Valuing Insect Pollination Services with Cost of Replacement

Value estimates of ecosystem goods and services are useful to justify the allocation of resources towards conservation, but inconclusive estimates risk unsustainable resource allocations. Here we present replacement costs as a more accurate value estimate of insect pollination as an ecosystem service, although this method could also be applied to other services. The importance of insect pollination to agriculture is unequivocal. However, whether this service is largely provided by wild pollinators (genuine ecosystem service) or managed pollinators (commercial service), and which of these requires immediate action amidst reports of pollinator decline, remains contested. If crop pollination is used to argue for biodiversity conservation, clear distinction should be made between values of managed- and wild pollination services. Current methods either under-estimate or over-estimate the pollination service value, and make use of criticised general insect and managed pollinator dependence factors. We apply the theoretical concept of ascribing a value to a service by calculating the cost to replace it, as a novel way of valuing wild and managed pollination services. Adjusted insect and managed pollinator dependence factors were used to estimate the cost of replacing insect- and managed pollination services for the Western Cape deciduous fruit industry of South Africa. Using pollen dusting and hand pollination as suitable replacements, we value pollination services significantly higher than current market prices for commercial pollination, although lower than traditional proportional estimates. The complexity associated with inclusive value estimation of pollination services required several defendable assumptions, but made estimates more inclusive than previous attempts. Consequently this study provides the basis for continued improvement in context specific pollination service value estimates

Cross-cutting principles for planetary health education

Since the 2015 launch of the Rockefeller Foundation Lancet Commission on planetary health,1 an enormous groundswell of interest in planetary health education has emerged across many disciplines, institutions, and geographical regions. Advancing these global efforts in planetary health education will equip the next generation of scholars to address crucial questions in this emerging field and support the development of a community of practice. To provide a foundation for the growing interest and efforts in this field, the Planetary Health Alliance has facilitated the first attempt to create a set of principles for planetary health education that intersect education at all levels, across all scales, and in all regions of the world—ie, a set of cross-cutting principles

Datasheet - Investigating hygienic behaviour and AFB resistance of Apis mellifera capensis colonies: are Cape honey bees hygienic and how well do they cope with the disease?

This is the raw data for "Investigating hygienic behaviour and AFB resistance of Apis mellifera capensis colonies: are Cape honey bees hygienic and how well do they cope with the disease?" paper. The dataset presents results obtained at 14 inspections after infecting colonies with AFB spores. The hygienic behavior of the colonies was evaluated prior to this experiment.</p

Identification of Multiple Loci Associated with Social Parasitism in Honeybees

In colonies of the honeybee Apis mellifera, the queen is usually the only reproductive female, which produces new females (queens and workers) by laying fertilized eggs. However, in one subspecies of A. mellifera, known as the Cape bee (A. m. capensis), worker bees reproduce asexually by thelytoky, an abnormal form of meiosis where two daughter nucleii fuse to form single diploid eggs, which develop into females without being fertilized. The Cape bee also exhibits a suite of phenotypes that facilitate social parasitism whereby workers lay such eggs in foreign colonies so their offspring can exploit their resources. The genetic basis of this switch to social parasitism in the Cape bee is unknown. To address this, we compared genome variation in a sample of Cape bees with other African populations. We find genetic divergence between these populations to be very low on average but identify several regions of the genome with extreme differentiation. The regions are strongly enriched for signals of selection in Cape bees, indicating that increased levels of positive selection have produced the unique set of derived phenotypic traits in this subspecies. Genetic variation within these regions allows unambiguous genetic identification of Cape bees and likely underlies the genetic basis of social parasitism. The candidate loci include genes involved in ecdysteroid signaling and juvenile hormone and dopamine biosynthesis, which may regulate worker ovary activation and others whose products localize at the centrosome and are implicated in chromosomal segregation during meiosis. Functional analysis of these loci will yield insights into the processes of reproduction and chemical signaling in both parasitic and non-parasitic populations and advance understanding of the process of normal and atypical meiosis

Characteristics of sweep regions containing gene candidates.

<p>Characteristics of sweep regions containing gene candidates.</p

A non-policing honey bee colony (Apis mellifera capensis)

In the Cape honey bee Apis mellifera capensis, workers lay female eggs without mating by thelytokous parthenogenesis. As a result, workers are as related to worker-laid eggs as they are to queen-laid eggs and therefore worker policing is expected to be lower, or even absent. This was tested by transferring worker- and queen-laid eggs into three queenright A. m. capensis discriminator colonies and monitoring their removal. Our results show that worker policing is variable in A. m. capensis and that in one colony worker-laid eggs were not removed. This is the first report of a non-policing queenright honey bee colony. DNA microsatellite and morphometric analysis suggests that the racial composition of the three discriminator colonies was different. The variation in policing rates could be explained by differences in degrees of hybridisation between A. m. capensis and A. m. scutellata, although a larger survey is needed to confirm this

A genome-wide scan for selection identifies several candidate loci in the Cape bee genome.

