Exposure to a fungicide for a field-realistic duration does not alter bumble bee fecal microbiota structure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Social bees are frequently exposed to pesticides when foraging on nectar and pollen. Recent research has shown that pesticide exposure not only impacts social bee host health but can also alter the community structure of social bee gut microbiotas. However, most research on pesticide–bee gut microbiota interactions has been conducted in honey bees; bumble bees, native North American pollinators, have received less attention and, due to differences in their ecology, may be exposed to certain pesticides for shorter durations than honey bees. Here, we examine how exposure to the fungicide chlorothalonil for a short, field-realistic duration alters bumble bee fecal microbiotas (used as a proxy for gut microbiotas) and host performance. We expose small groups of Bombus impatiens workers (microcolonies) to field-realistic chlorothalonil concentrations for 5 days, track changes in fecal microbiotas during the exposure period and a recovery period, and compare microcolony offspring production between treatments at the end of the experiment. We also assess the use of fecal microbiotas as a gut microbiota proxy by comparing community structures of fecal and gut microbiotas. We find that chlorothalonil exposure for a short duration does not alter bumble bee fecal microbiota structure or affect microcolony production at any concentration but that fecal and gut microbiotas differ significantly in community structure. Our results show that, at least when exposure durations are brief and unaccompanied by other stressors, bumble bee microbiotas are resilient to fungicide exposure. Additionally, our work highlights the importance of sampling gut microbiotas directly, when possible. IMPORTANCE With global pesticide use expected to increase in the coming decades, studies on how pesticides affect the health and performance of animals, including and perhaps especially pollinators, will be crucial to minimize negative environmental impacts of pesticides in agriculture. Here, we find no effect of exposure to chlorothalonil for a short, field-realistic period on bumble bee fecal microbiota community structure or microcolony production regardless of pesticide concentration. Our results can help inform pesticide use practices to minimize negative environmental impacts on the health and fitness of bumble bees, which are key native, commercial pollinators in North America. We also find that concurrently sampled bumble bee fecal and gut microbiotas contain similar microbes but differ from one another in community structure and consequently suggest that using fecal microbiotas as a proxy for gut microbiotas be done cautiously; this result contributes to our understanding of proxy use in gut microbiota research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".