts and Sciences, in 2021. He teaches Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Psychological Anthropology, Medical Anthropology and Religion: A Search for Meaning. He has been studying hazing since the latter half of his undergraduate years, when he did an honors thesis on severe initiations. He decided to continue that work in graduate school.

Cimino initially became interested in hazing when he was looking into research on cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values or attitudes. One of the most famous studies on hazing was investigating the role that cognitive dissonance might play in the experience of being hazed. The idea was that because hazing ordeals are very unpleasant, enduring such ordeals should be dissonant (i.e., inconsistent) with recognizing that aspects of the hazing group are suboptimal and not worth the effort. People who are hazed may resolve that dissonance by deciding that they like the group more than they would have otherwise, thus internally justifying their own effort.

“I found the explanation unsatisfying,” Cimino said. “It didn’t seem like a plausible, strong contributor to the genesis or persistence of a massive cross-cultural phenomenon like hazing. But I also knew that my intuitions had little value from a scientific perspective and I needed to do research.”

Cimino started reading the relevant academic literature and found a great many observations, speculations and theoretical perspectives but little in the way of well-established and replicated scientific findings. He decided to try to change that fact.

What’s Next?

“The first thing to know is that this study is not the final word on the solidarity question,” Cimino said. “We cannot simultaneously note that our study is a rare contribution while also treating it as closing the book. In science, you usually need a lot of studies to triangulate in on the truth. So, as hard as doing this kind of work is, there will need to be replications, and I’m hoping that myself and others will have an opportunity to do that.

“For fraternity advisors, Greek life administrators and other relevant stakeholders, it is important to keep this study in proper perspective,” Cimino continued. “I think an idea that some people will have is to take our results and use them to tell fraternities that they should just replace hazing with bowling or something else that seems nominally ‘fun.’ However, for fraternities and other groups, hazing practices have long coexisted with non-hazing practices, and they likely have differing motivations. Further, for many fraternities, hazing appears to have a kind of central importance that would make such suggestions bizarre and unlikely to be heeded. Ultimately, more research is needed.”

To read the journal article, visit www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513822000423.

To learn more about Cimino and Kent State’s Department of Anthropology, visit www.kent.edu/anthropology.

Kent State is ranked as an R1 research institution by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which is the highest recognition that doctoral universities can receive, affirming Kent State’s place as a top-tier research institution along with Yale, Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.

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Photo Caption:
Kent State University’s newest anthropologist, Assistant Professor Aldo Cimino, Ph.D., has made it his life’s work to understand the causes and consequences of hazing, including the possible generation of solidarity.

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JOURNAL

Evolution and Human Behavior

DOI

10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2022.07.001 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Does hazing actually increase group solidarity? Re-examining a classic theory with a modern fraternity

Burnout is real – here’s what leaders need to do about it

Book Announcement

DE GRUYTER

 

IMAGE: COVER view more 

CREDIT: DE GRUYTER

In the newly released book, Fired Up! A Guide to Transforming Your Team from Burnout to Engagement, organizational leadership experts Mia B. Russell and Girvin Liggans have collected compelling data, relevant stories, and timely strategies to make the case for cultivating a culture of engagement in the workplace. Burnout, one of the most pressing challenges of our time, is an organizational problem that is contagious – but can also be mitigated using evidence-based strategies. Russell and Liggans offer a practical three step approach that leaders can employ to improve their work environment and drive engagement for their team.

“Burnout is an organizational problem that we are positioning leaders and managers to address. As we navigate the Great Resignation and employees rethink how they want to live and work, the smart and accessible principles in this book will empower leaders to take action and drive positive change,” said Mia Russell, co-author of Fired Up! and lecturer in the Center for Leadership Education at Johns Hopkins University. Girvin Liggans, Fired Up! co-author, further explained that “Disentangling the complex relationships within the work environment using the Organization, Job, and Personal Framework will help leaders create a climate of trust, respect and fairness. Only then can leaders truly understand and identify strategies that will improve the energy, involvement, and energy within their team.”

In this new book, Russell and Liggans assert that individuals deserve to work in environments built upon purpose, autonomy, and mastery that span the individual, team, and organization. Grounded in theory and practice, Russell and Liggans share a framework to compartmentalize the work environment and tools to help leaders build an action plan for their team to avoid, overcome, and recover from burnout.

