Andony Melathopoulos: A number of high-profile recent studies have concluded, that native bee populations may be experiencing a widespread decline, relative to historic baselines. These studies can be complicated, they're not as straightforward as, for example, the study with Ohio butterflies that was featured on a previous episode with Tyson Wepprich. Where volunteers went out and consistently resurveyed sites and we're able to see changes over time - but rather, these studies rely on historic specimens. To better understand the methodologies and assumptions of these studies, but also to think a little bit forward towards what might constitute a better approach to measuring changes in bee populations - I invited Dr. John Ascher onto the show.

Now, Dr. Ascher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the National University in Singapore. He studies global bee diversity, including systematics, biogeography and [00:01:00] conservation. And he contributes to building specimen collections and online databases, including citizen science portals.

And you're going to hear a lot in this episode about the various citizen science portals, like BugGuide, Discover Life, and iNaturalist, which, Dr. Ascher's heavily involved with. In Singapore, he's very hard at work on, thinking about bee distributions and taxonomy across the world. This is a really great opportunity to catch up with one of the world's experts on native bees. I'm really looking forward to you hearing this great interview with Dr. John Ascher!

 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:00:00] Now there has been intense interest over the question of whether native bee populations are changing over time. On a past episode, we had Tyson Wepprich and we heard about work with butterflies in Ohio where volunteers track populations using a standard survey protocol. Is there anything comparable with bees? Is that desirable with bees? If there isn't, you know, what should we be doing?

John Ascher: [00:00:23] Well, I think the short answer is it's very desirable, but it hasn't happened yet. I think that there's been a sort of lack of leadership and vision, and some of the proposals that have been made are in a way thinking too small. They're very focused on certain aspects like monitoring from an ecological perspective and maybe not addressing other essential elements like an improved documentation of taxonomy and biogeography, which is where these things live and why. And it's very important that we establish a credible and accessible baseline in terms of basic maps of where species live in relation to habitats and ecoregions. And we must be investing in this, in addition to an ecological monitoring at study sites. So, I think there's been in general, a lot of interest from the ecological side, but the taxonomists tend to be sort of marginalized and often brought in to identify things after the fact but are not included enough in the planning stages and certainly not in the budgets of these enterprises.

So, we haven't had a match of, say collections-based research specimen digitization that hasn't been coordinated well, if at all, with other aspects like molecular diagnostics or DNA barcoding and in turn, those are not integrated with citizen science and so on. So, I think on a local scale and certain aspects of these, of the needed monitoring is happening. But we haven't seen the big picture come together. There haven't been any big projects in North America that have been successful. In other parts of the world, certain things have had more success.

So, Europe has had what's called the STEP Project, or also called the ALARM Project, they're related in some way. But they've been able to come up with a status assessment or red listing conservation assessment for about half of the European bee species and the others, they assessed them but didn't have enough quantitative data yet to make, quantitative metrics. So, in any event, in Europe, they're further along than we are. And, then in that case, the taxonomy was also marginalized, but they were still able to have effective enough leadership to pull together a more credible and a more quantitative result in what we've done yet as yet in North America.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:02:55] Well, that's really interesting. And I want to have you expand a little bit more on taxonomy and distribution maps and why they're so important. Why can't we just grid out an area and just send surveyors out there and come up with a good picture of what's going on?

John Ascher: [00:03:14] Well, we certainly want to get good coverage at the grid cell level, and that has its utility as far as it goes. But some issues that immediately arise is that bees often are very localized. So, you see that, especially in sand dune specialists bees and also bees that are specialized on particular host plants, that they may not be occurring generally across an area. But they may have very particular climatic zones or soil types or, ecological associations. And so, being able to strategically survey them and collect them in relation to that type of understanding, which you can get from some species distribution models and things like this, may lead to a more efficient result than just going across grid cells.

It's a bit complicated to explain, but I think biogeography is very powerful in predicting where animals and plants should live, and that can be quantified in terms of, like I said, species distribution modeling that are often built off of specimen data. But also, we can look at phylogenetic aspects and other things and get to a deeper understanding through integrative taxonomy then we can get from the ecological perspective alone.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:04:41] Okay, that makes sense to me. So, some of these bee species may have very specific preferences and where they inhabit this biogeographic matrix. And if you don't know anything about it and you just blindly go out and walk a transect. You might be missing half of them because you don't, you haven't paid attention to sort of natural history and what's known of these bees. You haven't consulted backwards through, you know, all the work that's been done on these bees, and so you end up not detecting - I imagine that's one of the big risks.

