So, the mere presence of flowers doesn’t necessarily mean the bees are getting nutritionally adequate food.

This matters because climate change is altering both the quantity and nutritional composition of pollen and nectar. At the same time, what nutrition the bees need is likely shifting, too. This creates rapidly moving goalposts – it’s increasingly difficult for bees to find and consume the right nutrients they need to reproduce, develop and survive.

In our new paper published in Current Opinion in Insect Science, we argue these changes are unlikely to affect all bees equally. Currently, most of what we know about bee nutrition comes from highly social species such as honeybees or bumblebees.

Yet most bees, including many native Australian species, are solitary or communal (group living but with no queens and workers). They might experience the nutritional landscape and nutritional stress in very different ways.

Understanding these differences is crucial for predicting which bees are most vulnerable under climate change.

Not all bees will encounter nutritional stress

One way to better understand vulnerability to nutritional stress is to think about the traits that shape how different bees interact with their environments. These include:

• how far they can forage
• how flexible their diets are
• whether they live alone or in groups
• how large those groups tend to be.

These traits can influence whether bees even encounter nutritional stress in the first place.

For example, a species with a large foraging range and a broad diet might live in a nutritionally poor landscape, but still be able to travel far enough, or combine pollen from different flowers, to meet its nutritional requirements. In contrast, species with narrower diets or shorter foraging ranges might have fewer opportunities to balance their diets.

Native stingless bees, such as Tetragonula carbonaria, generally forage over shorter distances than honeybees. This could make them more dependent on the nutritional quality of nearby flowers and more vulnerable to a changing climate.

Living in a group may help a little

Once nutritional stress occurs, other traits will determine how this stress is buffered and absorbed.

T. carbonaria, for instance, live in colonies with workers that collect food and share resources. This kind of social organisation can buffer short-term changes in the environment. Even if their foraging range is small, and one floral resource declines for a season, a colony might be able to shift foraging effort, draw on stored resources, or distribute food among nestmates and brood.

But despite potential buffering, poor nutrition can still impact social species. This can show up as fewer offspring, slower colony growth, smaller workers, weaker immunity, or reduced ability to cope with other stressors, such as heat or pesticides.

Solitary bees might have fewer safety nets

Solitary bees, by contrast, will likely face different problems when it comes to nutritional stress. Many native bees, such as blue banded bees (Amegilla chlorocyanea, pictured below), don’t benefit from the support of a colony.

A single female must find a nest, collect pollen, lay eggs and provide food for her offspring. Under predictable conditions, this can be a very effective way of interacting with the environment.

However, if the right flowers are missing, bloom too late, or produce pollen containing different nutrients to what the bee has evolved to expect, the effects could be more immediate: fewer nests, smaller offspring, fewer daughters and lower chance of survival.

In these species, the condition of one female can shape the next generation, so poor nutrition might lead to rapid population declines. This means the timing and quality of floral resources are likely to be especially important for many of our native bees.

How we can help our native bees

To accurately predict how species respond to climate change, future studies will need to connect floral nutrition with bee performance in real landscapes. Most importantly, we need to include a diverse range of bees with different social lives and traits in these studies.

For now, there are still practical steps we can take to support our native bees at home. Rather than simply planting more flowers, we need to be more deliberate about what we plant.

Native plants are of course important, but we should plant them in diverse mixes, to account for variability in nutritional availability and timing.

The same applies to nesting habitats. Many native bees will not use a hive or a bee hotel. Some need bare or lightly disturbed ground; others use stems, wood or existing cavities.

So avoid the urge to over-manage every patch of ground – leave some bare earth and dead branching stems in your roses and other plants. This will make your garden or landscape more useful to more bees, so we can help support them in this rapidly changing world.

The post Most bees are solitary and don’t live in hives. Climate change risks them starving appeared first on MASSIVE News.

Much more recently, one of its wing bones was discovered in Brazil, transformed over the aeons into a fossil made of a complex assemblage of different chemicals and minerals.

And in new research published in iScience, my colleagues and I found that the fossil bone still holds secrets of the creature’s life, including microscopic inner structures of its bones and molecular traces of its biology and diet.

A fossil treasure from Brazil

The fossil comes from the Romualdo Formation in the Araripe Basin of northeastern Brazil, one of the world’s most spectacular fossil deposits. The site has yielded exquisitely preserved fish, turtles, crocodile relatives, and pterosaurs.

Many fossils from the Romualdo Formation are preserved inside rounded rock nodules known as carbonate concretions. These mineral structures form shortly after burial, effectively sealing the remains from the environment. Think of them as natural time capsules.

Our fossil is a hollow wing bone, or phalanx. Pterosaur bones were thin and lightweight to aid flight, so they are rarely preserved in such detail.

Using high-resolution CT scanning, we examined the bone’s interior without breaking it open. The scans revealed layers of minerals with different densities filling the cavity – evidence of a complex sequence of chemical events that preserved the bone. We used several other methods to identify the minerals.

