Betsy: So What Have I Been Up To at the University?

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Several people have emailed to ask what research I’ve been doing and will be doing on my sabbatical here in Haifa. In this entry, I’ll try to answer that question in only a few paragraphs.

I proposed coming to Haifa originally for two projects, one on post-wildfire habitat restoration with the Israeli National Park Service and one on pollination biology of a mimetic orchid with pollination biologist Amots Dafni at the University of Haifa. The wildfire project was designed to take advantage of the almost simultaneously ignited fires from last summer’s war with Hezbollah--every Katusha rocket that hit northern Israel created a “controlled burn,” and the National Park Service proposed to establish paired plots inside and outside of 75 burns of different sizes across the northern Israel landscape. Unfortunately, the set-up was not funded, so I won’t be working on that project this year.

The orchid study involves an orchid (Orchis israelitica) whose flowers offer pollinators no reward at all, but that look like (i.e., mimic, apparently to the pollinators) the flowers of a simultaneously-blooming lily (Bellavalia flexuosa) that offers abundant nectar rewards. The system was originally described by my host, Amots Dafni, in the 1970’s, and essentially no other work has been done with the system. I’m interested in looking at the pollination success of the orchid mimic and its lily model at different proportions in mixtures with the underlying question, “If the orchid is very successful, does its pollination success, and perhaps that of the model lily, suffer because the pollinators more often get no reward?” Although the orchid is an endemic, protected species in Israel, the lily is widespread and abundant, so I can manipulate it to change the relative abundances of the two species. I’m also interested in measuring the effect of the surrounding floral abundance on the pollination success of the orchid. Perhaps it gets sufficient incidental pollinator visits if there are many other flowers in bloom even though it doesn’t look like any of them.

The orchid begins to bloom in late January or early February and continues into mid-March. Although many orchids bloom in the area around Haifa, for this species, I will need to go to the northern Galilee. I eagerly anticipate help from my most recent senior thesis student from Puget Sound, Kaitlin Lubetkin, who will be joining me to work on this question.

Amots has been extremely generous with lab space and support for my sabbatical here, and I am helping his lab with their current projects until the orchid season comes up. In the process, I’m learning some great techniques to assess pollen viability, stigma receptivity, pollen load on pollinators, etc. The Dafni lab is currently investigating the pollination biology of carob trees, which are one of the few native species that bloom at the end of the summer. The carob has separate male and female trees and in both sexes, the flowers arise rather bizarrely from the trunks and branches. The male trees produce both pollen and nectar as rewards whereas the female trees produce only nectar. So the question is, “Why would pollinators move from the male trees (that supply more rewards) to the female trees (that supply fewer rewards)? A previous Dafni student tested the composition of the nectars to see if they perhaps supplied different necessary dietary components, but found no differences. We are currently investigating whether the male and female trees produce the bulk of their nectar at different times of the day.

As the season progresses, we may move to an investigation of pollination of the native poppy anemone (Anemone coronaria). Although the anemone flowers come in many colors (see the photo I stole from the web), the most common color is red. The red flowers are also unique among the colors in that they follow the sun during the day (they are heliotropic). We are interested in finding out if their relative abundance is related to pollination success, and if their pollination success is related to their heliotropic movements. The anemones bloom Jan - March, and there are thousands of them in the national park adjacent to the University (Har Ha-Carmel).

As you can see, there will be more than enough to keep me occupied and intellectually excited over this sabbatical year!

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