John Ascher: [00:05:19] Well, I mean, a good example is the case of the so-called a bee that lives in sandstone. Sandstone inhabiting Anthophora bee or digger bee that lives in the desert Southwestern USA, a colleague named Michael War and also Terry Griswold and his group based out of Utah have done very extensive surveys of bees, of this bee in particular and along with other, colleagues from their labs. And, they've found that some bees that were essentially unknown to science are actually quite widely distributed, but the key is you have to know their affinity for the sandstone nest substrate. And with that knowledge then you're able to discover new populations to monitor them, to show that they're actually more numerous than you might otherwise think.

And for a lot of bees this very basic understanding of where did they live and why might they live there? Is, lacking. So, we can look at fluctuations at particular sites up and down in trends in they've gone up 5% and this year and 5% the other year. But I think it really helps to relate the bees preferably in a phylogenetic perspective. So that you know what the relatives of that bee are doing to, certainly their host plants, other biotic interactions, for example, between host and parasitic bees. And to be able to relate them to general patterns. So, for example, once you know that a bee is, let's say a bee in the Northeastern United States, if you know that it lives in grasslands, then you may be able to relate some of its conservation challenges to those that are faced by say, eastern meadowlark or bobolink or some other birds - upland sandpiper.

And there may be a vast body of knowledge about how to manage those habitats for those birds. And you can tie into that with a bee, if you found out that it had those sort of habitat preferences. So, I think that we can work a lot more efficiently once we know where the species occurs and why, in relation to both abiotic and biotic factors relevant to that species. 

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:07:37] You know, you bring up the great example of ornithologists and the bird world. Where there really isn't a rich understanding of the natural history of these birds. Also, their habitat types and you know, if you're looking for that bird, you have a good citizen science volunteer base that can go out to those habitats. There's more of the approach that you're sort of laying out, that should happen for bees. And I do remember before we started talking, you made an interesting comment where you said, "the bee world is sort of where birding was in the 1930's". I'd like you to talk a little bit more about the model and birding and how that's much more effective way of being able to understand where to make restoration investments, but also the status of these creatures.

John Ascher: [00:08:34] Well, there are about twice as many known and described bee species globally as there are birds. And, so, I often think that the bee scientists should have about twice as many funding opportunities and secretaries and such, associated with melittology, which is the study of wild bees as opposed to ornithologists. But in fact, they have a whole, a well-funded and famous branch of science called ornithology. But we who work on bees, have only really had melittology as a defined thing for several decades. It's historically been a relatively obscure topic.

So, we have a lot of infrastructure to build and a need to generate enthusiasm and momentum. Certainly, regarding identifications, we're at the embryonic stage, so some colleagues have asked me how many bees are identifiable, and I say, I have no idea because these are such early days. So, when the case of birds, there were some museum taxonomists like Ludlow for some based out of places like the American Museum of Natural History who were able to apply their museum-based knowledge to identifying previously unidentifiable fall warblers and so forth and were able to really push the boundaries of that.

And now with digi-scoping and improvements in optics and photography, and also with just much, much better, deeper understanding of say plumages and things we've been able to molt, we've been able to push the bounds of what is possible for bird identification. And the same thing can happen for bees, but I think now we're at the very early stage where birds were maybe in the 1930's or 1940's where, a few museum based people were able to apply that to image based identification and to field identification. But there hasn't been as yet in the bee world, a critical mass of these experts cross checking each other and developing some of the rigorously tested and more subtle and esoteric techniques that you've seen developing in the bird world, especially since the 1970's or so.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:10:49] Wow, that's a really interesting perspective. Let's take a quick break now. I want to come back and think a little bit more through this problem that we have this emerging interest, in native bees - maybe akin to birds in the 1970's. And there seems to be an opportunity to better integrate this interest in, with the work that specialists are doing. So, let's take a quick break and we'll come right back and pick it up!

 Now, before the break we were talking about the innovative integration between museum studies and an emerging very interested and motivated lay audience in ornithology. I'm going to transition onto what's happening currently, where we are with bees. In some ways I imagine we're just starting to see a lot of people who are not an expert start to come into this realm. Here in the Pacific Northwest, if you had to take a picture of a bee on iNaturalist, you often get an identification from, you're kind of going through and looking at these, you have a good sense of the types of bees that people are starting to engage with and it's a large number of people, it's not just a couple of specialists now.

