Pollinators are declining on a global scale, the collateral damage of continued habitat destruction and urbanization. But Florida Museum curator, Jaret Daniels, says we already have many of the resources required to stave off further declines — we just need to make better use of them. Daniels is putting that idea to the test with two new projects funded by the Florida Department of Transportation and Duke Energy Florida.

Photograph by Lawrence Reeves, Florida Medical Entomology Lab

An interdisciplinary team led by Robert Guralnick, curator of biodiversity informatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has won a 2023 Research Opportunity Seed Fund award from the University of Florida. The grant will help launch a project to create a map forecasting the risk of two mosquito-borne diseases across the state.

Beginning 15 million years ago, Earth’s warm and relatively stable climate took a nosedive. Temperatures plummeted rapidly before tapering off to a slow decline that ultimately resulted in the ice ages. This was bad news for organisms adapted to the previously warm and wet environments, and extinction soon followed for many of them. Giant salamanders in the genus Batrachosauroides, once widespread through North America, were among the casualties. Previous fossil evidence indicated these salamanders disappeared right as temperatures began to drop, but a new discovery shows they were able to avoid the worst of the cold for an additional five million years by hiding out in Florida.

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In the news

Beans & Bees (Not Bats) Gave Us Butterflies – PBS Eons

Before the Pilgrims, the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in St. Augustine – News4Jax 🔒

Florida Wildflowers & Pollinators Get a Boost With Two Grants – Miami Living

These Mice Had a Secret Until 2023 – Bizarre Beasts

Will a Goldfish Kept in a Dark Room Eventually Turn White? – Snopes

Research publications

Angiosperm phylogenetic diversity is lower in Africa than South America – Science Advances

Family science clubs: Ideas to get families excited about science – Science and Children

Formative audience research to increase consumer demand for professional wildlife-friendly landscape maintenance - Urban Forestry & Urban Greening

Investigation of regulatory divergence between homoeologs in the recently formed allopolyploids, Tragopogon mirus and T. miscellus (Asteraceae) – the plant journal

Palynology of the uppermost Cretaceous to lowermost Paleocene Deccan volcanic associated sediments of the Mandla Lobe, Central India - Palynology

Parental genomic compatibility model: only certain diploid genotype combinations form allopolyploids – The Nucleus

A new early Miocene bat (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae) from Panama confirms middle Cenozoic chiropteran dispersal between the Americas – Journal of Mammalian Evolution

Support the Museum

Butterfly Conservation Initiative

The Butterfly Conservation Initiative was established in 2001 by a coalition of organizations with the sole purpose of protecting butterfly species that are vulnerable to extinction. Initially located at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in Baltimore, the program is now headquartered at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. Each year, funding from the initiative supports research, education outreach, butterfly monitoring and the implementation of conservation projects. The McGuire Center’s Daniels Lab works with rare and at-risk butterflies.

Banner Image: Museum specimens show insects are sensitive to increasingly extreme weather events

As Earth’s climate continues to warm due to the emission of greenhouse gases, extreme and anomalous weather events are becoming more common. But predicting and analyzing the effects of what is, by definition, an anomaly can be tricky.

Scientists have begun using museum specimens to understand how organisms have responded to extreme weather over the last century. In the first study of its kind, researchers at the Florida Museum recently used this approach to find out when moths and butterflies in eastern North America are most active over time. The results were unequivocal: Unusually warm and cold weather has significantly altered insect activity to a greater extent than the average increase in global temperature for the last several decades. Read full article

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