The book’s use of research on burnout and engagement has been well received and awarded high praise from leading industry experts like Daniel Pink and Paul White, best-selling author of The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, who said “Russell and Liggans provide a principle-based approach to leadership that delineates the factors which lead to the exhaustion and reduced effectiveness created by burnout. While thoroughly evidence-based, practical steps are given to move team members from burnout to active engagement. Fired Up! is a foundational resource every leader will highly value.“

Contact: Mia Russell - 202-316-7013 firedup@engagedworkteams.com
Categories: Books, Human Resources, Publishing, Leadership, Teamwork, Management, Organizational development, Leadership

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DOI

10.1515/9783110741728 

Interactions between genetics and the environment can explain variability seen in common neuropsychiatric disorders

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICAL CENTER

While some diseases and disorders can be easily attributed to specific genetic mutations, for many diseases — especially neuropsychiatric ones — the causes are much more complicated, influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. A new study at the University of Chicago examined data from over 400,000 individuals to better understand how those two factors play into the variations seen in a number of neuropsychiatric disorders, with the hope of eventually identifying ways that individuals who are at risk can modify their environments to protect their mental health. The research was published on September 6 in Cell Reports Medicine.  

“We’ve known for a long time that environmental factors have a great impact on neuropsychiatric diseases, so we wanted to look at how environmental factors interact with genetic ones,” said Hanxin Zhang, PhD, first author on the study and a research assistant at UChicago. “Our lab has access to the data for millions of people and their family relationships, which helps us to model shared genetic factors between family members, as well as shared environmental factors.”

The researchers used a database with health information from over 100,000 U.S. families to model those genetic factors, and linked it together with environmental data from the EPA through the ZIP codes and counties that the individuals and families had lived in.

According to their models, gene-environment interactions account for only a small portion of the variations seen in the rates of some psychiatric disorders, such as depression and substance abuse. Other disorders, however, showed that gene-environment interactions accounted for a much larger proportion, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety/phobic disorders, recurrent headaches, sleep disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

These results demonstrate the importance of considering not just an individual’s genetic background, but also their environmental exposure history.

“Genetics is viewed by many people as something like a verdict — you can’t change it,” said Andrey Rzhetsky, PhD, Edna K. Papazian Professor of Medicine and Human Genetics and senior author on the study. “Finding these gene-environment interactions give us hope that we can find some genetic variance that interactions with the environment so that, ideally, you could change your environment and escape the disease.”

For example, if a patient were to have a gene that put them at increased risk of migraines when exposed to hot climates, a physician might suggest they ensure that they have air conditioning in their home and avoid the head.

These kinds of studies are typically challenged by a lack of sufficient data, particularly when it comes to environmental data. “Environment is not well defined,” said Atif Khan, PhD, a staff scientist at UChicago. “And it’s massive. You could potentially measure billions of different environmental details to determine what’s important.”

The researchers also pointed out that environment can include more than simply the molecules measured by the EPA in the air, water and soil. “In this study, we’re looking specifically at living environments and environmental exposures, but an individual’s personal experience is also a kind of exposure,” said Zhang. “Especially when you are considering psychiatric diseases. For example, understanding the interactions children have in school would be very important, but it’s very, very difficult to collect this data on a large scale.” 

In future research, the team hopes to examine some of these interactions more directly. “In this study, we just modeled a general interaction between genes and environment,” said Zhang. “Next, we could see if we can identify specific pairs of genes and environmental factors that play a role in the development of disease.”

Long term, and with enough data, the researchers believe they could even develop lifestyle plans based on an individual’s genetic makeup. “If we were able to identify a catalog of genetic variants interacting with specific environmental stimulation, we could design personalized environmental plans for patients at risk,” said Rzhetsky.

The study, “Gene-Environment Interactions Explain a Substantial Portion of Variability of Common Neuropsychiatric Disorders,” was supported by the DARPA Big Mechanism program under ARO contract W911NF1410333, by National Institutes of Health grants R01HL122712, 1P50MH094267, and U01HL108634-01, and by a gift from Liz and Kent Dauten.

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About the University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences

The University of Chicago Medicine, with a history dating back to 1927, is one of the nation’s leading academic health systems. It unites the missions of the University of Chicago Medical Center, Pritzker School of Medicine and the Biological Sciences Division. Twelve Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine have been affiliated with the University of Chicago Medicine. Its main Hyde Park campus is home to the Center for Care and Discovery, Bernard Mitchell Hospital, Comer Children’s Hospital and the Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine. It also has ambulatory facilities in Orland Park, South Loop, Homewood and River East as well as affiliations and partnerships that create a regional network of care. UChicago Medicine offers a full range of specialty-care services for adults and children through more than 40 institutes and centers including an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. Together with Harvey-based Ingalls Memorial, UChicago Medicine has 1,296 licensed beds, nearly 1,300 attending physicians, over 2,800 nurses and about 970 residents and fellows.

