They call it “the kill zone.”
Just outside the Nicaraguan capital city of Managua, the Masaya volcano smokes
as magma sloshes and bubbles near its surface. Clouds of noxious fumes and
slow-cooling lava wipe out any traces of life. But when a team of scientists
visited, they saw something unexpected: life. A little bee, Anthophora
squammulosa, was zipping through the ash heaps looking for nectar and burrowing
in a pile of volcanic debris. The find, a shock on this unforgiving mountain,
makes these insects the first of their genus to be found living in volcanic
ash, a rare home for any bee.
The search started when
pollination ecologist Hilary Erenler was researching her main passion,
neotropical butterflies. Erenler, a visiting researcher at the University of
Northampton in the United Kingdom, has been traveling to Masaya since 2008
mostly on her own dime to study the behavior of colorful pollinators like the
rare Godman’s metalmark. But early on, she noticed the activities of another
pollinator: bees.
The bees she saw nested almost
exclusively in one patch of Masaya. There, temperatures climbed as high as 42°C,
and an acid rain—caused by sulfur dioxide fumes from the volcano—occasionally
lashed the upper reaches of the mountain. Nothing visible grew. She wondered:
Why were the bees there?
Erenler launched a study with
researchers and citizen scientists from around the globe. First, they wanted to
figure out just how many bees were present—no simple task. She and her team
battled the sweltering temperatures and wore gas masks while searching for
nests. They visited the site five times over 3 years, and estimated a
population of 1000 to 2000 bees. But years of observations left them with more
questions, including the mystery of what the bees were eating.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!