John Ascher: [00:12:07] Well, I can give you some metrics as yet there are more than 80,000 observers of bees on iNaturalist alone, and more than 11,000 people have identified bees. So, I, myself, I've identified about more than 220,000 but on this one site there and like I said, almost 12,000 people who have identified a bee, and overall where more than 2000 species identified. So that's more than 10% of the known bees of the world. And it's a total of about 400,000 bee images and records on this one site. And then when you consider that BugGuide has millions of insect records, including hundreds of thousands of bee records. I don't know the exact total and largely different and complimentary user base. You can see, this is just in these two sites which are based in the United States. But if you look globally, the Australians and Japanese and other people have very extensive networks of their own. And so, I think it's fair to say there are millions of bee records on online at this point, and a large proportion of them are these citizen science records -so they actually become quite important.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:13:24] Wow, that is amazing! Well, I guess what I'd like to do now is transition, because we've talked about some of the constraints and also some of the opportunities to get a better handle on how our bees are doing. And square this with what seems to be a host of research studies that have conclusions on the status of bee populations across something like the United States. How are those studies done and what are some of the assumptions?

John Ascher: [00:13:53] Yes, I can speak about that. I'm most qualified to speak about things that make use of historical specimen records. And I've been involved with some, but by no means all of the studies, it seems like the more prestigious the studies are and the better journal they're in, the less likely they are to have authorships or lead authors coming from the world of collections and taxonomies.

So, from the little that I can say, specimen records have great potential, but it's often underutilized because, a very powerful use of these specimen records would be to use species distribution models like MAXENT that are robust to presence only data. But your standard ecological approach is often predicated on having presence, absence data. So, having the specimens collected in some standardized protocol so that you can in some straightforward way, interpret the absence of a bee from your dataset as being indicative of the bee, genuinely being absent. So, unfortunately that's often a highly invalid assumption for these records.

So, some of the approaches are to, use the data more cautiously, but then the problem is that your work will tend to be lower impact. Or alternatively, you can proceed with modeling with relatively little concern about the primary data sources. And so, I think what's happened is the more empirical and more skeptical and more conservative approach has not been rewarded and taking liberties with the data and essentially shoehorning presence, absence data into a, sorry - shoehorning presence only data with a lot of biases into a, presence absence framework has been better rewarded. It's difficult to, to say whether bees are declining or not, and I don't even think that's a very reasonable question to ask in the first place. I can tell you I don't put much credence in what has been published as yet, and I think that policy makers need to know that at least some of the empirical workers are underwhelmed by the reliability and quality and relevance of, what has been published on this topic, especially in the leading journals.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:16:22] Just to kind of sum that up though - so there is this kind of trade off that occurs where you just lack the, there's just not enough sampling, or you have bees whose taxonomy maybe poorly resolved, and you have to make compromises. And so, there's a conservative approach to, doing those analyses, which may not give you the crisp conclusion or there's one where you really take liberties with piecing together those limitations. But they can be misleading because there is a lot missing there, the collection methods are uneven, the taxonomy may not be very well worked out. All of these things sort of compound and you end up with this kind of conclusion, but you've really had to take some liberties with the data.

John Ascher: [00:17:19] What you said is exactly, you said it may be better than I could have, but I agree with everything that you said, taking liberties is correct. And what will often happen is that people will make some effort to address very well-known collecting biases, for example, tendency to collect at particular times of year, or, tendency to collect more conspicuous or larger species. So, often some of these collecting biases are addressed, but often in these digitized datasets, there's a whole range of other biases. For example, often there's limited resources for digitization. So which bees reached the end of that digitalization pipeline?

So, you start with a bee, let's just start from the beginning. So, you're out in the field, which bees you actually see may be biased to begin with. You see the more conspicuous ones, you collect some of those, some of them are too small and they go through the holes of your net, so there may be some biases there. Then once you have the bees, historically in the old school collectors, often if you had too many of the small boring species our caught too many of the same things, you wouldn't bother to pin them. So that pinning stage is a big bottleneck. Then in terms of labeling, if you visit any large collection, you'll see huge numbers of these bees that have been caught and pinned but have not yet been fully labeled.

