NEWS | I N D E P T H
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The two-spotted bumblebee, found in eastern North America, is one of about 250 bumblebee species worldwide.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Bumblebees aren’t keeping up with a warming planet Pollinators retreat from south, but don’t move north By Cally Carswell
A
s the climate changes, plants and animals are on the move. So far, many are redistributing in a similar pattern: As habitat that was once too cold warms up, species are expanding their ranges toward the poles, whereas boundaries closer to the equator have remained more static. Bumblebees, however, appear to be a disturbing exception, according to a study on p. 177 of this issue. A comprehensive look at dozens of species, it finds that many North American and European bumblebees are failing to “track” warming by colonizing new habitats north of their historic range. Simultaneously, they are disappearing from the southern portions of their range. “Climate change is crushing [bumblebee] species in a vice,” says ecologist Jeremy Kerr of the University of Ottawa in Canada, the study’s lead author. The findings underscore the importance of conserving the habitat the insects currently persist in, says Rich Hatfield, a biologist with the Xerces Society for Insect Conservation in Portland, Oregon, who was not involved in the study. Where bumblebees vanish, the wild plants and crops they pollinate could also suffer. To see how global climate change is affecting the bees, the researchers amassed a
data set consisting of some 423,000 observations, dating back to 1901, of 67 bumblebee species in North America and Europe. Then they mapped large-scale changes in the species’ territories and in their “thermal ranges”—the warmest and coolest places the bees live. They also built statistical models to test whether any range shifts were best explained by climate change, or whether two other factors—changes in land cover and the use of pesticides such as neonicotinoids, which have been implicated in smaller-scale bee declines—also played a key role. Overall, they found that some bumblebees have retreated as many as 300 kilometers from the southern edge of their historic ranges since 1974. The rusty patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis), for instance, has disappeared from parts of the southeastern United States. Southern species are also retreating to higher elevations, shifting upward by an average of about 300 meters over the same time period. Meanwhile, few species have expanded their northern territories. And it turned out that climate change was the only factor that had a meaningful impact on the large-scale range shifts. (Data on pesticide use were available only in the United States, however, and the study did not examine whether populations were growing or shrinking.) sciencemag.org SCIENCE
10 JULY 2015 • VOL 349 ISSUE 6244
Published by AAAS
PHOTO: © 68/ED RESCHKE/OCEAN/CORBIS
E.U. money plays an important role in Greece’s modest science endeavor; according to the commission’s Joint Research Center, the union paid for 15.8% of Greece’s total R&D spending in 2012, far more than is typical for a country in the Europen Union. Socalled structural funds, aimed at developing Europe’s economically weaker regions, have provided the bulk of stable support to research institutes in Greece. (For BSRC Fleming, losing access to structural funds could mean halting 60% of its research and laying off 75 of its 155 employees, Savakis says.) Another large slice of Greece’s funding has come from Horizon 2020, a 7-year E.U. research funding program, and its predecessor, the Seventh Framework Programme, in which Greek researchers fared quite well. “We are deeply integrated into the European system,” says Nektarios Tavernarakis, director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology in Heraklion. “These links would be severed.” As a non-E.U. member, Greece might have the option to buy into Horizon 2020 as an “associated country,” as Norway, Turkey, Israel, and nine other countries have done. But it would have to find the money somewhere. The commission declined to answer questions about the referendum’s potential impact on E.U. funding for Greek research. “Sorry, but we won’t enter into such speculations,” a spokesperson for the DirectorateGeneral for Research and Innovation says. Early this week, there was still some hope that a new deal could stave off a Grexit. The surprise resignation on Monday of Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, a thorn in the side of E.U. officials, “could be a signal that the Greek side is ready to make serious proposals and accept the consequences,” Mitsos says. Even if Greece leaves the eurozone, there is no reason it would have to leave the European Union and forgo Horizon 2020 grants and structural funds, says Fotakis, the vice minister. But a return to the drachma would make foreign supplies and equipment more expensive, he admits. It would also exacerbate the brain drain from Greece, says Peter Tindemans, a science policy expert and the secretary general of Euroscience, a lobby group based in Strasbourg, France. “I’m pretty sure it would be another push for Greek scientists to leave the country.” Fotakis says he hopes to help the scientific community by cutting bureaucracy, for example by simplifying rules for the use of structural funds. He also envisions centers of excellence that will attract and retain young researchers—although money will remain a problem. “How can I ask for funds,” Fotakis says, “when you have people sleeping in the streets or digging in the rubbish?” ■
Cally Carswell is a freelance journalist in Santa Fe.
WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Plan to drop goals for women roils Japanese science Change stirs debate about how to remedy underrepresentation of women at Nihon University, Funabashi, near Tokyo. “Without numerical targets we’re afraid apan Prime Minister Shinzō Abe reprogress could stall,” she says. Last week, peatedly has said he intends “to creOhtsubo and several colleagues started lobate a society in which women shine.” bying CSTI and other government officials to Now, female researchers are wonderadd targets and additional supportive meaing if they are included in his vision. sures to the final plan, which is due by the Japan’s top science advisory panel end of the year and takes effect next April. has issued a draft 5-year national research Japan continues to lag in recruiting plan that drops longstanding numerical women into its academic and scientific targets for boosting the number of women workforce, especially at top research uniin scientific fields, sparking concerns about versities. Nagoya University leads the way, the nation’s commitment with women holding to reshaping the male14.5% of all faculty podominated sector. sitions as of May 2013. The draft, unveiled Tokyo and Kyoto union 28 May by Japan’s versities, considered JaCouncil for Science, Techpan’s top schools, were nology and Innovation at 11% and 10.6%, re(CSTI), has prompted spectively. The average Yuko Harayama, Council debate over whether for Japan’s 86 national for Science, Technology and the targets—which have universities is 14.1%, exInnovation been in place for nearly a cluding teaching assisdecade—are the best way to foster change. tants, according to the Japan Association “Previous targets have not had as much imof National Universities (the student body pact as we would like,” says Yuko Harayama, is about 30% female). a political scientist and executive member of Those numbers are “are very low” comCSTI. “We need to analyze why.” But droppared with other developed countries, ping the targets is not the right response, says cancer biologist Michinari Hamasays Hisako Ohtsubo, a molecular biologist guchi, Nagoya University president from By Dennis Normile, in Tokyo
J
“Targets have not had as much impact as we would like.”
Stuck on the first rung In Japan, women have made up a growing percentage of total faculty members but a smaller proportion is being promoted to full professorships. 25
20 Percent women
DATA SOURCE: MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, CULTURE, SPORTS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
One clue to the importance of climate: Bumblebee ranges began shrinking “even before the neonicotinoid pesticides came into play in the 1980s,” says ecologist and coauthor Alana Pindar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph in Canada. She says the retreat from southern territories is “a huge loss for bumblebee distributions” and happened surprisingly quickly. The researchers believe the retreat—and the move to higher elevations—may reflect the fact that bumblebees evolved in cooler climates than many other insects that haven’t yet lost ground, and so are especially sensitive to warming temperatures. More mysterious is their failure to push north. “What we can infer is that temperature in the northern latitudes is not what’s limiting their spread,” says Ignasi Bartomeus, a researcher at Spain’s Estación Biológica de Doñana in Seville, who was not involved in the study. Differences in daylight or food could hamper a march north, or bumblebee populations may simply be too slow-growing to quickly expand. Many bumblebees form small colonies, Kerr explains, limiting their ability to spread quickly. In contrast, species with high population growth rates are “more likely to be able to establish a new colony that represents a measurable difference in geographic range.” He notes that one outlier in the study, the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris), one of Europe’s most common species, is known for its reproductive success and has moved north. The species “is kind of like the dandelion of the bumblebee world,” he says. So far, says Bartomeus, the most common bumblebee species seem to be the most resilient. But “we have a lot of losers,” he cautions, including species that have specialized habitat requirements. And climate change could further strain species already struggling with dwindling habitat and other pressures, Kerr says. “We’re hitting these animals with everything,” he says. “There’s no way you can nail a bee with neonicotinoids, invasive pathogens, and climate change and come out with a happy bee.” The loss of bee species could carry consequences for ecosystems and people. For instance, “plants that like their pollinators to be pretty loyal” could see declines in reproduction, says ecologist Laura Burkle of Montana State University, Bozeman. And given that wild bees help pollinate many crops, “we play with these things at our peril,” Kerr says. “The human enterprise is the top floor in a really big scaffold. What we’re doing is reaching out and knocking out the supports.” ■
15
10
5 Percent of faculty members who are women Percent of full professors who are women 0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
10 JULY 2015 • VOL 349 ISSUE 6244
Published by AAAS
127
126
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on July 9, 2015