Visit UChicago Medicine’s health and science news blog at www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront.

Twitter @UChicagoMed
Facebook.com/UChicagoMed
Facebook.com/UChicagoMedComer

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JOURNAL

Cell Reports Medicine

DOI

10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100736 

From the soil to the sky

UC Santa Barbara researchers are the first to put a number on the amount of energy that plants use to lift water

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA

 

IMAGE: A STAND OF QUAKING ASPEN PUMP WATER UP TO THEIR CANOPIES IN SOUTHWESTERN COLORADO. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO CREDIT: LEANDER ANDEREGG

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Every day, about one quadrillion gallons of water are silently pumped from the ground to the treetops. Earth’s plant life accomplishes this staggering feat using only sunlight. It takes energy to lift all this liquid, but just how much was an open question until this year.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have calculated the tremendous amount of power used by plants to move water through their xylem from the soil to their leaves. They found that, on average, it was an additional 14% of the energy the plants harvested through photosynthesis. On a global scale, this is comparable to the production of all of humanity’s hydropower. Their study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, is the first to estimate how much energy goes into lifting water up to plant canopies, both for individual plants and worldwide.

“It takes power to move water up through the xylem of the tree. It takes energy. We’re quantifying how much energy that is,” said first author Gregory Quetin, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography. This energy is in addition to what a plant produces via photosynthesis. “It’s energy that’s being harvested passively from the environment, just through the tree’s structure.”

Photosynthesis requires carbon dioxide, light and water. CO2 is widely available in the air, but the other two ingredients pose a challenge: Light comes from above, and water from below. So, plants need to bring the water up (sometimes a considerable distance) to where the light is. 

More complex plants accomplish this with a vascular system, in which tubes called xylem bring water from the roots to the leaves, while other tubes called phloem move sugar produced in the leaves down to the rest of the plant. “Vascular plants evolving xylem is a huge deal that allowed for trees to exist,” Quetin said.

Many animals also have a vascular system. We evolved a closed circulatory system with a heart that pumps blood through arteries, capillaries and veins to deliver oxygen and nutrients around our bodies. “This is a function that many organisms pay a lot for,” said co-author Anna Trugman, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography. “We pay for it because we have to keep our hearts beating, and that’s probably a lot of our metabolic energy.”

Plants could have evolved hearts, too. But they didn’t. And it saves them a lot of metabolic energy.

In contrast to animals, plant circulatory systems are open and powered passively. Sunlight evaporates water, which escapes from pores in the leaves. This creates a negative pressure that pulls up the water beneath it. Scientists call this process “transpiration.”

In essence, transpiration is merely another way that plants harvest energy from sunlight. It’s just that, unlike in photosynthesis, this energy doesn’t need to be processed before it can be put to use. 

Scientists understand this process fairly well, but no one had ever estimated how much energy it consumes. “I’ve only seen it mentioned specifically as energy in one paper,” co-author Leander Anderegg said, “and it was to say that ‘this is a really large number. If plants had to pay for it with their metabolism, they wouldn’t work.’”

This particular study grew out of basic curiosity. “When Greg [Quetin] and I were both graduate students, we were reading a lot about plant transpiration,” recalled Anderegg, now an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology. “At some point Greg asked, ‘How much work do plants do just lifting water against gravity?’

“I said, ‘I have no idea. I wonder if anyone knows?’ And Greg said, ‘surely we can calculate that.’”

About a decade later, they circled back and did just that. The team combined a global database of plant conductance with mathematical models of sap ascent to estimate how much power the world’s plant life devotes to pumping water. They found that the Earth’s forests consume around 9.4 petawatt-hours per year. That’s on par with global hydropower production, they quickly point out.

This is about 14.2% of the energy that plants take in through photosynthesis. So it’s a significant chunk of energy that plants benefit from but don’t have to actively process. This free energy passes to the animals and fungi that consume plants, and the animals that consume them, and so on.

Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that fighting gravity accounts for only a tiny fraction of this total. Most of the energy goes into simply overcoming the resistance of a plant’s own stem.

