Signatures of increasing environmental stress in bumblebee wings over the past century: Insights from museum specimens.

ABSTRACT: Determining when animal populations have experienced stress in the past is fundamental to understanding how risk factors drive contemporary and future species' responses to environmental change. For insects, quantifying stress and associating it with environmental factors has been challenging due to a paucity of time-series data and because detectable population-level responses can show varying lag effects. One solution is to leverage historic entomological specimens to detect morphological proxies of stress experienced at the time stressors emerged, allowing us to more accurately determine population responses. Here we studied specimens of four bumblebee species, an invaluable group of insect pollinators, from five museums collected across Britain over the 20th century. We calculated the

SUBMITTER: Arce AN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10086799 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature