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Symbiosis

Transformation

Humus

Community

Diversity

Migration

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Roots

Entangled

Coexist

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December 1, 2020
By: Alisa King-Klemperer

Bees and humans are about as different organisms as one can imagine. Yet despite their many differences, surprising similarities in the ways that they interact socially have begun to be recognized in the last few years. Now, a team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, building on their earlier studies, have experimentally measured the social networks of honey bees and how they develop over time. They discovered that there are detailed similarities with the social networks of humans and that these similarities are completely explained by new theoretical modeling, which adapts the tools of statistical physics for biology. The theory, confirmed in experiments, implies that there are individual differences between honey bees, just as there are between humans.

An image obtained from the system showing barcoded bees inside the observation hive. Outlines reflect whether a barcode could be decoded successfully (green), could not be decoded (red), or was not detected (no outline). The hive entrance is in the lower-right corner, and theinset reveals two bees that were automatically detected performing trophallaxis.

The study, which measures the extent of individual differences in honey bee networking for the first time, was carried out by first author physics PhD student Sang Hyun Choi, postdocs Vikyath D. Rao, Adam R. Hamilton and Tim Gernat, Swanlund Chair of Physics Nigel Goldenfeld (BCXT leader/GNDP) and Swanlund Chair of Entomology and IGB Director Gene E. Robinson (GNDP). The collaboration comprised experimental measurements of honey bee social behavior performed by Hamilton, Gernat and Robinson, with data analysis by Rao and theoretical modeling and interpretation by Choi and Goldenfeld. Their findings were published in a recent article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

"Originally, we wanted to use honey bees as a convenient social insect to help us find ways to measure and think about complex societies," said Goldenfeld. "A few years ago, Gene, Tim, Vikyath and I collaborated on a large project that put "bar codes" on bees so that we could automatically monitor everywhere they went in the hive, every direction in which they pointed, and every interaction partner. In this way, we could build a social network in time, something known as a temporal network."

That study, done a few years ago, involved high-resolution imaging of barcode-fitted honey bees, with algorithms detecting interaction events by mapping the position and orientation of the bees in the images. In those studies, researchers focused on trophallaxis - the act of mouth-to-mouth liquid food transfer - when measuring the social interactions between honey bees. Trophallaxis is used not only for feeding but for communication, making it a model system for studying social interactions.

"We chose to look at trophallaxis because it is the type of honey bee social interaction that we can accurately track," said Choi. "Since honey bees are physically connected to each other by proboscis contact during trophallaxis, we can tell whether they are actually engaging in an interaction or not. In addition, each honey bee is tagged so we can identify each individual engaged in each interaction event."

"In our earlier work, we asked how long bees spend between events where they meet other bees, and we showed that they interact in a non-uniform way," said Goldenfeld. "Sang Hyun and I took the same data set, but now asked a different question: What about the duration of interaction events, not the time between interactions?"

In looking at the individual interactions, the time spent varied from short interactions to long interactions. Based on these observations, Choi developed a theory where bees exhibited an individual trait of attractiveness that could be likened to human interaction. For example, humans might prefer to interact with friends or family members rather than strangers.

"We developed a theory for this based on a very simple idea: if a bee is interacting with another bee, you can think of that as a sort of "virtual spring" between them," said Goldenfeld. "The strength of the spring is a measure of how attracted they are to each other so if the spring is weak, then the bees will quickly break the spring and go away, perhaps to find another bee with whom to interact. If the spring is strong, they may stay interacting longer. We call this theoretical description a minimal model, because it can quantitatively capture the phenomenon of interest without requiring excessive and unnecessary microscopic realism. Non-physicists are often surprised to learn that detailed understanding and predictions can be made with a minimum amount of descriptive input."

Goldenfeld explained that the mathematical framework for their theory originated from a branch of physics called statistical mechanics, originally developed to describe gas atoms in a container, and since extended to encompass all states of matter, including living systems. Choi and Goldenfeld's theory made correct predictions about the experimental honey bee dataset that was previously collected.