So those are things that are not yet far enough in the pipeline to be digitized. Then you get collections of unsorted bees that haven't yet been identified. And, so, most collections that have had their bees databased, they fall into sort of two camps, and one is where they sort of digitized everything without quality control. So, you just get some undergraduates in there, for example, pay them very little, and then they will capture whatever is present in its current state. So, you just get a snapshot of what the collection looks like, which is going to have a lot of unidentified material, a lot of misidentifications. Or, you can go through a filter where only the specimens that have been fully identified and validated by an expert are included. But then you introduce a different set of biases because then you have higher quality data, but you have less of it and you're actually excluding potentially a large number of specimens.

And unfortunately, in my experience, a lot of the funding agencies and also the ecologists running these papers, they don't make much difference. Make much differentiation in either the reward structure or in the scientific interpretation between, what you could call complete and validated datasets as opposed to complete an unvalidated datasets versus highly incomplete and fragmentary datasets.

So, there are some datasets that have addressed some of the obvious collection biases, but there is a wide range of underappreciated collection biases and some very famous papers, including in journals such as Science, have claimed that, for example, large bees are declining, and small bees are relatively increasing. But if you look at historically, insect pins were scarce and very expensive, especially during an era such as the world depression, and so, and around the time of wars. And so, during those eras, it makes sense that people would preferentially pin large bees that are easily pinned as opposed to very small bees that you wouldn't necessarily want to waste an expensive tin on a very common individual, of a very small bee that may be too small to pin anyway, and that may require a specialized mounting technique.

So long story short is I think that, the idea that specimen collections can be used in some straightforward way for statistical ecology that requires presence absence data is incorrect, and also the idea that there are some simple statistical fixes where you can massage the data or redact some of it, or otherwise very quickly fix these things I think that's incorrect. It's actually very difficult and complicated, and I would like to expand a little bit going back to the bird analogy. If you think about what birds are endangered, you'll think, okay, the peregrine falcon is endangered by eggshell thinning and, the piping plover by beach disturbance by off road vehicles and dogs and whatnot. And maybe the upland sandpiper from loss of meadows and over mowing at the wrong time of year, things like that.

But no one in their right mind would ever suggest that there's a causal link between all of those losses or, that you can wrap them all into birds as a whole are declining. I think in the case of birds, we know what's happening with the poultry industry is very different than what's happening with the falcon and with the plover. Those are very, very different scenarios. And I think that those who are truly knowledgeable about bees know that we have our bee equivalent of the peregrine falcon and our bee equivalent to the piping plover. But we also have a bee equivalent of the cow, or the bee equivalent of the brown headed cowbird.

So, we have bee species that are increasing and decreasing, and those that are decreasing, are decreasing for a large number of factors that may be unrelated. So, when people talk about bee declines, I think often it's really the wrong question to ask from the outset. Now there are cases like amphibians where there is, in that case, fungal pathogens that are causing a truly widespread decline across this major group. But in the case of bees, I don't necessarily see it. So, the domesticated managed species like honeybees, are suffering from colony collapse disorder, but I don't see this as being relevant to the conservation issues that are facing some of the other bee species.

So, what we need is, is specificity of information, not only about the ranges and distributions of the species. But also, about their life histories to be able to know, what are the true causes of their decline. And just like we couldn't look at general trends in our birds increasing and declining and look at numbers that are influenced by starlings and brown headed cowbirds - we couldn't use those numbers to understand what's happening with the piping plover. And likewise, if we want to understand what's happening in bees, we have to be more specific and we have to properly understand them, often at the species level.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:23:51] That's absolutely true. You know, there is a way in which, what's recommended to preserve honeybee health is often the exact same recommendations for native bees and within the native bees - they are sort of treated as a catchall. They all have the same requirements, and I can see how this approach may stem from the original way of surveying changes in bee populations because they really do lack that specificity. So, we don't end up with kind of recommendations like we do for butterflies, for example, where we know what their host plants are, we know what their range is, and it leads to very specific targeted investments in restoration.

John Ascher: [00:24:33] Absolutely, I mean, I can highlight a few cases, one of them is sand dune specialist bees. So, both in the Southeastern United States, and also even more so in the Southwestern United States. In the desert, you get a set of species that are very closely tied to sand dunes and often there's some real low hanging fruit that hasn't been plucked yet as far as some very small geographic areas have edaphic or soil conditions that are highly conducive to bee nesting. And if those are identified and prioritized, we could potentially save the bees very effectively. Now, I'm personally more interested in this type of thing than say, farm set-asides and working in agricultural land.

