CHRISTINE CARSONBumblebee tongues are getting shorter—and it’s in part because of climate change, researchers concluded in a study published last week (September 25) in Science. In North America’s Rocky Mountains, summers have warmed up and flower populations have declined, giving bees with shorter tongues an advantage—they can access nectar from many types of flowers, whereas specialized bees with longer tongues are limited to flowers with a specific shape.
A team of researchers led by Candace Galen of the University of Missouri investigated how bumblebees in the Rocky Mountains were coping with documented flower declines in alpine areas; researchers have correlated the floral declines with higher summer temperatures that dry out the soil. The team measured changes in tongue length in two bee species. “Bumblebees with longer tongues specialize on flowers with deep, long tubes, while short-tongued bumblebees, in contrast, are generalists and tend to alight on a variety of flowers,” Galen explained in a press release.
Galen and her colleagues used 170 specimens kept in the University of Colorado Entomology Museum and other collections. The specimens were collected between 1966 and 1980, and between 2012 and 2014. The researchers discovered that average tongue ...
