Application deadline: October 13th
We invite applications for a fully-funded, full time PhD studentship to work as part of a multi-disciplinary team (including behavioural biologists and physiologists) on a project funded by UKRI (BBSRC) that is aiming to understand and predict the effects of the thermo-nutritional developmental environment upon the life history of two key UK wild bee species, and the consequent implications for pollination services. The aim of the PhD studentship will be to develop computational models that will form a key part of the overall project, underpinning our predictions of how environmental variables affect the life history of two bee species.
The UK has ~245 species of wild bees, collectively performing more pollination than managed honeybees and bumblebees. All animals need a balance of key nutrients, such as protein, carbohydrate and fat, in their diets for growth, maintenance and reproduction. However, different environmental conditions, such as temperature, may necessitate different balances. Temperature affects animals’ metabolic rate, physiology, digestion, and nutrient assimilation. For bees, this is an unassessed and possibly serious threat both to their health and their pollination services upon which we depend for our food security. Bees' health depends on access to a mix of nutrition appropriate for the conditions - but the climate is heating up, so this ideal mix may change. Crucially, if this affects bees’ flower choices, then the pollination services bees provide today may not be the same at higher temperatures.
To address these issues and achieve the central aim of the project, we will study two wild pollinator species representing two distinct contrasting lifestyles of UK bees - social-nesting buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris), and solitary-nesting red mason bees (Osmia bicornis). Both are commercially important pollinators, but they have important differences in life history that may result in different responses to nutrition and temperature.
The successful candidate will have a background in a quantitative or computational scientific discipline (e.g. Informatics, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering). They will use these skills to apply cutting-edge modelling techniques to create and parameterise computational models using a combination of existing experimental data gathered by the project team and previous literature. The models will be used to: (i) test hypotheses relating bee development, health and reproduction to achieve changes in practice (such as the sowing of wildflower strips of different nutritional composition in the context of predicted temperature shifts); and (ii) augment existing published models of bee reproduction and effectiveness as pollinators across conditions, landscapes and climates, making them nutritionally and thermally explicit.
The PGR will use, among others, Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) models that permit modelling of multiple physiological parameters across bees’ life histories. Such models use reaction kinetics and physico-chemical processes to dynamically estimate the uptake, allocation and usage of nutrients into and out of different functional pools (structure, reserve, maturity, reproduction) across organisms' lifetimes. The models will be implemented in Python, R or MATLAB.
The broader project team will consist of three main investigators who will act as supervisors for the PhD candidate. Dr James Gilbert is the principal investigator, based at the University of Hull. He is a behavioural ecologist who has pioneered rearing protocols for the economically and ecologically important solitary bee, Osmia bicornis, providing an unprecedented window onto their nutritional ecology. Prof. Jeremy Niven, a co-supervisor based at the University of Sussex, is an insect physiologist with extensive experience in computational modelling of physiological systems. Dr Beth Nicholls, a co-supervisor also based at the University of Sussex is a behavioural biologist and ecologist whose work has primarily focussed on bumblebees. Nicholls and Niven used in vitro feeding of honeybee larvae to show that dietary protein:carbohydrate ratio affected growth, survival, and the scaling of metabolic rate.