Because, although you can have a large number of pollinators living in those areas. The bees that are of maximum interest to the connoisseur or somebody who understands bees at the species level are going to be ones that are found in, for example, sandhill habitat, sand dunes. There are other habitats like bogs, and it's going to be places that are going to have a specialized plant community or are going to have certain soil conditions that are going to allow the bees to make their nests.

And when you combine those and have a unique or rich plant community and also, unusual soil conditions, these very small sites can support a disproportionate number of the rare bees. And so, a big priority of mine would be to try to increase knowledge of where do these bees live? And then the next step is they can be included in species distribution models. And then crucially, those models can then be ground-truthed and further honed through actual follow-up field work at the species level.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:26:26] I suppose that's where I did want to sort of bring the interview to is sort of, which way forward? And I am getting a picture here of really doing some rigorous inventory in the United States. Really trying to find out and drill down to the range distribution of some of these rare bees and also figuring out what their host plant requirements are. Is that, what you see as kind of the necessary next steps?

John Ascher: [00:26:55] I mean I think an inventory is by no means the only next step, but it's a crucial next step, and there's some really clear needs in order to make that happen. Maybe the public and even some people who work on bees may not realize that a large proportion of the species, even in the United States and even in the supposedly well-studied Northeastern United States are known only from a very few historical specimens, and many of them are unidentifiable certainly by routine taxonomic workers today. So, a big step is I think to document type material, which is the most historical material that we have in our collection. And that's crucial because often these are some of the oldest specimens that have some of our first records of where these bees were occurring. Maybe 100 or even more years ago. But also, these establish the name, the association of that name, and that taxonomic concept with the bee. And so, if we can prioritize, high resolution imaging of these types and documenting where they are, and we can map them. Then we can go back to those sites and get molecular grade voucher specimens from those localities. And at that point we can get rock solid molecular diagnostic databases, for example DNA bar coding databases that are highly rigorous.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:28:21] Oh because the specimens from way back then are very difficult to be - you can't extract the DNA from them. So, if you could go find them, and...

John Ascher: [00:28:29] I should say it's technically, it is possible nowadays to do ancient DNA techniques, but it requires a lot of money and it can require very particular expertise. And also, you're not going to be able to get say genome wide, you're not going to get long stretches of DNA. So, a really good approach would be to try to get genomic grade DNA from these historical sites, these type localities. And then conversely, I think we need to look not only in geographic space, in terms of grid cells and in terms of political space like counties and states. But also, we need look at ecological space, what ecoregions and what habitat types and in particular, what plant and soil types - plant associations and soil types have not been adequately surveyed in the past, and we really should prioritize those. And I think some of that has happened as sort of a byproduct of people like the bee biology and systematics lab doing a thorough surveys of national parks and public lands in the process of doing that, they've established a lot of the infrastructure, the baseline to be able to answer these questions.

But, I think going forward it would be good to have an inventory that doesn't have a single goal, but it has multiple goals, both, one of which would be to build upon the historical baseline, which would mean a recollecting some of these historical sites from the perspective of the age of genomics and the age of high resolution imaging. And then also to try to go where people haven't been before. Especially in terms of areas that there's quite a number of areas, for example in the Southeastern United States that are sort of neglected habitat types. And some of my colleagues who are working in places like Mississippi, for example, or even myself when I was in Western Tennessee recently - you're able to find a lot of significant new range extensions and new life history data by visiting these these sites.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:30:30] Which I have to say sounds like a whole lot of fun, being able to find bees that people haven't seen before, learning about their natural history. It does remind me of the Oregon Bee Atlas', informal motto to boldly go and find the bees that no Oregonian has seen before.

But let's move on to our last segment here after a break. I'm really curious about what's on your bookshelf. You must have on a lot of different tools for doing for doing native bee surveying and the work that you do. And I'm really interested in what your favorite pollinator species is. So, let's take a break, we'll be right back.

Okay, we're back. I imagine you have one of the most remarkable collections of native bee books anywhere on the planet. Tell us about some of the books that you would recommend for our listeners. 

