Heat waves: Stupor in Arctic Bumblebees

The current worldwide biodiversity undergoes one of the largest species extinction. Biodiversity decline results from numerous interacting factors, especially climate change. One of the main phenomenons related to climate change is the increase of the frequency of extreme event such as heat waves. Since the heat waves dramatically increase the bee mortality, the worldwide key pollinators, there is an urgent need to predict the consequences of heat waves on important organisms for ecosystem services. However these predictions remain difficult without bioassays because of each species have its own thermo-tolerance. In this study, we develop a comparative bioassay approach in 6 species of widespread, arctic and mountainous bumblebees using a new experimental portable device to determine the heat stress tolerance in order to predict consequences of local heat waves. Our results show a thermo-tolerance gradient: the thermo-tolerance of Arctic species is lower than the thermo-tolerance of mountainous species which is itself lower than widespread species. This study paves the way to a large scale assessment of heat stress tolerance of insects, a further step in their conservation

Ensuring access to high-quality resources reduces the impacts of heat stress on bees

Pollinators are experiencing declines globally, negatively affecting the reproduction of wild plants and crop production. Well-known drivers of these declines include climatic and nutritional stresses, such as a change of dietary resources due to the degradation of habitat quality. Understanding potential synergies between these two important drivers is needed to improve predictive models of the future effects of climate change on pollinator declines. Here, bumblebee colony bioassays were used to evaluate the interactive effects of heat stress, a reduction of dietary resource quality, and colony size. Using a total of 117 colonies, we applied a fully crossed experiment to test the effect of three dietary quality levels under three levels of heat stress with two colony sizes. Both nutritional and heat stress reduced colony development resulting in a lower investment in offspring production. Small colonies were much more sensitive to heat and nutritional stresses than large ones, possibly because a higher percentage of workers helps maintain social homeostasis. Strikingly, the effects of heat stress were far less pronounced for small colonies fed with suitable diets. Overall, our study suggests that landscape management actions that ensure access to high-quality resources could reduce the impacts of heat stress on bee decline.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Transition in the production of diploid-female to haploid-male eggs in bumblebee colonies: sperm quality or depletion?

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Heat resistance variability in the Lebanese bee fauna

peer reviewedWild bees are facing many environmental challenges that are reshaping their distributions and even causing extinctions. One of the common threats is climate change leading to a higher frequency of extreme climatic events such as heat waves. We focused on the bee fauna of the eastern Mediterranean country of Lebanon and assessed intra- and interspecific variability of the heat stress resistance in correlation with dry body weight, altitude, and collection date. We used the time before heat stupor (THS) at 40 °C in semi-controlled conditions as a proxy for heat resistance. We found significant interspecific differences in heat resistance, and a positive correlation with dry weight in some taxa. At the intraspecific level, there was a significant difference in heat resistance between sexes for some species. Also, dry/fresh weights, altitude, and collection date were correlated to a higher heat resistance in some taxa. In the context of global changes, we argue that we need heat tolerance metrics for a better understanding of bee decline and to enhance conservation measures at regional scale.15. Life on lan

WorldSense: A Synthetic Benchmark for Grounded Reasoning in Large Language Models

We propose WorldSense, a benchmark designed to assess the extent to which LLMs are consistently able to sustain tacit world models, by testing how they draw simple inferences from descriptions of simple arrangements of entities. Worldsense is a synthetic benchmark with three problem types, each with their own trivial control, which explicitly avoids bias by decorrelating the abstract structure of problems from the vocabulary and expressions, and by decorrelating all problem subparts with the correct response. We run our benchmark on three state-of-the-art chat-LLMs (GPT3.5, GPT4 and Llama2-chat) and show that these models make errors even with as few as three objects. Furthermore, they have quite heavy response biases, preferring certain responses irrespective of the question. Errors persist even with chain-of-thought prompting and in-context learning. Lastly, we show that while finetuning on similar problems does result in substantial improvements -- within- and out-of-distribution -- the finetuned models do not generalise beyond a constraint problem space

Contribution of Cerebellar Sensorimotor Adaptation to Hippocampal Spatial Memory

Complementing its primary role in motor control, cerebellar learning has also a bottom-up influence on cognitive functions, where high-level representations build up from elementary sensorimotor memories. In this paper we examine the cerebellar contribution to both procedural and declarative components of spatial cognition. To do so, we model a functional interplay between the cerebellum and the hippocampal formation during goal-oriented navigation. We reinterpret and complete existing genetic behavioural observations by means of quantitative accounts that cross-link synaptic plasticity mechanisms, single cell and population coding properties, and behavioural responses. In contrast to earlier hypotheses positing only a purely procedural impact of cerebellar adaptation deficits, our results suggest a cerebellar involvement in high-level aspects of behaviour. In particular, we propose that cerebellar learning mechanisms may influence hippocampal place fields, by contributing to the path integration process. Our simulations predict differences in place-cell discharge properties between normal mice and L7-PKCI mutant mice lacking long-term depression at cerebellar parallel fibre-Purkinje cell synapses. On the behavioural level, these results suggest that, by influencing the accuracy of hippocampal spatial codes, cerebellar deficits may impact the exploration-exploitation balance during spatial navigation

