Judith Lee Bronstein | |
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| Born | June 4, 1957 |
| Citizenship | United States |
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| Occupation | University Distinguished Professor |
| Employer | University of Arizona |
Judith Lee Bronstein is an American ecologist and evolutionary biologist who researches mutualisms, or positive species interactions. [1] She has edited multiple books and volumes, including Mutualism, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. [2]
Bronstein received a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in 1979 as an independent major focused on the use of ecological theory in environmental policymaking. She received her Masters and Doctorate degrees in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan in 1986. Her doctoral dissertation research examined coevolution and constraints in a Neotropical fig-pollinator wasp mutualism. [3]
Bronstein received additional training as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow in Evolutionary Genetics at Centre Louis Emberger in Montpellier, France, in 1987. [4] She then worked as an Isaak Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Alberta in 1988. [1] [5]
Since 2012 Judith Bronstein has been a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Arizona. [1] She has worked in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Arizona since 1989, when she was hired as an assistant professor. [6] Bronstein also worked as an adjunct professor at University of Miami from 1995-2010 and as a Visiting Professor at Duke University from 1999-2002, University of Puerto Rico in 1998, and University of Paris in 1989. In 2007-2008, Bronstein was a Program Director in the Division of Environmental Biology of the National Science Foundation. [1]
Bronstein has served on a number of editorial boards for scientific journals, including as a Book Review Consultant for the Quarterly Review of Biology , as an editorial board member for Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics , and as Editor in Chief for The American Naturalist. [6]
Research in her Lab focuses on the ecology and evolution of mutualisms. She uses both field and laboratory experiments to examine topics including conflicts of interest in mutualisms, context-dependent outcomes in mutualisms and antagonisms, and the causes and consequences of "cheating" in mutualisms. [6] Her research is both theoretical [7] and empirical, and much of her recent studies have focused on exploitation in pollination mutualisms [8] [9] and variation in the outcomes of ant-plant protection mutualisms. [10] [11]
Mutualism describes the ecological interaction between two or more species where each species has a net benefit. Mutualism is a common type of ecological interaction. Prominent examples are:
In biology, coevolution occurs when two or more species reciprocally affect each other's evolution through the process of natural selection. The term sometimes is used for two traits in the same species affecting each other's evolution, as well as gene-culture coevolution.
In ecology, a biological interaction is the effect that a pair of organisms living together in a community have on each other. They can be either of the same species, or of different species. These effects may be short-term, or long-term, both often strongly influence the adaptation and evolution of the species involved. Biological interactions range from mutualism, beneficial to both partners, to competition, harmful to both partners. Interactions can be direct when physical contact is established or indirect, through intermediaries such as shared resources, territories, ecological services, metabolic waste, toxins or growth inhibitors. This type of relationship can be shown by net effect based on individual effects on both organisms arising out of relationship.
Evolutionary ecology lies at the intersection of ecology and evolutionary biology. It approaches the study of ecology in a way that explicitly considers the evolutionary histories of species and the interactions between them. Conversely, it can be seen as an approach to the study of evolution that incorporates an understanding of the interactions between the species under consideration. The main subfields of evolutionary ecology are life history evolution, sociobiology, the evolution of interspecific interactions and the evolution of biodiversity and of ecological communities.
Parallel evolution is the similar development of a trait in distinct species that are not closely related, but share a similar original trait in response to similar evolutionary pressure.
The Prodoxidae are a family of moths, generally small in size and nondescript in appearance. They include species of moderate pest status, such as the currant shoot borer, and others of considerable ecological and evolutionary interest, such as various species of "yucca moths".
Myrmecophytes are plants that live in a mutualistic association with a colony of ants. There are over 100 different genera of myrmecophytes. These plants possess structural adaptations in the form of domatia where ants can shelter, and food bodies and extrafloral nectaries that provide ants with food. In exchange for these resources, ants aid the myrmecophyte in pollination, seed dispersal, gathering of essential nutrients, and defense. Domatia adapted specifically to ants may be called myrmecodomatia.
Entomophily or insect pollination is a form of pollination whereby pollen of plants, especially but not only of flowering plants, is distributed by insects. Flowers pollinated by insects typically advertise themselves with bright colours, sometimes with conspicuous patterns leading to rewards of pollen and nectar; they may also have an attractive scent which in some cases mimics insect pheromones. Insect pollinators such as bees have adaptations for their role, such as lapping or sucking mouthparts to take in nectar, and in some species also pollen baskets on their hind legs. This required the coevolution of insects and flowering plants in the development of pollination behaviour by the insects and pollination mechanisms by the flowers, benefiting both groups. Both the size and the density of a population are known to affect pollination and subsequent reproductive performance.
Nectar is a viscous, sugar-rich liquid produced by plants in glands called nectaries, either within the flowers with which it attracts pollinating animals, or by extrafloral nectaries, which provide a nutrient source to animal mutualists, which in turn provide herbivore protection. Common nectar-consuming pollinators include mosquitoes, hoverflies, wasps, bees, butterflies and moths, hummingbirds, honeyeaters and bats. Nectar plays a crucial role in the foraging economics and evolution of nectar-eating species; for example, nectar foraging behavior is largely responsible for the divergent evolution of the African honey bee, A. m. scutellata and the western honey bee.
