Undergraduate Thesis Or Project
 

Assessing Petal-cutting bees (Megachile sp.) usage of Clarkia amoena (Onagraceae) petals through the lens of iNaturalist and a Garden Experiment

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  • Farewell-to-spring (Clarkia amoena) is native to the Pacific Northwest and commonly found in gardens, due to its aesthetic value and purported benefits to pollinators. Oregon and Washington are home to five subspecies of C. amoena, yet commercially available seed is limited to C. amoena ssp. lindleyi and C. amoena cultivars. Research as to whether pollinators prefer foraging from wild-type C. amoena or cultivars is ongoing, yet what remains unexplored is the non-trophic herbivory of C. amoena petals by leafcutter bees (Megachilidae: Megachile). We conducted two experiments to test whether petal-harvesting bees preferred native or cultivar C. amoena petals for use in their nests. Over one season, we conducted weekly counts of petal-cuts by Megachile species to five replicates of C. a. ssp. lindleyi and three cultivars in a common garden experiment. We additionally used the community science database, iNaturalist, to quantify petal-cutting in observations of C. amoena subspecies and cultivars across 5 landscape classes in Oregon and Washington over a 6-year period. Though it has been used to answer questions about species distributions, iNaturalist data has never been used to quantify pollinator usage of floral resources. We used these experiments to answer the following research questions: 1) Is there a difference in Megachile use of C. amoena native subspecies and cultivars? 2) Is Megachile use of C. amoena influenced by landscape type? Our garden experiment revealed significantly greater use of the wild type than the cultivars, though no significant difference was found from the iNaturalist data set, nor was there a significant difference in use by landscape class. Here, we examine this non-trophic relationship and comment on the potential of iNaturalist to study a morphologically complex plant that exists in environments ranging from remote natural areas to urban gardens.
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