Asking the pikas politely…
I present a project to (1) assess intra-seasonal variation in the quantity and nutritional content of pollen and nectar and (2) link nutritional variation to foraging patterns in a community of wild insect pollinators. It is reasonable to expect that nutritional traits may exhibit substantive intra-seasonal variation, likely in response to phenological and environmental drivers, but we currently lack any framework for assessing the extent of such variation and how it could impact survival, foraging, and pollen transfer by insect pollinators. My goal with this project is to characterize weekly variation in nectar and pollen nutrients and assess how that variation impacts pollinator foraging and pollen collection. I hypothesize that the nutritional traits of pollen and nectar will vary in response to phenological and environmental drivers and that this intra-seasonal nutritional variation has a substantive impact on pollinator foraging.