Counting marmots…
Organisms must often make developmental decisions without complete information about future conditions. This uncertainty-for example, about the duration of conditions favorable for growth-can favor bet-hedging strategies. Here, we investigated the causes of life cycle variation in Osmia iridis, a bee exhibiting a possible bet-hedging strategy with co-occurring 1- and 2-year life cycles. One-year bees reach adulthood quickly but die if they fail to complete pupation before winter; 2-year bees adopt a low-risk, low-reward strategy of postponing pupation until the second summer. We reared larval bees in incubators in various experimental conditions and found that warmer-but not longer-summers and early birthdates increased the frequency of 1-year life cycles. Using in situ temperature measurements and developmental trajectories of laboratory- and field-reared bees, we estimated degree-days required to reach adulthood in a single year. Local long-term (1950-2015) climate records reveal that this heat requirement is met in only ∼7% of summers, suggesting that the observed distribution of life cycles is adaptive. Warming summers will likely decrease average generation times in these populations. Nevertheless, survival of bees attempting 1-year life cycles-particularly those developing from late-laid eggs-will be <100%; consequently, we expect the life cycle polymorphism to persist.
Knowledge graph centered on Two-year bee or not two-year bee? How voltinism is with 36 nodes and 199 connections. Top connected: The ecological and evolutionary significance of fr, An examination of synchrony between insect emergen, Lepidoptera, Osmia, Osmiini.
Items connected by shared entities, co-authorship, citations, or semantic similarity.