<p>Selection statistics associated with every SNP segregating between the Cape bees (<i>A</i>. <i>m</i>. <i>capensis</i>) and the African background population (<i>scutellata</i> + <i>adansonii</i>) (n = 6.2×10⁶). (A) The Fixation index (<i>F</i>_ST). Dark blue line is <i>F</i>_ST across 100kbp non-overlapping windows. Green lines are the 99.99% percentile (solid line; <i>F</i>_ST>0.44; n = 624), the 99.9% percentile (dashed line; <i>F</i>_ST>0.80; n = 6245) and the 99.5% percentile (dotted line; <i>F</i>_ST>0.24; n = 31,226). Highlighted in light blue are all SNPs associated with the 12 candidate sweeps labeled from A to L (<a href="http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006097#pgen.1006097.t001" target="_blank">Table 1</a>). See (D) below. (B) The Cross Population Extended Haplotype Homozygosity (XP-EHH) score of every SNP. Dark red line is the average XP-EHH across 100kbp non-overlapping windows. Green lines are the 99.99% percentile (solid line; XP-EHH>7.03; n = 622), the 99.9% percentile (dashed line; XP-EHH>4.11; n = 6224) and the 99.5% percentile (dotted line; XP-EHH>2.89; n = 31,120). Highlighted SNPs as in (D). (C) Haplotype divergence between the Cape bees, <i>scutellata</i> + <i>adansonii</i> and a European outgroup as measured using the Population Branch Statistic (PBS) for 1kbp non-overlapping windows. Dark green line is the average PBS across 100kbp non-overlapping windows. Green lines are the 99.99% percentile (solid line; PBS>1.99; n = 19), 99.9% percentile (dashed line; PBS>1.28; n = 190) and the 99.5% percentile (dotted line; PBS>0.51; n = 1946). Highlighted windows overlap with accessions in (D). (D) The composite selection score (CSS) of every SNP, based on the joint fractional rank for both <i>F</i>_ST and XP-EHH estimates of each SNP. Black line is the CSS computed from the fractional ranks of <i>F</i>_ST and XP-EHH for 100kbp non-overlapping windows. Green lines are the 99.99% percentile (solid line; CSS>3.33; n = 624), 99.9% percentile (dashed line; CSS>2.26; n = 6245) and the 99.5% percentile (dotted line; CSS>1.62; n = 31,226). Red dashed line at the minimum CSS level of the top 1000 SNPs within 8kbp from gene bodies (CSS>3.04; n = 1000; 97 accessions; <a href="http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006097#pgen.1006097.s012" target="_blank">S3 Table</a>). 25 of the 97 accessions have at least one SNP with allele frequency differences above the 99.99% percentile (<i>F</i>_ST>0.8) and are located into 12 putative selective sweeps (A–L; all SNPs associated with each accession are highlighted in blue; <a href="http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006097#pgen.1006097.t001" target="_blank">Table 1</a>). The three sweeps H (uncharacterized protein LOC100576557; chromosome 11), B (Ethr; chromosome 1) and D (<i>β</i>-glucosidase; chromosome 6) have the SNPs with the highest CSS.</p

Characteristics of sweep regions containing gene candidates.

<p>Characteristics of sweep regions containing gene candidates.</p

Geographical location of population samples.

<p>The thelytokous and parasitic Cape bee <i>Apis mellifera capensis</i> (lower ellipse) inhabits the Fynbos ecoregion (green) of South Africa. It was sampled from the western Fynbos (Stellenbosch, Cape Town; black circle) and eastern Fynbos (near Kragga Kamma Game Park, Port Elizabeth; white circle) and compared to two arrhenotokous and non-parasitic African populations (upper dashed ellipse). <i>A</i>. <i>m</i>. <i>scutellata</i> is widespread throughout of the Central Plateau and was sampled in the Pretoria region (yellow circle). A transitional zone with mixed phenotypes exists between the two subspecies (blue region). <i>A</i>. <i>m</i>. <i>adansonii</i> bees (pink) were sampled in Kaduna state, Nigeria (outside map). The schematic triangle specify the genome-wide levels of divergence between the three populations (<i>F</i>_ST estimator of Reynolds <i>et al</i>. [<a href="http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006097#pgen.1006097.ref104" target="_blank">104</a>]).</p