Out of curiosity, the theory was then applied to human datasets, revealing similar patterns as with the honey bee dataset. Choi and Goldenfeld then applied an economic measure for wealth and income disparities in humans - termed the Gini coefficient - to show that bees displayed disparities in attractiveness in their social interactions, although not as different as humans. These results indicate a surprising universality of the patterns of social interactions in both honey bees and humans.

"It is obvious that human individuals are different, but it is not so obvious for honey bees," said Choi. "Therefore, we examined the inequality in the activity level of the honey bees in a way that is independent of our theory to verify that honey bee workers are indeed different. Previous work done in our group has used the Gini coefficient to quantify the inequality in honey bee foraging activity so we thought that this method would also work to examine the inequality in trophallaxis activity."

"Finding such striking similarities between bees and humans spark interest in discovering universal principles of biology, and the mechanisms that underlie them," said Robinson.

The researchers' findings suggest that complex societies may have surprisingly simple and universal regularities, which can potentially shed light on the way that resilient and robust communities emerge from very different social roles and interactions. The researchers predict that their minimal theory could be applied to other eusocial insects since the theory does not involve honey bee-specific features.

In future studies, the same techniques from statistical mechanics can be applied to understand the cohesiveness of communities through well-characterized pair interactions, said Choi and Goldenfeld.

"This was my first project after I joined Nigel's group, and it took a long time for me to figure out the right way to approach the problem," said Choi. "It was fun and challenging to work on such an interdisciplinary project. As a physics student studying biological systems, I had never expected myself to use concepts from economics."

"It was very exciting to see how simple physical ideas could explain such a seemingly complex and widespread social phenomenon, and also give some organismal insights," said Goldenfeld. "I was very proud of Sang Hyun for having the persistence and insights to figure this out. Like all transdisciplinary science, this was a really tough problem to solve, but incredibly fascinating when it all came together. This is the sort of advance that arises from the co-location of different scientists within the same laboratory - in this case the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology."

December 1, 2020
By: Alisa King-Klemperer
Photos By: Tim Gernat

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Unexpected similarity between honey bee and human social life

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December 1, 2020 By: Alisa King-Klemperer Bees and humans are about as different organisms as one can imagine. Yet despite their many differences, surprising similarities in the ways that they interact socially have begun to be recognized in the last few years.

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Under climate change, such as global warming, food and water supplies for people become scarce, while homes and livelihoods of people are destroyed. As a result, death, displacement, hunger and unemployment as well as mass migration have also occurred. But the main culprit for these extreme climate crises is humans.
Bees, like humans, suffer from climate changes. Their habitat is destroyed as a result. Habitat fragmentation increases the vulnerability of these species as they are unable to expand their range in response to climate change. The rapid change of seasons means that pollinators can lose synchronism with the flowering plants they feed on. Many species were wiped out. Fewer bees means fewer pollinators, fewer crops, and less plant diversity. In this process, human society is not only limited by the shortage of natural resources, but also its economic interests are deeply affected in honey industry.
The pattern of social interaction between bees and humans is surprisingly universal. So, in my story, humans are bees, and bees are humans. Personify these endangered bees and listen to their conversations. Learn how their fellows are wiped out under extreme climate change, how they survive, how they will protect themselves from extinction.
This story aims at alerting human beings, protecting the environment and controlling unreasonable human activities. Don't be the next bee.

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Almost 90% of the world's wild plants depend on animal pollination, along with 75% of leading global crops. Pollinator species include wasps, ants, butterflies, beetles, moths and bees.

There are more than 250 species of bee in the UK, including the honey bee that normally lives in hives that are managed by beekeepers. Others, like many species of bumblebees and solitary bees live in the wild.