These findings may not have many immediate applications, but they help us better understand life on Earth. “The fact that there’s a global energy stream of this magnitude that we didn’t have quantified, is mildly jarring,” Quetin said. “It does seem like a concept that slipped through the cracks.”

The energies involved in transpiration seem to fall in between the scales that different scientists examine. It’s too big for plant physiologists to consider and too small for scientists who study Earth systems to bother with, so it was forgotten. And it’s only within the past decade that scientists have collected enough data on water use and xylem resistance to begin addressing the energy of transpiration at global scales, the authors explained.

Within that time, scientists have been able to refine the significance of transpiration in Earth systems using new observations and models. It affects temperatures, air currents and rainfall, and helps shape a region’s ecology and biodiversity. Sap ascent power is a small component of transpiration overall, but the authors suspect it may turn out to be noteworthy given the significant energy involved.

It’s still early days, and the team admits there’s a lot of work to do in tightening their estimates. Plants vary widely in how conductive their stems are to water flow. Compare a hardy desert juniper with a riverside cottonwood, for instance. “A juniper tree that is very drought adapted has a very high resistance,” Anderegg said, “while cottonwoods just live to pump water.”

This uncertainty is reflected in the authors’ estimates, which fall between 7.4 and 15.4 petawatt-hours per year. That said, it could be as high as 140 petawatt-hours per year, though Quetin admits this upper bound is unlikely. “I think this uncertainty highlights that there is still a lot we don't know about the biogeography of plant resistance (and to a lesser extent, transpiration),” he said. “This is good motivation for continued research in these areas.”

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JOURNAL

Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences

ARTICLE TITLE

Quantifying the Global Power Needed for Sap Ascent in Plants

Taking solar-powered lasers to new heights with four-mirror pumping

Scientists designed a new solar-pumped laser with improved solar-to-laser conversion efficiency

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SPIE--INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR OPTICS AND PHOTONICS

 

IMAGE: SIMPLIFIED SCHEME OF A SIDE-PUMPED SOLAR LASER SYSTEM WITH FOUR OFF-AXIS PARABOLIC MIRRORS: (LEFT) FRONT VIEW AND (RIGHT) SIDE VIEW; (INSET) LASER HEAD IS MOUNTED AT THE COMMON CENTER POINT OF THE FOUR OFF-AXIS PARABOLIC MIRRORS. view more 

CREDIT: BOUTAKA, LIANG, AND ABDELHAMID KELLOU, DOI 10.1117/1.JPE.12.038002.

The design of efficient solar cells, which harness energy to generate electricity or produce hydrogen by splitting water, has received much attention globally. Another route to harnessing abundant, free solar energy: using it as a pumping source for lasers. High-power lasers are earmarked for several applications, including deep space communication, atmospheric sensing, high-temperature material processing, and hydrogen production. But, they are often expensive and suffer from performance setbacks arising from thermal stress effects.

In a recent study published in the SPIE Journal of Photonics for Energy, researchers from Algeria and Portugal report a new solar-powered laser design that successfully addresses these issues. This laser has an improved laser conversion efficiency compared to those pumped with conventional sources (such as flash lamps and LEDs).

“The approach we adopted in this study allowed us to develop a powerful solar-powered laser operating in TEM00 mode, the fundamental or lowest-order mode,” explains Associate Professor Dawei Liang from Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal, the corresponding author of the study. “Each of these modes (our laser sustains multiple fundamental modes) can be precisely controlled with minimal heat input to the pump cavity. This enables us to tailor the applied energy to the specific needs of an application,” he adds.

The researchers performed numerical simulations to optimize the design parameters of a TEM00-mode Nd:YAG solar laser beam. Further, they used four laser rods inside four 2V-shaped pump cavities, and pumped them with sunlight using four large off-axis parabolic mirrors with a total collection area of 10 m2.

“The laser head in our design also includes four secondary fused-silica aspheric concentrators, and four rectangular fused-silica light guides. This ensures an even distribution of the absorbed pump power within each rod and helps avoid heating damage resulting from thermal lensing and thermal stresses occurring in conventional single rod solar lasers,” elaborates Liang.

This resulted in an improved performance of the solar laser. The numerical calculations estimated a total laser power of 155.29 watts in the TEM00 mode. This resulted in a two-fold enhancement in the collection efficiency and an improvement of 1.24 times in the conversion efficiency compared to those recorded for earlier designs with similar configuration.

