In recent decades, the populations of pollinators have been declining worldwide. This is increased by anthropogenic background factors such as agrochemical pollution, degradation of natural habitats, noise, dust and heavy metal loads from roads. Anthropogenic noise is a type of pollution that has so far been little studied, but it has been proven to negatively affect the physiology, nervous function and development of animals, and can also disrupt the perception of signals from the environment and the intraspecific communication based on acoustic signals.
In this project, we investigate the anthropogenic impacts on bumblebees’ behaviour in different noise environments. For data collection, we use action cameras in the field to record bumblebees and, at the same time, we also measure the environmental noise. We will analyse videos using cutting-edge deep-learning-based methods.
10th Congress of Apidology
Between 16 and 19 September, I had the pleasure of attending the 10th Congress of Apidology (organized by the Estonian University of Life Sciences) in Tallinn, Estonia. It was a special gift for me to be able to present a poster, entitled ‘Buzzing under pressure: Investigating the effects of anthropogenic…
Noise and pollination
In addition to wild pollinators visiting agricultural lands, ’commercial bumblebees’ (e.g. Bombus terrestris audax in Europea) have been used in glass houses and open-field cultivations worldwide since the 1980s. Indeed, bumblebees (Bombus sp.) are the most efficient pollinators for a wide variety of popular crops, such as tomatoes and strawberries,…