Bees in a modern, industrialised world are facing a range of complex and interacting threats, and the cumulative effect of which could affect the abundance and diversity of bee species. The IUCN list shows that as many as 24% of Europe's bumblebee species are now threatened with extinction, despite being worth a staggering £690 million per year to the UK economy.

Habitat fragmentation is generally thought to be the most important factor driving bee declines, but climate change is having an increasing role to play in their demise.

What can you do?

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Bees feel the sting of climate change in east England

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Almost 90% of the world's wild plants depend on animal pollination, along with 75% of leading global crops. Pollinator species include wasps, ants, butterflies, beetles, moths and bees. There are more than 250 species of bee in the UK, including the honey bee that normally lives in hives that are managed by beekeepers.

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In our reading, the story is based on a human protagonist who wants to bond with animals and become a symbiosis to adapt to survive in a future deteriorating earth. That also leads to the assumption that perhaps animals are even stronger in the face of a deteriorating environment. Although they do not have the technology or the more flexible humanism of humans, they have a more survival-of-the-fittest instinct and a more ordered social structure, which allows the order of survival to function more efficiently in the face of a shortage of resources. So, how do humans survive when they are the underdogs and all the tools used are degraded due to resource scarcity? Based on a resource-grabbing antagonistic relationship between humans and animals, I hypothesise the following story( if the animals are bees):

Humans become the inferior party, and bees become the superior party in a harsh future environment. In the deteriorating environment, the bee keeps expanding into various kinds of bees and keeps expanding the survival space which is occupied by them, making human beings think that they can rebuild their home by eradicating the bees, making it into an antagonistic relationship. However, due to the power of the bees, humans need to learn by going inside the bee society, learning how they survive, and finding their weaknesses. As humans and bees get along, humans find it impossible to understand the order of the bees because their purpose is to survive and maintain a steady state. In contrast, humans cannot subvert their beliefs as human beings, and it is not the purpose of human existence to reduce the diversity of cultures just for the sake of survival. Humanity's values collapse due to a lack of understanding. Throughout the process, the bee race, which comes from nature, gradually assimilates the value-collapsed human beings, making them identify with the changes in the environment themselves and become parasites of the bees.

So the question arises: is it the degradation of the environment that leads to the demise of humans, or is it the demise of other species? I think it is pessimistic for human beings; to protect the environment is to protect yourself, and what you think is the extinction of other organisms is only temporary; no one will know the laws of survival better than animals; they will only evolve to become more in line with the nature and the existence of human society can not be comprehended, intelligence is not the only tool for survival.

Therefore, to protect the environment is to protect human beings from facing a crueller future. It is not the Earth that will be destroyed, but man himself.

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2.4 Gaia hypothesis

The Gaia Hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock (1972) suggests that living organisms on the planet interact with their surrounding inorganic environment to form a synergetic and self-regulating system that created, and now maintains, the climate and biochemical conditions that make life on Earth possible. Gaia bases this postulate on the fact that the biosphere, and the evolution of organisms, affect the stability of global temperature, the salinity of seawater, and other environmental variables. For instance, even though the luminosity of the sun, the Earth's heat source, has increased about 30% since life began almost four billion years ago, the living system has reacted as a whole to maintain temperatures at a level suitable for life. Cloud formation over the open ocean is almost entirely a function of oceanic algae that emit sulfur molecules as waste metabolites, which become condensation nuclei for rain. Clouds, in turn, help regulate surface temperatures.

Lovelock compared the atmospheres of Mars and Earth and noted that the Earth's high levels of oxygen (21% atmospheric composition) and nitrogen (78%) were abnormal and thermodynamically in disequilibrium. The 21% oxygen content of the atmosphere is an obvious consequence of living organisms, and the levels of other gases, NH ₃ and CH ₄, are higher than would be expected for an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The biological activity also explains why the atmosphere is not mainly CO ₂ and why the oceans are not more saline. Gaia postulates that conditions on Earth are so unusual that they could only result from the activity of the biosphere.