John Ascher: [00:31:20] Sure, for bees, there's one book which stands out above all others, which is called The Bees of the World by Charles Michener and the second edition is from 2007. And so, this synthesizes many, many decades of incredibly dedicated work by Charles Michener to study literally all bees from all over the world. And the unique thing about this book is it covers down to the subgenera, sub-generic level all bee taxa that occur anywhere in the world.

So, I myself am living and working in Singapore, and I can use this book to identify my bees, my colleagues in Pakistan or, Australia or, anywhere in South America, and indeed all over the world, can find this an invaluable reference. It has a lot of technical diagrams, and even though a lot of the book is written for let's just say bee specialists or a technical audience. The introductory sections are wonderfully written and very concise and well-worth read by anybody who wants to know about bees beyond the usual honeybees.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:32:26] What a fantastic suggestion. It is really great book and I will echo what you said, all the introductory chapters give you this really nice, pressie on, native bee biology and taxonomy and somehow the groups are laid out. It's a great recommendation. Tell us about some of the other books that you really would like people to know about.

John Ascher: [00:32:49] Well, I think a good read for somebody who wants to get a sense of some exciting things that non-Apis bees do, would be Bees of the World by Chris O'Toole. Which is a shorter book and it has a lot of fascinating life history and photographs about bees.

I also want to mention two more obscure books that I think are fantastic and, in a way, underappreciated. One of them is a book by a German author named Paul Westrich, and all of his work is of the highest quality. And in particular, he did a faunal survey of the bees of Baden-Württemberg - I'm probably not saying that right, but a part of Southern Germany. And, the thing that makes it stand out is that it integrates the life history, the taxonomy, and the ecology - the habitat and conservation needs of all of these bees and their association with each other and with the flowers in a wonderfully beautiful way. It's written in German, but I think this book has been absolutely inspirational to all people who are trying to document bee faunas.

And, we can only hope to have something of this quality in North America in the future. He has a website and other more recent books. So, the beautiful thing, even if you don't, read German, its color photos of all of the bees living in this area. But also, a wonderful set of documentation of the habitats, where do bees nest, where they live, and how they've been impacted by human change to the landscape. It's really a, uniquely complete picture of sort of all aspects of bees from the most rigorous taxonomy all the way to the most applied - how do we maintain bees in our yard, in our home area? So, so I would recommend that as a model that we could look to.

And then, there's another book that, this may be more for a specialist audience. But, there's a wonderful bibliography of Russian bee research by, the late Yuri Pacenko and Yullia Astofferova. And this book makes accessible to the English audience, literally thousands of Russian publications on bees. And the thing that's wonderful about it is just to see the sheer scope of bee research that has been done historically on all aspects from applied agriculture to apiculture, to native bees, wild bees in an area that is often overlooked. And so, when you look at this, you get the clear understanding that looking at the heavily indexed journals from the past ten years in the G7 countries or something like that, is not even remotely adequate to understand what we already know about bees.

So, there's been a wonderful literature on bee biology and diversity that I think is somewhat neglected even by academics, especially if they only speak one or a few languages. So, myself, I can't speak Russian, but by using this book, I'm able to get a window into a whole different world of bee research.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:36:09] Man, I love that recommendation! I love that sentiment as well because we do get trapped in the English language or trapped in Oregon or trapped in United States when some of these species are, you know, on multiple continents. And there are some very different bee communities in different places and, without that knowledge, without kind of staying in touch with that kind of on the ground knowledge - you may sort of be missing a large parts of the picture of the bees of the world. That's great! Okay, so the next question I have for you is, do you, well, I know you have one, but what are your go to tools, the tools that you really rely on and you would like other people to know about?

John Ascher: [00:36:50] Well, I'm going to mention three tools, which are all readily accessible on the internet. One of them is, is BugGuide and BugGuide is focused on North America, but it's a sort of defacto, highly curated, highly reliable field guide, that has high resolution well cropped, well vetted images for most of the readily identifiable bee species, and a lot of very obscure ones for all of, America, North of Mexico - so United States and Canada. And if you want to have a reliable, a reference set of images for, like I said, pretty much all of the commonly found bees and many of the most rare and spectacular ones.

This is a great resource bugguide.net and then if you want to see a larger range of images from a truly incredible number of observers, and localities across the entire planet, then, iNaturalist is incredible. And the rate of increase is staggering. So, every single day, hundreds, if not thousands of new images are coming in from everywhere in the planet. And so, you can keep up with the bee world. Like I said, there's already 2000 species of bees identified there - so the iNaturalist is a really good one.