In zoology, a nectarivore is an animal which derives its energy and nutrient requirements from a diet consisting mainly or exclusively of the sugar-rich nectar produced by flowering plants.
Ornithophily or bird pollination is the pollination of flowering plants by birds. This sometimes coevolutionary association is derived from insect pollination (entomophily) and is particularly well developed in some parts of the world, especially in the tropics, Southern Africa, and on some island chains. The association involves several distinctive plant adaptations forming a "pollination syndrome". The plants typically have colourful, often red, flowers with long tubular structures holding ample nectar and orientations of the stamen and stigma that ensure contact with the pollinator. Birds involved in ornithophily tend to be specialist nectarivores with brushy tongues and long bills, that are either capable of hovering flight or light enough to perch on the flower structures.
Myrmecophily consists of positive, mutualistic, interspecies associations between ants and a variety of other organisms, such as plants, other arthropods, and fungi. It may also include commensal or even parasitic interactions.
Nectar robbing is a foraging behavior used by some organisms that feed on floral nectar, carried out by feeding from holes bitten in flowers, rather than by entering through the flowers' natural openings. Nectar robbers usually feed in this way, avoiding contact with the floral reproductive structures, and therefore do not facilitate plant reproduction via pollination. Because many species that act as pollinators also act as nectar robbers, nectar robbing is considered to be a form of exploitation of plant-pollinator mutualism. While there is variation in the dependency on nectar for robber species, most species rob facultatively.
Insect ecology is the interaction of insects, individually or as a community, with the surrounding environment or ecosystem. This interaction is mostly mediated by the secretion and detection of chemicals (semiochemical) in the environment by insects. Semiochemicals are secreted by the organisms in the environment and they are detected by other organism such as insects. Semiochemicals used by organisms, including (insects) to interact with other organism either of the same species or different species can generally grouped into four. These are pheromone, synomones, allomone and kairomone. Pheromones are semiochemicals that facilitates interaction between organisms of same species. Synomones benefit both the producer and receiver, allomone is advantageous to only the producer whiles kairomones is beneficial to the receiver. Insect interact with other species within their community and these interaction include mutualism, commensalism, ammensalism, parasitism and neutralisms.
Conservation is the maintenance of biological diversity. Conservation can focus on preserving diversity at genetic, species, community or whole ecosystem levels. This article will examine conservation at the species level, because mutualisms involve interactions between species. The ultimate goal of conservation at this level is to prevent the extinction of species. However, species conservation has the broader aim of maintaining the abundance and distribution of all species, not only those threatened with extinction. Determining the value of conserving particular species can be done through the use of evolutionary significant units, which essentially attempt to prioritise the conservation of the species which are rarest, fastest declining, and most distinct genotypically and phenotypically.
Ecological fitting is "the process whereby organisms colonize and persist in novel environments, use novel resources or form novel associations with other species as a result of the suites of traits that they carry at the time they encounter the novel condition". It can be understood as a situation in which a species' interactions with its biotic and abiotic environment seem to indicate a history of coevolution, when in actuality the relevant traits evolved in response to a different set of biotic and abiotic conditions.
Evolving digital ecological networks are webs of interacting, self-replicating, and evolving computer programs that experience the same major ecological interactions as biological organisms. Despite being computational, these programs evolve quickly in an open-ended way, and starting from only one or two ancestral organisms, the formation of ecological networks can be observed in real-time by tracking interactions between the constantly evolving organism phenotypes. These phenotypes may be defined by combinations of logical computations that digital organisms perform and by expressed behaviors that have evolved. The types and outcomes of interactions between phenotypes are determined by task overlap for logic-defined phenotypes and by responses to encounters in the case of behavioral phenotypes. Biologists use these evolving networks to study active and fundamental topics within evolutionary ecology.
Pedro Diego Jordano Barbudo is an ecologist, conservationist, researcher, focused on evolutionary ecology and ecological interactions. He is an honorary professor and associate professor at University of Sevilla, Spain. Most of his fieldwork is done in Parque Natural de las Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas, in the eastern side of Andalucia, and in Doñana National Park, where he holds the title of Research Professor for the Estación Biológica Doñana, Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). Since 2000 he has been actively doing research in Brazil, with fieldwork in the SE Atlantic rainforest.
Robert A. Raguso is an American biologist and professor at Cornell University in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior. He has expanded the field of chemical ecology by introducing and pioneering floral scent as a key component of plant-pollinator communication, with special focus on hawkmoths and Clarkia plants.
Plant-animal interactions are important pathways for the transfer of energy within ecosystems, where both advantageous and unfavorable interactions support ecosystem health. Plant-animal interactions can take on important ecological functions and manifest in a variety of combinations of favorable and unfavorable associations, for example predation, frugivory and herbivory, parasitism, and mutualism. Without mutualistic relationships, some plants may not be able to complete their life cycles, and the animals may starve due to resource deficiency.
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