Microbes helped decay – and preservation

The fossil’s exceptional preservation may have begun with decay. As the pterosaur’s body decomposed on the ancient seafloor, microbes broke down tissues and altered sediment chemistry. These changes triggered the rapid formation of phosphate minerals.

One mineral in particular, called fluorapatite, formed within and around the bone, stabilising delicate features before they could be lost. Under the microscope, we could still see microscopic canals that once carried nutrients through living tissue.

Mineral analysis revealed evidence of microbial activity. We detected barite and celestite, minerals associated with sulphur-using bacteria. These microbes drove chemical reactions that helped create the conditions necessary for preservation.

In other words, ancient microbes didn’t just decay the body, they also helped preserve it for science.

A mineral vault for ancient molecules

After early phosphate minerals stabilised the bone, a sequence of calcite layers gradually formed inside and around it. These derived largely from carbon released during the decay of fatty tissue.

First, a thin layer of fine-grained calcite formed along the bone surface, followed by a second, slightly coarser-grained one. Over a longer period of time, larger calcite crystals formed, ultimately filling the bone cavity.

Analysis showed this calcite was low in an isotope called carbon-13, which indicates it partly came from organic carbon sources, such as fatty lipids and residual bone material. In contrast, any remaining organic matter in the bone appears to have relatively high levels of carbon-13.

The multi-layered mineral barrier acted like a geological vault, protecting delicate structures and organic compounds trapped in the bone from chemical degradation for millions of years. This protection allowed molecular traces such as steroid biomarkers and collagen fibre patterns to survive, giving us a rare window into the biology and diet of this ancient flying reptile.

Molecular traces of ancient life

Within this mineralised structure, we detected molecular traces of life called steranes, which are derived from steroidal lipids once present in living cells. To our knowledge, this is the first time steroid biomarkers have been reported from a pterosaur fossil.

Even more exciting, these molecules carry dietary clues. Carbon isotope analysis of cholesterol-derived compounds suggests this pterosaur likely fed on fish or squid-like marine animals, which is what we would expect from the shape of its teeth and skull.

The fossil also preserves microscopic structures resembling collagen fibres, the protein framework that strengthens bone. Although chemically altered over millions of years, the fibre patterns remain visible and resemble those seen in modern birds, which are distant relatives of pterosaurs.

Reading fossils in new ways

Discoveries like this one are transforming how we study fossils. Instead of examining only bone shapes, we can now recover chemical and molecular fingerprints as well.

Understanding how these exceptional fossils form may help identify other specimens capable of preserving ancient biomolecules. More broadly, our findings show that under the right conditions, molecular traces of life can survive for more than 100 million years.

Even after millions upon millions of years, ancient life can still leave behind chemical clues waiting to be discovered. As analytical techniques continue to advance and unusual modes of preservation become better understood, there is increasing potential to recover previously inaccessible information.

In the future, we may even be able to detect ancient DNA fragments or other molecular remnants in exceptionally preserved fossils, including those of dinosaurs and pterosaurs.

The post Microbes destroyed an ancient pterosaur’s wingbone, then preserved it for 100 million years appeared first on MASSIVE News.

The news doesn’t stop when markets close. Hosts David Gura, Christina Ruffini and Lisa Mateo bring clarity, context and a bit of humor to the weekend’s biggest headlines, LIVE from New York. Joined by Swarovski CEO Alexis Nasard, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Senior Scholar Dr. Amesh Adalja, and Pacific University Political Science Professor Jules Boykoff.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Bloomberg This Weekend Begins

00:02:12 – News Now with Lisa Mateo

00:05:43 – SpaceX IPO Raises $75B in Biggest Debut of All Time

00:13:50 – Pakistan PM Expects Final US-Iran Deal within 24 hrs

00:21:17 – Lisa Mateo with News Now

00:23:08 – Risk of Infectious Diseases at World Cup

00:31:49 – Why Nike Keeps Stumbling | Bloomberg Originals

00:35:22 – Musk Becomes World’s First Trillionaire

00:38:22 – The Rise of America’s New Robber Barons

00:45:16 – Living with Nuns; Wedding Witches | BTW

00:51:59 – Top of the Hour 8:00a

00:53:54 – News Now with Lisa Mateo

00:57:32 – SpaceX Sold 555.6M Shares On First Trading Day

01:10:05 – Lisa Mateo with News Now

01:11:54 – Iran FM: Deal “Has Never Been Closer”

01:23:34 – News Now with Lisa Mateo

01:25:58 – Global Tensions Rise Amidst World Cup

01:33:43 – Consumers Turn to a Caffeine Minimalism Diet

01:40:28 – Top of the Hour 9:00a

01:42:03 – Lisa Mateo with News Now

01:45:20 – Axios: Trump, Netanyahu Spoke of Deal Thursday

01:58:34 – News Now with Lisa Mateo

02:00:31 – Swarovski CEO on Company’s “Pop Luxury” Rebrand

02:08:48 – Swarovski Souvenirs on Set

02:12:28 – Knicks Chase First NBA Title Since 1973

02:22:28 – Pointed

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