Monitoring bee health in European agroecosystems using wing morphology and fat bodies

Current global change substantially threatens pollinators, which directly impacts the pollination services underpinning the stability, structure and functioning of ecosystems. Amongst these threats, many synergistic drivers, such as habitat destruction and fragmentation, increasing use of agrochemicals, decreasing resource diversity, as well as climate change, are known to affect wild and managed bees. Therefore, reliable indicators for pollinator sensitivity to such threats are needed. Biological traits, such as phenotype (e.g. shape, size and asymmetry) and storage reserves (e.g. fat body size), are important pollinator traits linked to reproductive success, immunity, resilience and foraging efficiency and, therefore, could serve as valuable markers of bee health and pollination service potential. This data paper contains an extensive dataset of wing morphology and fat body content for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) and the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) sampled at 128 sites across eight European countries in landscape gradients dominated by two major bee-pollinated crops (apple and oilseed rape), before and after focal crop bloom and potential pesticide exposure. The dataset also includes environmental metrics of each sampling site, namely landscape structure and pesticide use. The data offer the opportunity to test whether variation in the phenotype and fat bodies of bees is structured by environmental factors and drivers of global change. Overall, the dataset provides valuable information to identify which environmental threats predominantly contribute to the modification of these traits

Thermomechanical characterization and wear mechanisms identifica- tion of a low-pressure and high-pressure abradable coating under extreme

La réduction des jeux fonctionnels aubes/carter permet d’augmenter le rendement global d’un turboréacteur en limitant les fuites inter-étages. Cependant, les vibrations inhérentes au système ou l’ingestion de corps étrangers tend à produire des interactions aube/carter initiées en bout d’aube qui peuvent mener à la ruine du turboréacteur. L’utilisation de revêtements dits « abradables » permet de limiter la conséquence de ces interactions. En cas de contact avec les parties tournantes, le matériau abradable va « s’abrader » de façon préférentielle par rapport au bout d’aube en limitant les énergies d’interaction. Ces matériaux sont étudiés depuis de nombreuses années sur des bancs expérimentaux dans le but de développer des modèles numériques prédictifs. L’objectif de ces travaux de thèse est la caractérisation expérimentale de deux revêtements abradables du compresseur basse pression – l’AlSi-PE – et haute pression – le Metco 2043 – sur un banc expérimental existant. La configuration adoptée est simplifiée et se dédouane de la dynamique d’aube et du turboréacteur. La caractérisation thermomécanique des deux revêtements de l’étude a été rendue possible grâce à la corrélation des efforts d’interaction, des échauffements produits par le contact et des endommagements induits. Les développements technologiques ont permis de réaliser des essais représentatifs jusqu’à 135 m s−1 et 720 ◦C. Une modélisation semi-analytique basée sur la technique des fonctions de Green a également été mise en place pour estimer la température au contact et les coefficients de répartition du flux thermique dans l’aube et le revêtement abradable. Les résultats numériques ont finalement été corrélés à un essai pilote pour valider l’approche.Reducing gaps between blades and the casing allows an increasing of the aircraft engines effi- ciency. Moreover, blade/casing interactions, mainly due to engine vibrations, may occur. They are localized at the blade tip and may lead to the engine failure. Specific materials called « abradable materials » are used to reduce interactions impact. When an interaction occurs, the abradable ma- terial will be worn preferentialy to the blade and limits the interaction energies. Those materials are studied since many years on experimental devices to develop predictive numerical models. The purpose of this thesis is the experimental characterization of two abradable materials grades from the low-pressure compressor – the AlSi-PE grade – and from the high-pressure compressor – the CoNiCrAlY-hBN grade – on an experimental device. The experimental configuration is simpli- fied and doesn’t take in account the blade’s and casing’s dynamic phenomena. Thermomechanical characterization of two coatings was performed thanks to the correlation between forces, tem- peratures and wear mechanisms. Technological developments allowed representative tests up to 135 m/s and 720 °C. Semi-analytical modeling with Green’s techniques has been used to predict friction temperatures and heat distribution coefficients in the blade and the abradable material. Results have been correlated to an experimental test to approve the model

A protocol to assess the heat stress resistance of insects applied to bumblebees

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