Assessment of Pollinator Preference of Native and Nonnative Perennial Flowering Plants in South Dakota’s Grasslands

With global pollinator decline continually worsening as a result of human action, concerned citizens and scientists alike have been looking for answers as to what can be done to help, and the question of whether native or non-native plants provide more benefit to pollinating insects has been long discussed in the scientific community. This research is intended to help answer that question by attempting to determine whether pollinators have a distinct preference between native and non-native plants when presented with both options. The hypothesis at outset of this project was that native plants would provide greater benefit to pollinators, whom they (presumably) evolved alongside, and would thus be selected more frequently than non-native plants. To test this, a collection of various native and non-native plants was deployed in a restored grassland in rural South Dakota and observed for 10 days. Data collected included abundance of different groups of insect visitors and the frequency at which they visited individual plants. Analysis of data gathered during the study showed that there was no clear preference between plants based on native status alone, but rather that differences in visitation frequency possibly occurred as result of individual differences between the species of plants used, meaning that a variety of factors, not necessarily just native status, should be considered when selecting plants with the intent of encouraging pollinator activity. These results can be interpreted by ecologists to provide guidance for further research questions concerning what morphological and physiological traits attract pollinators and why, as well as conservation-minded members of the general public on what species and varieties of plants may provide the most benefit to pollinators when gardening or landscaping. In addition to the findings associated with the main research question, data also showed that pollinating insects that are not native to the study region dominated observations throughout the duration of the study, which may also have contributed to the study’s findings as well as spark further research on the relative abundance of native vs. non-native pollinators in the study area. This information could help provide more insight on the state of South Dakota’s pollinator populations and allow for more focused interpretation of the results of this study and any others like it

William Faulkner and alcoholism : distilling facts and fictions.

Opinions about alcoholism as a construct, and opinions about William Faulkner’s alcoholism as a fact, have varied. By considering carefully the role alcohol plays in human society, and by looking at these matters of concern through several different lens models, we can explain both why Faulkner was attracted abnormally to alcohol and why others around Faulkner have responded ambivalently to him, to his drinking and to his fiction. Faulkner’s alcoholism was rumored and denied during his life (1897-1962), evaded and contested after his death, and consistently affirmed after 1980. Attention to David Minter and Joseph Blotner, biographers, reveals much about the shifted opinion. Evolutionary psychology establishes origins of alcoholism, and medical science of heredity, genetics, and neurophysiology describes the problem. Theoreticians such as Wayne Booth, Harold Bloom, Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek provide tools to explain why we vary in our narratives about our favored writers, their personal problems, and the quality of their works. Narrative and rhetorical choices such as telling vs. showing, framing, and word-choice determine focus in biographies. Likewise, Faulkner’s use of doubled-characters both conceals and reveals his own alcoholism in his fictions. The project argues for practice of simultaneity in the application of multiple perspectives. Links connect survival advantages, intoxication, divergent thinking, and heightened creativity, as well as chronic alcoholism, anhedonia, and impaired creativity. The project explains why Faulkner, early in his career, received a creative spark from drinking, was able to sustain this creative flame for a few years even as other bad consequences emerged, and then found his creativity extinguished in alcohol. His rise to fame, however, began exactly at the time that his creativity was waning; a fact that is not so much ironic as it is determined by a drive for others to cling to a creative leader beyond the height of his or her powers. Readers are ardently prone to persist in their attachments to favored writers who no longer function well, paralleling alcoholics who are ardently prone to drink after alcohol no longer benefits them. Both tendencies are coded in our genes