One of the major potential applications of this design concerns space-based solar power generation. This involves collection of solar energy in outer space, converting it to a laser beam, and sending it down to Earth where it can be utilized to generate electricity using solar cells. Since this process is not influenced by the Earth atmosphere, it is more stable and requires smaller transmission and receiving equipment than those needed in microwave power transmission.

Liang notes that while a photovoltaic-powered diode-pumped laser still has greater solar-to-laser conversion efficiency than that of a solar laser, it is much less suitable for long-term space applications. This is because a diode-pumped laser has a limited diode pump source lifetime and a more complex laser system. A solar-powered laser enjoys far greater system simplicity, and benefits from a nearly eternal and free pump source.

Overall, this study lights a way to take solar-powered lasers to new heights, with a clear blueprint for high-efficiency, space-ready solar lasers.

Read the original article by Boutaka, Liang, and Kellou, “Efficient TEM00-mode solar laser using four Nd:YAG rods/four off-axis parabolic mirrors pumping approach,” J. Photon. Energy 12(3) 038002 (2022), doi 10.1117/1.JPE.12.038002.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Photonics for Energy

DOI

10.1117/1.JPE.12.038002 

ARTICLE TITLE

Efficient TEM00-mode solar laser using four Nd:YAG rods/four off-axis parabolic mirrors pumping approach

Study suggests one-third of wild bee species in Pa. have declined in abundance

Researchers say monitoring bee biodiversity can help in conserving pollinators

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PENN STATE

 

IMAGE: A GREEN SWEAT BEE (AUGOCHLORA PURA) FORAGES ON GOLDENROD FLOWERS. RESEARCHERS FOUND THAT MANY SWEAT BEE SPECIES WERE AMONG THOSE THAT DECLINED IN ABUNDANCE OVER SIX YEARS IN SOUTHCENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA. view more 

CREDIT: NASH TURLEY/PENN STATE

Over a six-year period in southcentral Pennsylvania, measures of biodiversity among wild bee communities declined and one-third of species experienced decreases in abundance, according to a Penn State-led team of researchers.

Findings from their recently published study, the researchers contend, demonstrate the value of standardized, season-wide sampling across multiple years for identifying patterns in bee biodiversity and monitoring population trends among species.

“Pollinators facilitate the reproduction of more than 80% of flowering plants and increase the yield of about three-fourths of crop species,” said study lead author Nash Turley, postdoctoral scholar in entomology in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.

“Bees are one of the most important groups of pollinators, but previous research has found troubling declines among wild bees,” he said. “For example, the range and abundance of some species have shrunk substantially, especially bumble bees in North America and Europe. Tracking changes in bee biodiversity is important for developing pollinator management plans that can help sustain wild plant communities and maximize crop yields.”

In this study, the research team set out to characterize changes in bee community biodiversity and changes in abundance of specific species, both during individual years and from year to year, covering the period from 2014 to 2019. The study took place in and around Penn State’s Fruit Research and Extension Center, near Biglerville in Adams County.

The researchers sampled bees at eight locations adjacent to four active apple orchards, collecting bees continuously from April through October each year and removing specimens from traps weekly for species identification.

“These orchards are in a landscape that has high diversity and abundance of native plants and pollinators,” said study co-author David Biddinger, tree fruit research entomologist and professor of entomology at the Fruit Research and Extension Center. “Only about 8% of the landscape is active orchards, and all of them are successfully pollinated only by wild pollinators.”

The researchers, who recently reported their results in Ecology and Evolution, examined more than 26,700 individual bees representing five bee families, 30 genera and 144 species. “We collected 33% of the total number of bee species that have been found in Pennsylvania,” Turley said.

Ten species had more than 1,000 individuals collected, while over half of the species had five or fewer individuals. “It is typical in nature for there to be a few, very abundant species and many rare species,” Turley explained.

The largest number of specimens and species collected came from the family Apidae — which includes bumble bees, honey bees, carpenter bees and other commonly seen species — followed by Halictidae, often called sweat bees.

The scientists found strong evidence for seasonal changes in all measures of biodiversity, indicating that bee communities are completely different almost every month. When measuring abundance, for example, they counted an average of 21 bees per site in April, compared to 168 bees per site in July. Species richness, or the number of species present, showed a similar pattern, with an average of nine species found per site in April, increasing to an average of 21 species in July.

