STS Seminar Series explores the psychological contributions to science and technology studies, Sept. 24
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The second event in this year’s Research Seminar Series in Science & Technology Studies (STS) takes place on Sept. 24 and features guest speaker Kieran O’Doherty, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Guelph.
Now in its 26th year, the series has hosted hundreds experts from across Canada and around the world presenting on a wide range of STS-related topics. The talks are free and open to the public, and STS majors are especially encouraged to attend. Refreshments will be provided.
The Sept. 24 seminar, titled “Psychological Contributions to Science and Technology Studies,” will run from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in 203 Bethune College (Norman’s).
Kieran O’Doherty
Science and technology are central to almost all domains of human activity. As a result, they are the focus of subdisciplines such as the philosophy of science, the philosophy of technology, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of science and technology. Further, multidisciplinary programs such as science and technology studies focus on a systematic investigation of the dynamic relationships between science, technology and human life. Many contributions to STS question mechanistic and universalistic scientific visions and instead argue for a socially and culturally situated conception of the production of scientific knowledge and technological artifacts.
To date, psychology has been marginal in this space, and the contributions that have come from psychology have tended to come from relatively narrow epistemological orientations. O’Doherty argues that it is because of mainstream psychology’s adherence to a vision of itself as a science modelled on the natural sciences – universal, objective, guided by a view of humans as a collection of variables to be measured – that it has failed to engage meaningfully with STS.
To counter this trend, O’Doherty and his colleagues recently collected contributions on the study of science and technology specifically from psychologists working from perspectives that are aligned with STS. The resulting book, Psychological Studies of Science and Technology, was published this year by Palgrave-Macmillan. Contributors’ orientations include theoretical psychology, critical psychology, feminist psychology, queer psychology, history of psychology and qualitative psychology, among others.
In this talk, O’Doherty will reflect on the position of psychology in relation to STS and argue that a pluralistic vision of psychology has much to offer.
Here’s a look at the rest of the Fall 2019 lineup:
Oct. 22: Zbigniew Stachniak (York University), “The IBM Images Archive”
Nov. 5: Kelly Bronson (University of Ottawa), “Data-driven: Agribusiness, Activists and Their Shared Politics of the Future”
Nov. 19: Kate Henne (University of Waterloo), “Grey Matters: Imagining Traumatic Brain Injury Through the Lens of Sex Difference”
Dec. 3: John McLevey (University of Waterloo), “Democracies in Crisis? Online Deception, Disinformation and Political Polarization in Comparative Perspective”
Unless otherwise specified, all seminars in this series will take place on Tuesdays from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in 203 Bethune College (Norman’s).
Further details will appear in YFile prior to each talk, and the lineup for Winter 2019 will be released at a later date. This series is sponsored by York University’s Department of Science & Technology Studies, Faculty of Science, and co-ordinated by members of the department. For more information about the Research Seminar Series in Science & Technology Studies, contact Professor Conor Douglas at cd512@yorku.ca or visit sts.info.yorku.ca/seminar-series.
Scientists set to start $10M project to create health diagnosis tool for bees
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When Canada’s honey bees are thriving, they produce honey and pollinate valuable crops like blueberries, apples and hybrid canola seeds.
But the health of honey bees is declining, with more than a quarter of honey bee colonies dying each winter. These deaths have left beekeepers and government regulators struggling to find ways to quickly diagnose, manage and improve bee health.
Amro Zayed
The solution could be a new bee health diagnosis tool being created as part of a research project led by bee genomics expert Amro Zayed of York University, along with Professor Leonard Foster of the University of British Columbia. On Oct. 1, they will launch a $10-million project to develop a new health assessment and diagnosis platform, supported by Ontario Genomics and Genome Canada.
“We need to think of innovative solutions to fix the bee health crisis. The current tools are just not cutting it,” said Zayed, an associate professor in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, and a York Research Chair.
Honey bees produce 90 million pounds of honey each year and are needed to pollinate some of Canada’s most lucrative crops. Their pollination services are valued at $5.5 billion per year in Canada alone.
The causes of bee decline are complex, variable and difficult to identify. But beekeepers and government regulators need to rapidly identify the stressors impacting specific populations before they can make changes to improve bee health. Currently, the industry uses post-mortem analysis to test for the presence of a few known pathogens or toxins in dead colonies. These tests are often expensive, time consuming and provide an incomplete picture of the stressors affecting bee health.
The research team is looking to modernize the industry by delivering a tool to quickly assess bee health in living colonies that would allow loss-mitigating strategies to be implemented.
“You can identify the stressors affecting a colony, not by searching for the stressor itself, but by looking for specific signatures of stress in the bee – what we call biomarkers,” explained Zayed. “The biomarker approach has a lot of potential for quickly screening stressors affecting bees before colonies decline.”