And then the third one I would recommend is Discover Life. At discoverlife.org you can find all of the bees of the world listed more than 20,000 species. And I maintain a world distributional checklist and catalog, which is accessible through a sortable guide and also through an array of maps. The maps also map, specimen records from the institutions where I've worked like the American Museum of Natural History, but also from all of GBIF. So basically, all kinds of records that are in the public domain, including specimens and citizen science, are mapped there in dynamic global maps that you can zoom into and you can pull up full details from those. You can, customize the maps in a variety of ways. And so, it's a really great way to learn about global bees.

And then for certain areas and certain taxa, I like for Eastern North America, almost all of the bees have a large array of images of living and pinned bees. They have identification guides, which are dynamic and very user friendly. There's also, in many cases, scan text, which has been used with permission from revision. So, you can find information that's from these old books, so to speak, like a Mitchell's Classic Bees of Eastern United States. You can find that accessible online for free, at this website. And then finally it integrates all of the, bee plant associations from our specimen databasing and even from some of the citizen science and it crosslinks, those with the plant pages. So, it has both bee and plant coverage as indeed does iNaturalist - and so the ability of these websites to start collecting information about species interactions, I think is very exciting.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:39:57] Well, you know, I just use it for that purpose, just the other day I was up in the Mid-Columbia area. I was on larkspur, I thought I saw a bee. I thought it was an Anthophora, and I went on to Discover Life and it listed all the bees that went to that specific larkspur, or anything that there had been records for. And I know in the Atlas ourselves, we use it a lot just to be able to identify where to potentially survey for, looking for a bee, starting with its host plant. And I'm kind of working backwards as a way to do what, you know, you talked about the beginning of the episode, how to kind of find these bees that may have not been seen for quite a long time.

John Ascher: [00:40:37] Yeah, so I think the, really special thing about this site is that it is simultaneously trying to capture, the most rigorous taxonomic information, certainly about the names of the bees. And in fact, it uses a more current and updated version of the names that are shared with the US government with the International Taxonomic Information System or ITIS. So, it's actually at the highest level of, rigor for the names and also the distributions. But, in addition, it also draws in the broadest possible citizen science outreach. So even, there's a lot of pollinator projects for schools, that have been contributing. And so, it really runs the gamut everywhere from high resolution photos of primary types and the most famous entomological museums, all the way to school kids, photographing honeybees in their backyard.

So, that's a tool, I would say all three of those tools I find to be very wonderful. And then, going to other parts of the world there's other tools, like an Atlas of Living Australia, for example, where you can see images of all the Australian bees. So, I think the next step is to try to bring some of these success stories across the entire world.

There's another one I would draw the attention of, especially for North American users who may not know of it, is BWARS, which is Bees, Wasps, and Ants Recording Society of the UK or Britain - which is an absolutely wonderful resource. And in addition to that, Atlas Hymenoptera, which is a source for literally millions of records of bees and maybe other insects for Europe and also all of the old world. So, one of the challenges that we face going forward is how do we pull together these different national and regional and continental resources, and how do we bring them together for a global status assessment of bees?

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:42:40] You know, I'd like to get you to expand on this. With iNaturalist I can understand where the records come, a person takes a picture of a bee on a dandelion, it gets uploaded and their name is there, and associated with it, so they get the attribution for it. But with some of these other platforms like Discover Life and a BugGuide, where do the records come from? Sometimes I can't tell, who actually collected the record or where it is.

John Ascher: [00:43:05] Yes, that's a very important observation. So, there's been a lot of misunderstanding and confusion on these points because, what will happen is you will get a primary database or primary data source. So, this will often be, either a particular website where the images are actually identified or curated. And then in the case of specimens, it's going to be the actual museum where that it may or may not host the software, the, tools to digitize it, but it actually will be hosting the physical specimens. And so those, the owner of, either the database end or the specimens themselves, should probably have some ownership.

And if they want their research program to be viable going forward, they're going to need some crediting. But what tends to happen is, that these local databases, and by local, I can also be referring to databases that may have hundreds of thousands or more records, but still in some sense, they're local to a particular museum or a particular website. Those will get captured in metadatabases or data aggregators like GBIF, which is the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. And unfortunately, these global aggregators don't necessarily have the tools in place to ensure and we certainly as a community, we don't have the tools in place to ensure that the primary databases are updated and credited and that the owners of those data are included as authors in publications and so forth.