The researchers spotted three general patterns by month. Some solitary species emerged early in the year and had a short period of activity. Other solitary, ground-nesting species also had short periods of activity, but in the summer rather than in spring. The third group was composed mostly of social species with much longer periods of seasonal activity.

Such seasonal variation is an important target for monitoring, according to study co-author Margarita López-Uribe, associate professor of entomology and Lorenzo L. Langstroth Early Career Professor.

“These groups of bees provide unique ecological functions,” she said. “For example, many of the early emerging bee species are of critical importance for early flowering plants such as spring ephemeral wildflowers, and these bee-plant interactions may be particularly sensitive to disruptions from climate change. And many crops, such as apples and blueberries, rely on pollination by early emerging wild bees.”

The evidence of changes in biodiversity over years also was strong, the researchers noted. For instance, the average abundance of bees captured declined by 48%, and the number of species detected fell by 41%.

At the species level, monitoring suggested that 26 species were stable over time, with no detectable change in abundance. However, 13 species, or about one-third of the species for which researchers had sufficient data, declined in abundance between 2014 and 2019. Many of the declining species were bumble bees and sweat bees, Turley said. By contrast, only one species increased in abundance during the study period.

The researchers pointed out that it will take more years of monitoring to determine if the changes they observed over time are part of a larger trend or a consequence of year-to-year fluctuations.

“Wild bee communities are diverse and dynamic, and little is known about what species or groups have the greatest conservation needs,” López-Uribe said. “Our findings could help to quantify the effects that different aspects of environmental change have on bee communities and to identify species of conservation concern.”

Neelendra Joshi, associate professor, Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology, University of Arkansas, also contributed to this research.

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture supported this work.

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JOURNAL

Ecology and Evolution

DOI

10.1002/ece3.9190 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Six years of wild bee monitoring shows changes in biodiversity within and across years and declines in abundance

Bee it known: Biodiversity is critical to

ecosystems

A Rutgers-led study on bees shows how different species pollinate the same plants over time

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

Rutgers has conducted the first study showing how many more species of bees are needed to maintain crop yields when a longer-term time frame is considered.

In the paper, which was recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, scientists said biodiversity of the bee population is critical to maintaining the ecosystem function of crop pollination, which is critical to humanity’s food supply.  

“We found that biodiversity plays a key role in the stability of ecosystems over time,” said Natalie Lemanski, lead author on the study and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS). “You do actually need more bee species in order to get stable pollination services over a growing season and over years.”

The team on the study focused on various populations of bees at dozens of farms in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and California and found that many more bee species were not only needed for pollination than expected over an entire flowering season, but even more were needed over multiple years.

The researchers said they discovered different bee species pollinated the same types of plants at different times of the year. They also found that different bee species were the dominant pollinators on the same kind of plants in different years. Because of natural fluctuations in bee populations, researchers said, all bee species present were needed to maintain a minimum threshold of pollination during lean years.

“This research shows that abundance [of a species] matters, but bee diversity matters even more,” said Michelle Elekonich, the deputy division director of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Biological Sciences, which funded the study. “It’s not the same bees that are abundant at a given point in time, and variety is necessary to provide balance during a growing season – and from year to year.”

Lemanski said the study offers substantiation to a long-standing concept ecologists refer to as the “insurance hypothesis.” The idea is that ecosystems probably benefit when nature “diversifies the portfolio,” supporting multiple species of a category of a plant or animal, rather than relying on one dominant species. 

“We found that two to three times as many bee species were needed to meet a target level of crop pollination over the course of a growing season compared to a single date,” Lemanski said. “Similarly, twice as many species were needed to provide pollination over the course of six years compared to a single year.”

The researchers based their analysis on their own extensive observations of bee visits to flowers and measurements of the quantity of pollen grains deposited on individual flowers over weeks and months within a given calendar year and then over multiple years. They collected the data, with permission of farmers, at 16 blueberry farms in South Jersey, at 25 watermelon farms in Central Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania and at 36 watermelon farms in the Northern Central Valley of California.

“The magnitude of increase in species needed over multiple years was remarkably consistent among crop systems when considered over the same interval of time,” Lemanski said. “In addition, the fact that the relationship between timescale and the number of species needed did not level off suggests that even longer time series, spanning multiple seasons, may further bolster the need for biodiversity to ensure reliable ecosystem service.”

Rachael Winfree, a professor in the Rutgers Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources at SEBS, was the senior author on the paper, which was also written in collaboration with Neal Williams of the University of California-Davis. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.