The researchers will use genomic tools to measure stressor-induced changes in bees to identify biomarkers for specific stressors. By the end of the project, the researchers envision a system where beekeepers can send their samples for biomarker testing and receive a report with both a health assessment and information on the most effective management strategies, which can then be applied in the field to improve the health of their colonies.
The research team comprises 22 researchers from across Canada, including ones from Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), the University of Manitoba, the University of Guelph and the University of Laval. The project is funded through Genome Canada’s Large-Scale Applied Research Project Competition: Genomics Solutions for Agriculture, Agri-food, Fisheries and Aquaculture. Funding partners include Genome Canada, AAFC, Genome British Columbia and Genome Quebec.
Professor Emeritus Allan Carswell’s gift to accelerate research in dementia care at York University
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Allan Carswell remembers vividly the moment he and his wife, Helen, started to fall in love.
The pair had known of each other through high school – she was interested in music, and he in math and science. But it wasn’t until he walked her home after a Halloween party in 1951 that Carswell thought of her as more than a classmate.
“I finally worked up the courage to phone her a week after that party to ask if she wanted to go out,” he recalled. “And she said yes!”
That was 68 years ago. The two fell in love, married, had three children, made significant scientific discoveries, pursued a multitude of philanthropic endeavours and built a successful business.
Carswell is a professor emeritus of physics who, while at York University, was instrumental in developing light detection and ranging (LIDAR) systems, which use light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure distances. In 1974, he and Helen co-founded Optech Inc., a company that focused on developing laser-based survey systems. Operating out of their family home as the sole staff member for several years, it was Helen who oversaw the transition of Optech into a highly successful business with more than 300 staff. Together they built Optech into an international business, which developed LIDAR technologies that are now used around the world and in space. They also established the Carswell Family Foundation.
In that time together, the Carswells have overcome challenges and braved the odds, deepening their love and respect for one another. But there is one battle that Carswell and his wife have been fighting for 20 years, and it is one he knows they will not win.
About 20 years ago, Helen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and her cognitive abilities began to decline.
“There came a time when we just had to accept it,” Carswell said. “We had to accept that Helen had an incurable disease and that there was nothing we could do.”
Over the years, the disease has continued to progress.
“Since 2012, Helen has been unable to stand, speak or do anything for herself,” Carswell said. “In recent years, we have had amazing support from the Alzheimer Society of York Region and that’s why establishing this partnership is so important to us.”
York University President and Vice-Chancellor Rhonda Lenton with Professor Emeritus Allan Carswell
On Sept. 17, in honour of Helen Carswell and World Alzheimer’s Month, York University and the Alzheimer Society of York Region announced a joint $2.26-million partnership to research Alzheimer’s and dementia care programs. Funded by the Carswell Family Foundation, this gift will be used to advance research into the efficacy of dementia day programs, respite services and various models of care as well as the benefits of integrating support for caregivers into the programming.
The partnership will enable York University to do the following:
establish the Helen Carswell Research Chair in Dementia Care in York University’s Faculty of Health (with an additional $1 million in matching funding from York University);
provide funding for graduate research fellowships in dementia care for master’s and doctoral students at York University; and
support a program of evaluation, research and knowledge dissemination that is led by the Chair in Dementia Care, working collaboratively with the Alzheimer Society of York Region.
York University President and Vice-Chancellor Rhonda L. Lenton thanked Carswell and his family for their important gift.
“This new partnership between York University and the Alzheimer Society of York Region will enable us to lead the way in dementia care research and its application,” said Lenton. “By collaborating with partners in the community, we are able to combine our strengths and expertise, greatly increasing the impact of our work. Importantly, the partnership also provides research opportunities and other types of experiential education for our students, enhancing innovation and better equipping them to serve our communities in the future.”
Loren Freid, chief executive officer of the Alzheimer Society of York Region, said his organization is excited that York University is establishing a Chair in Dementia Care.
“We hope this new partnership will further validate the good work that gets done in our programming and will help support future initiatives,” said Freid. “The research of an endowed Chair and graduate students will provide expertise in dementia care that can be shared across the province and across Canada.”
Members of the Carswell family gather with York University community members and representatives from the Alzheimer’s Society of York Region for the announcement about the partnership to advance research in dementia care and the establishment of the endowed Research Chair that will be named after Helen Carswell
For Carswell, the gift is a way to honour and celebrate Helen – a kindhearted woman, an entrepreneur in her own right and his loving partner for more than six decades.
Even though Helen isn’t always fully aware of what is happening, the pair still continue to celebrate milestones together.
“We’ve just celebrated the birth of our first great-grandchild,” said Carswell with a laugh. “We’re all so excited!”
