Monthly Meeting: Charlie Thrift

Concentrated Vulnerabilities in Bees: Diet Specialists Have Smaller Geographic Ranges with Charlie Thrift

Charlie Thrift is a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara advised by Katja Seltmann (Big-Bee project) and Hillary Young. His interest in bees began as an over-correction from his mom’s fear of bees, and was further fostered by his time in high school in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History’s teen science program, Quasars to Sea Stars. Charlie seeks to inform bee conservation through a combination of museum specimens, field work, and community science. He will talk about his recently published research! Wild bees with small geographic ranges or narrow diet breadths may be more vulnerable to anthropogenic change. Using occurrence data and diet breadth data for 633 bee species from six families, we find a positive correlation between these two traits. This concentrates vulnerabilities in a subset of specialist bees, but may also provide an opportunity for targeted conservation efforts.

Register for the Zoom meeting here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/DF42A-q9SnKXBUI4MB0utg