So, it's kind of the Wild West out there and it's very often very confusing, even to full time biodiversity specialist, what is really going on. Because, often there can be a huge lag time between when the data sets are updated locally and when they are uploaded to the global sites. So, we really had a lot of chaos and confusion, and there has not been adequate leadership or adequate investments in the global databasing system, in order to ensure that these things work well. So, for example, the program that I was working on, digitizing bees in the American Museum of Natural History - these are not ongoing programs, these are things that are funded once on an ad hoc basis and so there's really not much forward momentum.

And so, we end up with these legacy databases, which are often not updated. And, paradoxically, we find ourselves in a situation where, when there is a citizen science record on iNaturalist, it has some sort of error. I can immediately correct that and then on BugGuide, I can even directly curate records and even delete them. It's controversial, but you can very easily manipulate the records. And when there's a new publication out, I've witnessed with my own eyes very often the very day it's published. The taxonomic change will be made in these citizen science databases, and not necessarily by a known expert, but just some, sort of a grassroots user will notice that publication and indicate the change.

 Whereas when it comes to so-called professional data sites, there's often lag time of many, many years before source data sets get updated. And even if they do, very often, that doesn't get translated into the data aggregator. So, we have a very confusing and frustrating situation where the local data is often, not used or if it is used, it's misused or uncredited or not updated.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:46:41] Well, thanks for that clarification. And it really, that's a great kind of reflection on this whole interview. There is a lot of interest in bees, but there seems to be some real needs for infrastructure, and for integrating these kinds of non-specialists and specialists in these platforms. Anyways, it's very fascinating. I'm glad our listeners have been exposed to sort of the complications of this. But I do want to transition to our last question. And for you, I don't know what exactly you're going to answer this cause you have such a great perspective on all the bees of the world, but do you have a favorite? Is there a bee that you are particular to, that you really love when you see it? Tell us a little bit about it.

John Ascher: [00:47:32] Well, one of my favorites has to be Amegilla insularis, which is a long tongue digger bee that lives in the forest of Southeast Asia. And there's a bunch of things I love about this bee, for one thing it has an extremely long tongue. So, it's an example of a, specialist bee that is going to be trap lining nectar, deep in the forest. So, if you know about trap lining, hummingbirds, like the hermits in the Neotropics, it's pretty similar to that - it will go from one widely dispersed flower to the other. They're extremely fast fliers and as long ago as the 1950's, these have been noted to be associated with rainforests and high-quality primary forest, which are becoming scarce in Southeast Asia. So, it's an indicator species for high quality habitat. Some other really interesting things about it is that it's got this orange colored fur, and recently with some colleagues at Yale and US who are studying biophysics, we've been able to show that there's some structural component to the generation of this bright orange color.

So, it has orange fur, and you can see images of this on the internet. If you look up Amegilla insularis, you should find some photos of it on the flowers and also, we have a Biodiversity of Singapore web portal that has images of the pinned bee, you can see how spectacular it is. And in Australia, these sort of related bee, it's called the teddy bear bee, and it's one of the most popular ones for people to observe there.

What else I like about it? I want to mention is it has a parasitic bee. So, in order to be my favorite bee, you have to have a parasitic bee associated with you. So, there's a bee, which is in the cloak and dagger bee group, which is called Thyreus abdominalis, which is inherently, these, these parasites tend to be less often seen in the host.

And in this case, it's covered with beautiful, bright blues, structural colors, made by feather-like hairs. And, we've been able to document persistence of not only this being in Singapore, but also the parasite and through use of trapping techniques in our remnant forest of Singapore. So, it's one of my favorites because it's an example of a species that was found you know a hundred years ago in Singapore, in the primary forest, and it's still persisting there in these remnant patches. So, for me, it's a symbol of the Southeast Asian rainforest.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:49:57] Oh, I actually got an image of it up on, Amegilla insularis up on my screen. What a gorgeous bee, and that orange hair is really stunning. Orange is the color of Oregon State University, and I do think we should take this, bee up as our mascot - absolutely. Anyways, I really appreciate you taking time to walk us through this really complicated realm of monitoring for bee populations and some of the complications, but also some of the opportunities. It's been really enlightening for me and I'm sure for many of our guests, thank you so much!

John Ascher: [00:50:32] Sure!