Take a sneak peek through York University’s new telescope before it opens to the public
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Would you like to view celestial objects through the Faculty of Science’s new one-metre telescope? The Allan I. Carswell Observatory is inviting faculty and staff at the University and their families to attend a sneak peek on Thursday, Sept. 26, starting at 7:30 p.m. (registration opens at 7 p.m.).
Installation of the telescope
The largest telescope on a university campus anywhere in Canada was installed on Aug. 16 at the Allan I. Carswell Observatory at York University.
“This state-of-the-art, one-metre reflecting telescope will offer students unprecedented opportunities to explore and understand the night sky for their classes and research,” said physics and astronomy Professor Paul Delaney, observatory director.
“For the public, unrivalled views of the night sky will be available every Wednesday evening starting Oct. 2 during the observatory’s regular public viewing sessions.”
Tickets are free, but limited to four per person to ensure maximum enjoyment and minimum wait times for the telescope eyepiece. Twenty visitors will be invited to enter the one-metre dome every 30 minutes starting at 7 p.m. Observatory team members will be on hand to describe what visitors are viewing as well as the characteristics of the telescope.
Faculty and staff should meet in Room 317 of the Petrie Science & Engineering Building about 30 minutes before their scheduled time.
Refreshments will be available.
Organizers request that you book your tickets by Monday, Sept. 23 using the Eventbrite links below.
Remember to dress for the weather. The observatory domes are unheated and uncooled, so whatever the temperature is outside is what it will be in the dome while you are viewing.
Faculty of Science presents Feasting at the Table of Elements lecture series at Toronto Public Library
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Periodic table
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the periodic table of elements. How were the elements discovered and do they affect our daily lives? Come to the Faculty of Science’s annual public lecture series at the Toronto Public Library this fall to find out.
This year’s series, Feasting at the Table of Elements, features speakers from the Department of Chemistry discussing the chemical elements in tattoos, in the air we breathe, in the scent of conifers, how they affect the making of beer and more.
The series will begin on Sept. 26 and will run until Nov. 18. All lectures in the series are free and open to everyone at Toronto Public Library branches across the city. Here is this year’s lineup:
Although tattoos have been around for millennia, their popularity has only recently skyrocketed. Now nearly 25 per cent of all Canadians have at least one tattoo. What makes the colours so vibrant and what makes them stay in your skin forever? As new technologies develop, it raises the question: do tattoos have to be permanent? Professor Christopher Caputo will discuss the science behind tattoos to illuminate answers to these questions.
Air is usually invisible, so it’s easy to assume it’s simple, yet it’s composed of a wide diversity of tiny molecules – not merely oxygen – some of which could be harmful and travel great distances. How do we know what’s in our air? Professor Cora Young will tell us this as well as how it influences air quality, climate and our health.
The Periodic Table of the Elements: 150 Years Young and Still Growing
What is an element? How do chemists identify them? Where are they used? Why is it called a periodic table? And why is it useful? In answering these questions, Professor Pierre Potvin will highlight the surprising importance of chemical elements in all aspects of our lives.
The Science of Beer-Making: More than Barley, Water, Hops and Yeast
From its inception in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to the resurgence of the craft beer phenomenon, beer making applies chemistry to everyday life. Be it mass produced or home brewed, it follows the same process. Professor Hovig Kouyoumdjian discusses the science of beer and highlights the chemistry behind it.
With the holiday season approaching, our senses are bombarded with all sorts of seasonal stimuli. Professor Derek Jackson will present a thematic overview of the chemistry behind the scent of a pine tree, the popping sounds of a Christmas cracker, how hand warmers work and more.
Widely used insecticides shown to threaten wild birds
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Wolfgang Wander [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]
Neonicotinoids are widely used around the world as seed treatments. What happens when wild birds encounter these insecticides, which are proven neurotoxins?
A team of researchers from York University and the University of Saskatchewan decided to find out. They investigated the effects of neonicotinoids on migrating birds that forage for food in agricultural areas. Their findings show how these widely used chemicals could be partly responsible for a dramatic decline in songbird populations.
Their study, which was published in the journal Science on Sept. 13, is the first of its kind to track the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on wild birds.
White-Crowned Sparrow. Photo by Wolfgang Wander [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]The study found that white-crowned sparrows that consumed small doses of an insecticide called imidacloprid suffered weight loss and delays to their migration – effects that could severely harm the birds’ chances of surviving and reproducing.
York University Distinguished Research Professor Bridget Stutchbury, Department of Biology in the Faculty of Science, is the co-author of the study, which is led by her former York master’s student Margaret Eng (MSc ’07). Eng is now a postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Saskatchewan’s Toxicology Centre. Christy Morrissey, an ecotoxicologist in the USask College of Arts & Science and the School of Environment & Sustainability, collaborated on the study.
“We saw these effects using doses well within the range of what a bird could realistically consume in the wild – equivalent to eating just a few treated seeds,” said Eng.