Consider what might be learned from the history of Earth's sister planet Venus. Today Venus has a surface temperature of 840°F (450°C) and an atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide, with a density 90 times that of Earth's. However, for much of its history, Venus likely had an Earth-like climate, with oceans, rain, perhaps snow, maybe even continents and plate tectonics, and even more speculatively perhaps even life on its surface. Then, less than a billion years ago, Venus' climate dramatically changed due to a runaway greenhouse effect. It can be speculated that an intensive period of volcanism pumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause this great climate change event that evaporated the oceans, caused the end of the water cycle, and significantly raised temperatures, and ended any possibilities of life.

Scientists have discovered the world's oldest forest in an abandoned quarry near Cairo, New York. The 385-million-year-old rocks contain the fossilized woody roots of dozens of ancient trees (Stein et al., 2019). These trees mark an important stage in the Earth's history. When trees evolved roots, they began to take the CO ₂ sequestered from the atmosphere and store it away - radically shifting the climate and contributing to the atmosphere that we have today.

The CLAW hypothesis illustrates the principle of the Gaia Hypothesis. The Phanerozoic Eon, the current geologic eon in the geologic time scale, covers 541 million years to the present, during which abundant animal and plant life has existed. During this period, the greenhouse gas CO ₂ in the global carbon cycle has played a critical role in the maintenance of the Earth's temperature within the limits of habitability. The CLAW hypothesis (Charlson et al., 1987), derived from the author's initials and inspired by the Gaia hypothesis, proposes that a feedback loop operates between ocean ecosystems and the Earth's climate (Fig. 2.1). This hypothesis posits an example of planetary-scale homeostasis where phytoplankton, which produces dimethyl sulfide are responsive to variations in climate forcing, and that these responses lead to a negative feedback loop that acts to stabilize the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere.

This negative feedback loop begins with an increase in the available energy from the sun causing an increase in the growth rates of phytoplankton due to elevated temperature and/or enhanced photosynthesis resulting from increased irradiance. Certain phytoplankton, such as coccolithophorids, synthesize dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP), and their enhanced growth increases its production, leading to an increase in the concentration of its breakdown product, dimethyl sulfide (DMS), first in seawater and then in the atmosphere. DMS is oxidized in the atmosphere to form sulfur dioxide, and this leads to the production of sulfate aerosols. These aerosols act as cloud condensation nuclei and increase the number of cloud droplets, which in turn elevate the liquid water content of clouds and cloud area. This results in an increase in cloud albedo, leading to the greater reflection of incident sunlight and a decrease in the forcing that initiated this chain of events.

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18.1.2 The Gaia Hypothesis

The Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock, 1972; Lovelock and Margulis, 1973) postulates: "the climate and chemical composition of the Earth's surface environment is, and has been, regulated in a state tolerable for the biota" (Lovelock, 1989, p. 215). The Gaia hypothesis ( Figure 18.1) - named after the Greek goddess of Earth by the author William Golding (Lovelock, 2009) - was criticized for not fully factoring in evolution by natural selection and, in particular, competition between organisms (e.g., Dawkins, 1982). In response, Lovelock contended that, "In no way is this [Gaia] theory a contradiction of Darwin's great vision. It is an extension to it to include the largest living organism in the Solar System, the Earth itself" (Lovelock, 1986, p. 25). The Daisyworld model (Figure 18.2) (Lovelock, 1983; Watson and Lovelock, 1983) was developed to illustrate how Gaia may work (Kump and Lovelock, 1995). It also provides an initial 'mathematical framework' for understanding self-regulation (Lenton, 1998).

