Learning from the BeesA semester in Costa Rica turned a biology student into a research biologist.
by Nancy Oster
In 1998, Brendan, a biology student at UC Santa Barbara, chose to spend his fall term in Monteverde, Costa Rica as an EAP student. “I had just discovered the photographs of the Monteverde photographers, Michael and Patricia Fogden in Harry Greene’s Snakes book,” he says, “and I knew I had to get to the tropics. Next thing I knew I was picking up an application in the EAP office.” Brendan says, “Monteverde had a profound effect on me, changing my perspective from being someone who was just curious about science to someone who actually wanted to do science.” In Monteverde, Brendan did independent research with Dr. Frank Joyce, the EAP Study Center Director, on the diversity and abundance of arachnids along a specific altitudinal gradient. “After EAP, my parents were pretty surprised when I told them I was planning to apply for Ph.D. programs.” Brendan graduated from UC Santa Barbara with High Honors in 1999. Monteverde had a profound effect on me, changing my perspective from being someone who was just curious about science to someone who actually wanted to do science. Looking back, Brendan says, “My EAP experience gave me a chance to get a job as a field assistant in Panama, and I think both of those experiences really helped out as I was applying to graduate school.” He notes, “If you’re thinking about going to graduate school, I think you have to do some research first to see if you really like it. Why wait until you graduate?” Following EAP, Brendan did research studies on tungara frogs in Panama, rattlesnakes in Texas, and pteropods in Antarctica. Brendan is currently working on his Ph.D. in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. When asked how he chose orchid bees for a dissertation topic Brendan said, “Like most dissertation topics I discovered it after a lot of trial and error. During my first field season, I was struggling with a project on beetles—spending a lot of time catching them in front of the black lights I was hauling all over Costa Rica. One night, an orchid bee (my first orchid bee) showed up at my black light, which was quite unexpected because they are day-flying insects. Well, I did what any good entomologist would do; I killed it with ethyl acetate and looked at it under a microscope. The first thing I noticed was its incredibly long proboscis. When I discovered that nobody had really studied much about nectar foraging in orchid bees, I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” Brendan adds, “In some sense, my latest project has been fueled by EAP memories. To measure the various properties of the nectars that orchid bees were foraging on in a variety of habitats, I ended up choosing a number of field sites that I had first visited with Dr. Joyce—Pitilla, Santa Rosa, Monteverde, and Penas Blancas. This was great because I already knew the trails pretty well so I could just throw on a backpack and head out to the forest on my own.” On these treks Brendan collects orchid bees and is able extract nectar samples from their honey crops. He combines this information with behavioral studies on captive bees, and laboratory investigations of the physics of drinking nectar. The Royal Society recently published a paper Brendan wrote on the results of his orchid bee fieldwork. Brendan has found that orchid bees can still drink nectar after their tongues have been removed from their proboscis, which demonstrates that they do not use their tongues to lap nectar like other types of bees. He has also shown that orchid bees are more efficient drinkers of runnier nectar, the kind found in the deep funnel-shaped orchids in tropical forests. During one of his field site visits to Costa Rica, his younger sister Allison joined him. Brendan says, “I forced Allison to go out in the rain and mud to collect insects for me, and I took her on a pretty grueling trek through Corcovado.” A year after trekking through the muddy Costa Rican forests with her brother, Allison went back to Monteverde as an EAP student to work on her own research project. Brendan says, “It actually made me a bit jealous when I heard that she was going.” However, he notes, “The course really opened her eyes and made her a lot more independent. Although she’s not necessarily going to be a gung-ho tropical biologist, I think perhaps it even had a bigger effect on her than it did on me.” About his own EAP experience, Brendan says, “The other thing that has been great has been running into so many EAPers all over the place, some of whom are now my colleagues: David Logue is now studying birds in Panama; my teaching assistant, Alex Trillo, studies leaf beetles in Panama; and Stacey Combes, who was in Monteverde the year before me, will be a Miller Postdoc in our lab in Berkeley this year. Since the program, I think I’ve run into about ten EAPers who are still doing tropical biology in some form or another, and I think that’s great.” |
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the past three years, evolutionary biologist Brendan Borrell
has been studying the nectar foraging activities of Central
American orchid bees. While most bees use their hairy tongues
to lick the nectar from shallow flowers, Brendan has found
that orchid bees have adapted to consume nectars from deeper
flowers in tropical forests by sucking the nectar out through
their long tubular proboscises (which stretch up to three times
their own body length). 
