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Communicating results and ideas to a wider audience has been an important, but challenging component of scientists working in an academic environment. Particularly in recent decades, various social media platforms have become increasingly important to facilitate this. In addition, many scientists have used blogging platforms to communicate and discuss their work. Although the online dynamics of science communication are continuously changing, blogging has been used in a remarkably stable form for several decades. For this work, we brought several ecology bloggers to reflect on blogging as a science communication medium. We argue that blogging can be a powerful way to present new ideas and discuss them with a wide audience. Although blogs are not the same as scientific articles, they often serve as the initial brainstorm session. Importantly, we argue that blogs are most effective when bloggers and readers actively engage in conversations. We believe that blogging will be here to stay in science communication because of its unique and independent form of outreach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A majority of the world's flowering plants benefit from insect pollination. Bees in particular are known to carry large amounts of pollen, and the pollen load transported is often highly conspecific. However, there is limited knowledge about the transfer of pollen by other non‐bee flower‐visiting insect taxa.We observed and collected insects visiting flowers in an Australian alpine plant community. We identified insect body pollen loads to evaluate the relative differences among taxa using visitation and pollen transport networks. We sampled a diverse pollinator community from 39 insect families that visited 31 plant species (n = 488 individual insects).Pollen abundance and richness on insect bodies varied significantly among Diptera, Hymenoptera and Lepidoptera both among individuals and across insect families.Bees carried more pollen overall than the other three insect orders surveyed, yet dipterans were the most frequent flower visitors overall, with six dipteran families observed visiting flowers more frequently than the most frequent hymenopteran visitor (Apis mellifera L.). Apidae was also the only family in this study to carry consistently large quantities of pollen.At the order level, Diptera carried the second highest quantity of pollen but greater diversity of pollen than other insect orders. Importantly, visitation networks revealed visits to plant taxa that were not identified in pollen transport networks and vice versa.Given the missing links in both visitor observation and pollen transfer networks, we advocate combining both types of networks to provide a more accurate estimate of the full range of plant–pollinator interactions occurring within and across taxa at the community level. Understanding the variation in plant–pollinator interactions as a result of differences among taxa and between networks of flower visitors, pollen transfer is important to evaluate the level of generalisation/specialisation among plants and their pollinator partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 2017, ecologist Caspar Hallmann of Radboud University in the Netherlands and his colleagues published an analysis of data from the Entomological Society Krefeld in Germany that showed a [...]

Insects are important pollinators of global food crops and wild plants. The adult and larval diet and habitat needs are well known for many bee taxa, but poorly understood for other pollinating taxa. Non‐bee pollinators often feed on different substrates in their larval and adult life stages, and this diet and habitat diversity has important implications for their conservation and management. We reviewed the global literature on crop pollinating Diptera (the true flies) to identify both larval and adult fly diet and habitat needs. We then assembled the published larval and adult diets and habitat needs of beneficial fly pollinators found globally into a freely accessible database. Of the 405 fly species known to visit global food crops, we found relevant published evidence regarding larval and adult diet and habitat information for 254 species, which inhabited all eight global biogeographic regions. We found the larvae of these species lived in 35 different natural habitats and belong to 10 different feeding guilds. Additionally, differences between adult Diptera sexes also impacted diet needs; females from 14 species across five families fed on protein sources other than pollen to start the reproductive process of oogenesis (egg development) while males of the same species fed exclusively on pollen and nectar. While all adult species fed at least partially on floral nectar and/or pollen, only five species were recorded feeding on pollen and no fly larvae fed on nectar. Of the 242 species of larvae with established diet information, 33% were predators (n = 79) and 30% were detritivores (n = 73). Detritivores were the most generalist taxa and utilized 17 different habitats and 12 different feeding substrates. Of all fly taxa, only 2% belonged to the same feeding guild in both active life stages. Our results show that many floral management schemes may be insufficient to support pollinating Diptera. Pollinator conservation strategies in agroecosystems should consider other non‐floral resources, such as wet organic materials and dung, as habitats for beneficial fly larvae. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]