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JOURNAL

Nature Ecology & Evolution

DOI

10.1038/s41559-022-01847-3 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

Magma and ice

Scientists uncover evidence that the Late Cretaceous hosted icy conditions in Antarctica

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA

 

IMAGE: STARK AND BEAUTIFUL, PARTS OF ANTARCTICA MAY HAVE LOOKED MUCH THE SAME IN THE LATE CRETACEOUS view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO CREDIT: COURTESY IMAGE

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Let’s pretend it’s the Late Cretaceous, roughly 66 to 100 million years ago. We’ve got dinosaurs roaming the land and odd-looking early species of birds, although the shark as we know it is already swimming in the prehistoric oceans — which cover 82% of Earth. Redwood trees and other conifers are making their debut, as are roses and flowering plants, and with them come bees, termites and ants. Most of all, it’s warm, volcanically active and humid all over the place with nary an ice sheet in sight.

Except, according to a group of scientists from UC Santa Barbara, University of Oregon and University of Manitoba, icy conditions did exist in the region of the South Pole.

“And it wasn’t just a single-valley glacier,” said UCSB geologist John Cottle, “it was probably multiple glaciers or a large ice sheet.” Contrary to our widely held picture of the Late Cretaceous as “hot everywhere,” he said, there’s evidence that polar ice existed during that period, even at the height of global greenhouse conditions. The geologists’ study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

A Prehistoric Puzzle

Fast-forward to today. Let’s pretend we’re in Antarctica. It’s chilly, it’s barren, and we’re standing near a large grouping of exposed glassy rock along the Transantarctic Mountains, adjacent to the Ross Ice Shelf, called the Butcher Ridge Igneous Complex (BRIC).
 

“I actually heard about these rocks when I was a grad student 20 or so years ago, and they’re just really weird,” Cottle said. Remote, even by today’s Antarctic exploration standards, the BRIC is unusual because the rocks’ composition and formation are uncharacteristic of nearby rock formations, with, among other things, large amounts of glass and layered alteration that indicates significant physical, chemical or environmental events that changed their mineral composition.

Cottle got the chance to finally sample the BRIC on a recent expedition, and in the process of analyzing how it was formed, he and his team encountered an “unusually large amount of water.”

“So you have a really hot rock that interacts with water, and as it cools, incorporates it into the glass,” he said. “If you look at the composition, then you can tell something about where that water came from. It can exist as hydroxyl, which tells you that it probably came from the magma, or it could be molecular, which means it is probably external.”

What they were expecting to see was that the alteration in the rock was caused by the water already in the magma as it cooled. What they found instead was a record of a climate process that was thought not to have existed at the time.

In their spectroscopic analysis of the samples, the researchers determined that while some of the water indeed originated with magma as it plumed upward from Earth’s interior, as the molten rock cooled into glass just beneath the Earth’s surface, it also incorporated groundwater.

“We determined that most of the water in these rocks is externally derived,” Cottle said. “We then measured the oxygen and hydrogen isotopic composition of the water and it matches very well to the composition of Antarctic snow and ice.”

To lock in their result, Cottle and team also conducted argon-argon geochronology to date the rock and its alteration.

“The problem is, these rocks are Jurassic, so about 183 million years old,” he said. “So when you measure the alteration, what you don’t know is when that happened.” They were able to recover the age of the rock (Jurassic), but also found a younger age (Cretaceous). “So when these rocks cooled and were altered,” he continued, “it also reset the argon isotope as well, and you can match the age of the alteration to the composition of the alteration.”

There are other, similar volcanic rocks roughly 700 km north of the BRIC that also have a Cretaceous alteration age, indicating that polar glaciation might have been regionally extensive in Antarctica during that time. “What we’d like to do is go to other places in Antarctica and see if we can determine the scale of the glaciation, if we recover the same results that we’ve already found,” he said.

Finding evidence of large ice sheets dating back to the Cretaceous might not alter our general picture of a hot and humid Earth at that time, Cottle said, “but we would have to think about the Cretaceous and Antarctica quite differently than we do now.”

Research in this study was also conducted by Demian A. Nelson (lead author) of UCSB, Ilya N. Bindeman at University of Oregon and Alfredo Camacho at University of Manitoba.

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

ARTICLE TITLE

Ultra-depleted hydrogen isotopes in hydrated glass record Late Cretaceous glaciation in Antarctica

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Sep-2022