Daisyworld is an imaginary planet, similar in many respects to Earth, on which grow only daisies. The daisies have an abundance of nutrients and water. Their ability to spread across the planetary surface depends only on temperature, and the relationship is parabolic, with minimum, optimum, and maximum temperatures for growth. The climate system is correspondingly simple. There are no clouds, and no greenhouse gases [GHGs]. The planetary energy balance is a function only of solar insolation, albedo and surface temperature, and planetary albedo depends on the areal coverage of the soil (which is grey) by black and white daisies.

(Kump and Lovelock, 1995, p. 539)

(Reprinted from Kump and Lovelock, 1995; with permission from Elsevier.)

The Gaia hypothesis has evolved over time, generating further research to test its robustness and advance the notion of a holistic ES. For example, "When introduced, this [Gaia] hypothesis was contrary to conventional wisdom that life adapted to planetary conditions as it and they evolved in their separate ways. We now know that the hypothesis as originally stated was wrong because it is not life alone but the whole ES that does the regulating" (Lovelock, 2009, p. 166). In a paper presented at the United Nations University in Tokyo on 25 September 1992, Lovelock explained that, although contentious, the Gaia hypothesis has generated many experiments (Lovelock, 1993). This section describes how - through these experiments - researchers have attempted to elucidate how the ES works by using climate as an illustrative example of how processes and feedbacks can operate homeostasis. Indicative of this thinking is the investigation of the role of algae in the ocean and its control of Earth's climate through the dimethyl sulfide (DMS) process.

18.1.2.1 Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS) and Climate Regulation

DMS, central to numerous atmospheric processes, plays an important role in climate regulation (Kump and Lovelock, 1995; Ayers and Gillett, 2000). How an understanding of DMS was attained illustrates the evolution of integrated ESs thinking. For instance, Ayers and Gillett (2000) explain that, despite the effort of a small group of researchers (e.g., Junge and Manson, 1961; Fletcher, 1962), initial sulfur studies were limited. This was particularly because the source of aerosol sulfur in regions far removed from volcanoes or anthropogenic emissions of sulfur dioxide had yet to be determined, making it problematical to balance global sulfur budgets. The solution came "with the suggestion by Lovelock et al. (1972) that DMS was the 'missing' biogenic source of sulfur needed to balance the global atmospheric sulfur budget" (Ayers and Gillett, 2000, p. 276).

Recognition of the importance of DMS, combined with earlier cloud microphysical studies (e.g., Twomey, 1977; Twomey et al., 1984) that made the connection between droplet numbers and cloud radiative transfer properties (Ayers and Gillett, 2000), led to the CLAW ¹ hypothesis (Charlson et al., 1987). This hypothesis postulates, "biological regulation of the climate is possible through the effects of temperature and sunlight on phytoplankton population and dimethyl sulfide production" (Charlson et al., 1987, p. 665). In other words, DMS emissions from the oceans are influenced by climate and climate (through the impact of cloud albedo on the radiation budget) is affected by Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN) emanating from DMS emissions, "making climate and DMS emissions interdependent and closing a feedback loop" (Ayers and Gillett, 2000, p. 276).

Looking at the elucidation of DMS as part of the whole planet's chemistry and its importance to climate regulation, it seems that the systems approach advocated by Lovelock and others was an important framework. For example, Lenton (1998) argues that the Gaia hypothesis was used to make predictions, such as "marine organisms would make volatile compounds that can transfer essential elements from the ocean to the land. The discovery that dimethyl sulfide and methyl iodide are the major atmospheric carriers of the sulfur and iodine cycles, respectively, support this suggestion." (Lenton, 1998, p. 440). Another early example of ES framing using climate as an illustrator is seen in research on vegetation and climate interactions.

18.1.2.2 Vegetation and Climate Interactions

When large changes were recognized as occurring in tropical rainforests (e.g., Salati and Vose, 1984), tests were conducted to try to determine their climatic impact (e.g., Henderson-Sellers and Gornitz, 1984). Fundamental aspects of this research included the use of stable water isotopes to track hydrological changes (e.g., Salati et al., 1979; McGuffie and Henderson-Sellers, 2004) and model simulations of tropical deforestation that helped elucidate the importance of an accurate representation of vegetation in global climate modelling (e.g., Dickinson and Henderson-Sellers, 1988; Henderson-Sellers et al., 2008).

Tropical deforestation simulations indicated a "sensitivity of the local climate to the removal of tropical forest.... Moreover, the scale of moisture convergence changes, and possibly also cloud and convection changes, is such that there is a possibility that nonlocal climatic impacts may also occur" (Zhang et al., 1996, p. 1516). Further studies (e.g., Zhang et al., 2001) found that tropical deforestation can impact large-scale atmospheric circulation. This supported previous Global Climate Model (GCM) studies (e.g., Sud et al., 1988) and suggested that land-use change (e.g., tropical deforestation) may affect projections of future climate (cf. Pitman and de Noblet-Ducoudré, 2012, this volume). However, research in Amazonia had yet to be studied in an interdisciplinary manner (Dickinson, 1987), a central tenet of an ESs approach.

Although it was not clear how deforestation might threaten interdependent (homeostatic) systems because "our scientific framework is yet inadequate to make such judgments" (Dickinson, 1987, p. 1), and well before detailed disciplinary research of the 1990s-2000s, research scientists joined an international conference on 'Climatic, Biotic, and Human Interactions in the Humid Tropics with Emphasis on the Vegetation and Climatic Interactions in Amazonia' in Brazil in 1985. This meeting brought together some of the world's top scientists to examine critical processes linking climate and vegetation in the tropics. The humid tropics were chosen as the focus because they were deemed of fundamental importance to the global climate. The urgent need to carefully analyse land-use change and climate in the humid tropics was combined with a desire to communicate research findings clearly (Figure 18.3).

Tropical forests are vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change through disturbances in precipitation and temperature (e.g., Lewis et al., 2011) and the compounding effects of tropical deforestation and greenhouse warming on climate have been investigated for some time (e.g., Zhang et al., 2001; Fearnside, 2011). There are many synergies operating among local people's survival, climate, vegetation, and land-use change in the humid tropics. For example, as Fearnside (2011) notes, "Because half of the dry weight of the trees in a tropical forest is carbon, either deforestation or forest die-off releases this carbon in the form of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO ₂) and methane (CH ₄), whether the trees are burned or simply left to rot" (Fearnside, 2011, p. 1283).

Gradually, as tropical forests became a key part of climate change research and policy debate, simulations became more like 'Gaian-type experiments' in which researchers attempted to describe how the ES works by using disturbances to the tropical forests' climate as an exemplar (e.g., Henderson-Sellers et al., 1988). An integrated systems approach (big picture perspective) evolved through the lens of ESS. This understanding prompted the concept of teleconnections and tipping points resulting from tropical deforestation in Amazonia, Africa, and South East Asia, as discussed by Lenton (2012, this volume). Nobre (2011, personal communication) made the following comments:

Prompted by a need to create a scientific framework to better understand these complex processes, the workshop on Vegetation and Climatic Interactions in Amazonia in 1985 helped advance an integrated Earth systems approach. The Conference recommendations evolved into central Large-Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) themes of understanding the Amazon as a regional entity of the Earth system and of studying how climate and land cover changes can alter its physical, chemical and biological functioning.

C. Nobre, personal communication, 2011

Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis advanced understanding that a planet with abundant life will have an atmosphere with 'thermodynamic disequilibrium' and that "Earth is habitable because of complex linkages and feedbacks between the atmosphere, oceans, land, and biosphere", which helped shape ESS (Lawton, 2001, p. 1965). The remainder of this section focuses on the genesis and evolution of ESS.

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Read full chapter URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0122270908000403 The Gaia Hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock (1972) suggests that living organisms on the planet interact with their surrounding inorganic environment to form a synergetic and self-regulating system that created, and now maintains, the climate and biochemical conditions that make life on Earth possible.