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Bee Season
There are certain challenges that come with researching honeybees and paper wasps. They may, for instance, become quite agitated if you approach them on the wrong day. Or, if it's a particularly harsh winter, thousands could perish in the blink of an eye and with them would go your research sample. But one of the biggest challenges must be to remain calm when one happens to find its way down your shirt.
Starks and his students have gotten this view and then some, and their research has helped expose a truly unique world. "One of our discoveries has to do with the ability of a colony to mount a group level temperature response to disease," says Starks. "We introduced a particular infection that impacts young, developing larvae into some of our hives and used temperature probes to measure the temperature of the brood comb. We noticed that the temperature within the hive spiked in response to the infection. An infection like this can do a number on a colony, so what honeybees do is elevate the temperature of a hive to the point that the fungal pathogen can't take root in the larvae. It's sort of a preventative fever." Along with this group response, the Starks Lab has also found that when the temperature outside a hive fluctuates honeybees can form a living "heat shield" and that worker paper wasps, instead of helping their fellow workers, sometimes depart the hive to form their own. The lab also has its share of other questions, some of which are being explored by Noah Wilson-Rich and Susan Weiner. "Many paper wasps found a colony with another reproductive female, which is usually her sister," says Weiner. "When this happens, they form a linear dominance hierarchy where the dominant animal will lay most, and sometimes all, of the eggs. The subordinate basically takes a worker role. However, when the rest of the workers emerge the subordinate female usually disappears. It was believed that either the dominant female or the workers would chase her away. But there isn't an increase in aggression observed. My hypothesis is that, instead, these subordinates go off and try to usurp or adopt other nests in the area and raise workers that are relatively near to emergence. They will then be able to raise their own brood of reproductives." Noah Wilson-Rich's primary research differs from Weiner's both for his research subjects (i.e., honeybees) and the area he's focusing on (i.e., immune response). "My major bee study this year has been to compare immune strength between colonies," says Wilson-Rich, who visited the Veterinary School a few days a week last summer to collect bees from different colonies. "One of the questions I'm exploring is if the genetic diversity of a colony corresponds to their immune strength or otherwise health. There has been documentation in the scientific literature of this relationship in honeybees, whereas colonies from polyandrous queens had less variance in survival than colonies with monogamous queens in response to a disease challenge. I'm trying to find out how genetic diversity affects particular aspects of the immune response, and then incorporate these data into a mathematical model of how diseases are spread through social groups. Epidemiological questions are tough to answer empirically with humans, because it's unethical to send an infected person to a crowded area and record how the disease spreads. Honeybees, however, make an excellent model system to study the relationship between group dynamics and disease transmission." Wilson-Rich plans to write a research paper on this cross-colony immune response in the future. For now, though, most of his work involves analyzing the data he has gathered. "I am testing the hypothesis that colonies with low genetic diversity will have more variability in their disease susceptibility," says Wilson-Rich, who is also researching the immune strength of the invasive paper wasp species, Polistes dominulus. SIBLING RIVALRY Professor Starks began studying paper wasps in the early 1990s. He added honeybees to his research repertoire several years later. In truth, it's difficult to truly pin down Starks' research interests. Over the course of his academic career, he has published over 30 papers which have focused on, along with honeybees and paper wasps, ants, solitary bees, and human beings. He recently submitted a paper on howler monkeys, and hopes to add ants to the research agenda of the Starks Lab in the near future. Starks wasn't always interested in animal behavior, though. He had originally planned on attending medical school. But, after taking courses in evolution and ecology as a Harvard University undergraduate, he realized that his interests lay elsewhere. "There was no way [after taking these courses] that I was going to study anything else," says Starks, who transferred to Harvard after attending Northern Essex Community College. "So, I dropped my plans for medical school and decided I wanted to study the behavioral ecology of naked mole rats. I thought they were the coolest things on earth." During his time as an undergraduate, Starks worked with a post-doctoral researcher, Dr. H. Kern Reeve, who was studying paper wasps. Reeve eventually became a faculty member at Cornell University and, following graduation, Starks followed him there, enrolling as a Ph.D. student. It was during this time that Starks began researching paper wasps in earnest, and he soon discovered that sibling rivalry isn't only present in the human world. "Early in my graduate career [at Cornell], I identified some previously undescribed aggressive behavior of paper wasps," he says. "My research at the time involved marking wasps, videotaping their natural behavior on nests, and having undergraduates help the research by transcribing the videotapes. Over the course of five years, I had a total of 70 undergraduates transcribe videotapes of wasps on their nests. I always gave the students a list of things that they would see and one of them came up to me one day and said she was seeing something that wasn't on the list. It turns out that sisters would take a male sibling and shove him headfirst into an empty nest cell when food came back to the colony. This was our previously undescribed aggressive behavior. We called this practice 'male-stuffing'." Starks graduated from Cornell in 1999 with a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior and, after serving as a Miller Fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California, Berkeley, arrived at Tufts in 2002. Today, along with his research duties, he teaches courses in areas such as animal behavior and Darwinian medicine. THE SECRET LIVES OF HONEYBEES AND PAPER WASPS It would be difficult to find two graduate students as different as Noah Wilson-Rich and Susan Weiner conducting research in the same lab at Tufts. Wilson-Rich, who is originally from Fairfield, Connecticut, rarely interacted with nature as a child and had a deep-seated fear of spiders and, yes, bees growing up. Weiner's affection for the natural world, on the other hand, has run deep since childhood. "When I was four years old, I went to the American Museum of Natural History," she says. "The museum was running a demonstration and they put a huge cockroach in my hand. I thought it was wonderful, and I sat there staring at it. My parents wanted to leave and tried to take it away, but I wouldn't let them. I said something like, 'It's my cockroach! You gave it to me!'" How did two vastly different individuals end up in the same lab? Much of it has to do with Professor Philip Starks. "I chose Tufts primarily for Phil Starks," says Wilson-Rich. "I think that he, first and foremost, was someone that I wanted to work with. I appreciate his vitality, and he's really interested in teaching and educating. Also, working with bees and wasps in the field challenges me to get over my innate fear of these creatures by learning more about them." Adds Weiner, "The biggest reason I came to Tufts was Phil. I thought his work was fascinating. He cares very much about everyone in the lab, and I like the fact that everything he's involved with seems like it's very important to him." Testimonials like these serve as proof that the Starks Lab isn't just about honeybees and paper wasps. Much like a hive, it's about those inside who, together, are working toward a common goal—in this case, to shed light on the secret lives of honeybees and paper wasps. "I study social insects and I like the work to be social, too," says Starks. "There's not a lot of competition here in the lab. There's a lot of cooperation." Article by Robert Bochnak, G07 Photos of Professor Philip Starks and his graduate students by Jodi Hilton. This article originally appeared in the spring 2007 edition of Alma Matters, the magazine for Tufts Arts, Sciences, and Engineering graduate alumni. |