The two-spotted bumblebee, found in eastern North America, is one of about 250 bumblebee species worldwide.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Bumblebees aren’t keeping up with a warming planet Pollinators retreat from south, but don’t move north By Cally Carswell
A
s the climate changes, plants and animals are on the move. So far, many are redistributing in a similar pattern: As habitat that was once too cold warms up, species are expanding their ranges toward the poles, whereas boundaries closer to the equator have remained more static. Bumblebees, however, appear to be a disturbing exception, according to a study on p. 177 of this issue. A comprehensive look at dozens of species, it finds that many North American and European bumblebees are failing to “track” warming by colonizing new habitats north of their historic range. Simultaneously, they are disappearing from the southern portions of their range. “Climate change is crushing [bumblebee] species in a vice,” says ecologist Jeremy Kerr of the University of Ottawa in Canada, the study’s lead author. The findings underscore the importance of conserving the habitat the insects currently persist in, says Rich Hatfield, a biologist with the Xerces Society for Insect Conservation in Portland, Oregon, who was not involved in the study. Where bumblebees vanish, the wild plants and crops they pollinate could also suffer. To see how global climate change is affecting the bees, the researchers amassed a
data set consisting of some 423,000 observations, dating back to 1901, of 67 bumblebee species in North America and Europe. Then they mapped large-scale changes in the species’ territories and in their “thermal ranges”—the warmest and coolest places the bees live. They also built statistical models to test whether any range shifts were best explained by climate change, or whether two other factors—changes in land cover and the use of pesticides such as neonicotinoids, which have been implicated in smaller-scale bee declines—also played a key role. Overall, they found that some bumblebees have retreated as many as 300 kilometers from the southern edge of their historic ranges since 1974. The rusty patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis), for instance, has disappeared from parts of the southeastern United States. Southern species are also retreating to higher elevations, shifting upward by an average of about 300 meters over the same time period. Meanwhile, few species have expanded their northern territories. And it turned out that climate change was the only factor that had a meaningful impact on the large-scale range shifts. (Data on pesticide use were available only in the United States, however, and the study did not examine whether populations were growing or shrinking.) sciencemag.org SCIENCE
10 JULY 2015 • VOL 349 ISSUE 6244
Published by AAAS
PHOTO: © 68/ED RESCHKE/OCEAN/CORBIS
E.U. money plays an important role in Greece’s modest science endeavor; according to the commission’s Joint Research Center, the union paid for 15.8% of Greece’s total R&D spending in 2012, far more than is typical for a country in the Europen Union. Socalled structural funds, aimed at developing Europe’s economically weaker regions, have provided the bulk of stable support to research institutes in Greece. (For BSRC Fleming, losing access to structural funds could mean halting 60% of its research and laying off 75 of its 155 employees, Savakis says.) Another large slice of Greece’s funding has come from Horizon 2020, a 7-year E.U. research funding program, and its predecessor, the Seventh Framework Programme, in which Greek researchers fared quite well. “We are deeply integrated into the European system,” says Nektarios Tavernarakis, director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology in Heraklion. “These links would be severed.” As a non-E.U. member, Greece might have the option to buy into Horizon 2020 as an “associated country,” as Norway, Turkey, Israel, and nine other countries have done. But it would have to find the money somewhere. The commission declined to answer questions about the referendum’s potential impact on E.U. funding for Greek research. “Sorry, but we won’t enter into such speculations,” a spokesperson for the DirectorateGeneral for Research and Innovation says. Early this week, there was still some hope that a new deal could stave off a Grexit. The surprise resignation on Monday of Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, a thorn in the side of E.U. officials, “could be a signal that the Greek side is ready to make serious proposals and accept the consequences,” Mitsos says. Even if Greece leaves the eurozone, there is no reason it would have to leave the European Union and forgo Horizon 2020 grants and structural funds, says Fotakis, the vice minister. But a return to the drachma would make foreign supplies and equipment more expensive, he admits. It would also exacerbate the brain drain from Greece, says Peter Tindemans, a science policy expert and the secretary general of Euroscience, a lobby group based in Strasbourg, France. “I’m pretty sure it would be another push for Greek scientists to leave the country.” Fotakis says he hopes to help the scientific community by cutting bureaucracy, for example by simplifying rules for the use of structural funds. He also envisions centers of excellence that will attract and retain young researchers—although money will remain a problem. “How can I ask for funds,” Fotakis says, “when you have people sleeping in the streets or digging in the rubbish?” ■
Cally Carswell is a freelance journalist in Santa Fe.
WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Plan to drop goals for women roils Japanese science Change stirs debate about how to remedy underrepresentation of women at Nihon University, Funabashi, near Tokyo. “Without numerical targets we’re afraid apan Prime Minister Shinzō Abe reprogress could stall,” she says. Last week, peatedly has said he intends “to creOhtsubo and several colleagues started lobate a society in which women shine.” bying CSTI and other government officials to Now, female researchers are wonderadd targets and additional supportive meaing if they are included in his vision. sures to the final plan, which is due by the Japan’s top science advisory panel end of the year and takes effect next April. has issued a draft 5-year national research Japan continues to lag in recruiting plan that drops longstanding numerical women into its academic and scientific targets for boosting the number of women workforce, especially at top research uniin scientific fields, sparking concerns about versities. Nagoya University leads the way, the nation’s commitment with women holding to reshaping the male14.5% of all faculty podominated sector. sitions as of May 2013. The draft, unveiled Tokyo and Kyoto union 28 May by Japan’s versities, considered JaCouncil for Science, Techpan’s top schools, were nology and Innovation at 11% and 10.6%, re(CSTI), has prompted spectively. The average Yuko Harayama, Council debate over whether for Japan’s 86 national for Science, Technology and the targets—which have universities is 14.1%, exInnovation been in place for nearly a cluding teaching assisdecade—are the best way to foster change. tants, according to the Japan Association “Previous targets have not had as much imof National Universities (the student body pact as we would like,” says Yuko Harayama, is about 30% female). a political scientist and executive member of Those numbers are “are very low” comCSTI. “We need to analyze why.” But droppared with other developed countries, ping the targets is not the right response, says cancer biologist Michinari Hamasays Hisako Ohtsubo, a molecular biologist guchi, Nagoya University president from By Dennis Normile, in Tokyo
J
“Targets have not had as much impact as we would like.”
Stuck on the first rung In Japan, women have made up a growing percentage of total faculty members but a smaller proportion is being promoted to full professorships. 25
20 Percent women
DATA SOURCE: MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, CULTURE, SPORTS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
One clue to the importance of climate: Bumblebee ranges began shrinking “even before the neonicotinoid pesticides came into play in the 1980s,” says ecologist and coauthor Alana Pindar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph in Canada. She says the retreat from southern territories is “a huge loss for bumblebee distributions” and happened surprisingly quickly. The researchers believe the retreat—and the move to higher elevations—may reflect the fact that bumblebees evolved in cooler climates than many other insects that haven’t yet lost ground, and so are especially sensitive to warming temperatures. More mysterious is their failure to push north. “What we can infer is that temperature in the northern latitudes is not what’s limiting their spread,” says Ignasi Bartomeus, a researcher at Spain’s Estación Biológica de Doñana in Seville, who was not involved in the study. Differences in daylight or food could hamper a march north, or bumblebee populations may simply be too slow-growing to quickly expand. Many bumblebees form small colonies, Kerr explains, limiting their ability to spread quickly. In contrast, species with high population growth rates are “more likely to be able to establish a new colony that represents a measurable difference in geographic range.” He notes that one outlier in the study, the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris), one of Europe’s most common species, is known for its reproductive success and has moved north. The species “is kind of like the dandelion of the bumblebee world,” he says. So far, says Bartomeus, the most common bumblebee species seem to be the most resilient. But “we have a lot of losers,” he cautions, including species that have specialized habitat requirements. And climate change could further strain species already struggling with dwindling habitat and other pressures, Kerr says. “We’re hitting these animals with everything,” he says. “There’s no way you can nail a bee with neonicotinoids, invasive pathogens, and climate change and come out with a happy bee.” The loss of bee species could carry consequences for ecosystems and people. For instance, “plants that like their pollinators to be pretty loyal” could see declines in reproduction, says ecologist Laura Burkle of Montana State University, Bozeman. And given that wild bees help pollinate many crops, “we play with these things at our peril,” Kerr says. “The human enterprise is the top floor in a really big scaffold. What we’re doing is reaching out and knocking out the supports.” ■
15
10
5 Percent of faculty members who are women Percent of full professors who are women 0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
10 JULY 2015 • VOL 349 ISSUE 6244
Published by AAAS
127
