Sonja Glasser Awarded AFRI-NIFA Fellowship for Research on Bee Community Diversity
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Sonja Glasser, a PhD candidate in the College of Natural Sciences’s Organismic & Evolutionary Biology graduate program, recently received a predoctoral fellowship from the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), which will support her research on how bee community diversity affects infectivity and virulence of a shared gut pathogen.
NIFA awards AFRI research, education, and extension grants to champion initiatives such as improving rural economies, increasing food production, stimulating the bioeconomy, and mitigating impacts of climate variability.
“Typically, research on bee pathogens focuses on surveying infection prevalence in bee communities, which is used as an important proxy for assessing their health,” explains Glasser. “My project will use the natural variation of bee communities across Western Massachusetts to ask, how does the diversity of bees' present affect how bad they can get sick? This project, made possible by receiving the AFRI Predoctoral Fellowship, will set me up for a career in research where I will continue to investigate bees' relationships with their parasites.”
Loss of biodiversity is considered a great risk to the health of natural communities and humanity. One way loss of biodiversity negatively affects communities is by worsening the effects of infectious diseases among community members. This is especially true among bees, which are essential in the pollination of not only wild plants, but also the world’s agricultural crops.
“Just like humans, bees can get sick and can spread their sickness to other bees,” argues Glasser. “Unfortunately, some bee species populations are experiencing sharp declines, with parasites and pathogens as a contributing factor. Because some parasites are shared between many bee species, having fewer species in a community might affect how the parasite evolves and its ability to infect. For example: bumble bees are often infected by a common gut parasite that also infects many other bee pollinators.”
Understanding how the different types of bees in a pollinator community can impact infection in bumble bees is essential for conserving native bee pollinators and pollination services. For this reason, Glasser will employ this grant toward testing how the number of bee species in a pollinator community affects the ability of a parasite to infect and damage bumble bees and other native bee species.
With this predoctoral fellowship, Glasser aims to make a significant contribution to the study of the ecological communities we all rely on: “Advancing our knowledge of host-parasite interactions in pollinator communities will help us to predict the consequences of diversity loss and inform management practices supporting pollinator diversity in agricultural and natural settings. Protecting diversity is crucial for maintaining balance of the ecosystems we share with our non-human neighbors.”