
PLEASE NOTE:
- This seminar is IN PERSON ONLY in room RSM 2.28, Level 2, Royal School of Mines at Imperial College London’s South Kensington campus.
- Refreshments and the opportunity to network will take place after this seminar in RSM 3.24.
GUEST SPEAKER:
Professor Mario Vallejo-Marin, Professor in Ecological Botany at the Evolutionary Biology Centre, Uppsala University, Sweden.
SEMINAR TITLE:
Evolution and mechanics of buzz pollination
ABSTRACT:
Pollination, a form of balanced mutual exploitation between some plants and animals, is associated with diverse adaptations. Some bees have evolved a curious behaviour to extract pollen from certain flowers in which they apply vibrations produced with their thoracic muscle to rapidly remove pollen grains that they need as a protein source for their larvae. The use of vibrations to remove pollen gives rise to the phenomenon of buzz pollination.
Here, I will present an overview of buzz pollination from both plant and animal perspectives and discuss how different traits affect both the type of vibrations produced and their effects on pollen release from flowers. I will argue that mechanistic studies of buzz pollination across multiple taxonomic groups can inform us about the pathways of adaptation in both plants and animals.
BIOGRAPHY:
I am from Mexico but have spent the last 25 years abroad studying the ecology and evolution of plant reproduction. I did my PhD at Duke University, where I studied why some plants produce both hermaphroditic and male flowers in the same individual. I did a postdoc at the University of Toronto, working on floral adaptations that allow plants to manipulate bee pollinators. In 2008, I started as a Lecturer at the University of Stirling, Scotland. There, I began studying buzz pollination and was also fortunate to find and describe a recently evolved species of monkeyflower that originated in the last 200 years.
In 2022, I moved to Uppsala University, where I am currently a Professor in Ecological Botany at the Evolutionary Biology Centre. My lab studies plant evolution using a combination of field, greenhouse and lab experiments and combines tools from genomics to phylogenetics to biomechanics to study floral adaptations.