Neonicotinoids are the most commonly used class of agricultural insecticides. They are often applied as a seed coating or as a spray on most major crops worldwide.
Although the toxic effects of neonicotinoids were once thought to affect only insects, most notably pollinators such as bees, there is growing evidence that birds are routinely exposed to the pesticides with significant negative consequences.
Bridget Stuchbury
“Our study shows that this is bigger than the bees – birds can also be harmed by modern neonicotinoid pesticides, which should worry us all,” said Stutchbury.
Until now, researchers had not been able to assess what happens to pesticide-exposed birds in the wild. The researchers used new lightweight tagging technologies and a collaborative research network called the Motus Wildlife Tracking System to track the effects in the sparrows’ natural habitat.
The researchers exposed individual sparrows to small doses of the pesticide, imidacloprid, in southern Ontario during a stopover on the birds’ spring migration. Each bird’s body composition was measured before and after exposure, and a lightweight radio transmitter was attached to each bird’s back to track their movements in the wild.
Birds given the higher dose of the pesticide lost six per cent of their body mass within just six hours. That one dose also caused birds to stay 3.5 days longer, on average, at the stopover site before resuming their migration compared to control birds.
“Both of these results seem to be associated with the appetite suppression effect of imidacloprid. The dosed birds ate less food, and it’s likely that they delayed their flight because they needed more time to recover and regain their fuel stores,” said Eng.
Because the researchers used controlled dosing, they were able to confirm a cause and effect between neonicotinoid exposures and delayed migration, not just a correlation that is more typical of field studies.
In North America, three-quarters of bird species that rely on agricultural habitat have significantly declined in population since 1966. The results of the new study show a mechanism by which pesticides could be directly contributing to this drop-off.
“Migration is a critical period for birds and timing matters. Any delays can seriously hinder their success in finding mates and nesting, so this may help explain, in part, why migrant and farmland bird species are declining so dramatically worldwide,” said Morrissey.
The three researchers examined the effects of neonicotinoids in a previous study using captive sparrows. The new research reinforces the weight loss effect seen in that 2017 study. Captive birds in the earlier study were also found to become disoriented as a result of neonicotinoid exposure.
“We didn’t see that result in wild birds here,” said Eng. “In the real world, birds likely avoid migratory flight while recovering from the effects of the toxin.”
Funding for the research published in Science was provided by the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants Program, the Kenneth M. Molson Foundation, the NSERC Research Tools & Instruments Grants Program, and a Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship in partnership with Bird Studies Canada.
Welcome to YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2019, part one
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Welcome to YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2019, part one. In this special issue, YFile introduces new faculty members joining the York University community and highlights those with new appointments.
The New Faces Feature Issue 2019 will run in two parts: part one on Friday, Sept. 13 and part two on Friday, Sept. 27.
In this issue, YFile welcomes new faculty members in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design; the Faculty of Education; Glendon Campus; and the Faculty of Health.
New Faces was conceived, developed and edited by Ashley Goodfellow Craig, YFile’s deputy editor, with support provided by Lindsay MacAdam, communications officer, and Jenny Pitt-Clark, YFile editor.
Distinguished Research Professor at York University’s Faculty of Science, Huw Owen Pritchard, died peacefully on Aug. 9 at Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga. A long-serving member of the Department of Chemistry, he began his career at York in 1965 and retired in 1998.
Huw Owen Pritchard
Prof. Pritchard was an original member and former Chair of the department, and supervised the first PhD in chemistry, although it was in the physics graduate program. His main research interest was in Experimental and Theoretical Reaction Kinetics.
His colleagues remember him as “one of a kind, a renaissance scientist” and a “highly productive and well-respected researcher.” He was also one of the first four Distinguished Research Professors (1983) at York.
“Personally, I remember his lab for two things. The diesel engine he was trying to run on benzyl peroxide, and his experiments on the isomerization of methyl isocyanide,” said Don Hastie, associate dean of faculty.
René Fournier, Chair of the Department of Chemistry, said, “He could talk with personal knowledge about a wide range of topics, including about the beginnings of electronic digital scientific computing in Manchester in the early 1950s, the first MO calculations on aromatic hydrocarbons, as well as the theories of valence, electronegativity, and unimolecular reactions.”
His knowledge also extended to the effect of blackbody radiation on vibrational relaxation, numerical instability and chaos in molecular simulations, diesel fuel ignition, and the first computers connected to the internet at York.
Huw Owen Pritchard teaching a class early in his career
“He took part in, witnessed, or researched, those things himself,” said Fournier. “When I joined in 1996, his research program had what was then a rare, maybe unique, combination of gas phase kinetics experiments, electronic structure calculations and molecular dynamics simulations.”
Before his time at York, Prof. Pritchard studied in Michael Polanyi’s Chemistry Department in 1945 at Manchester University, receiving his PhD in 1951. The same year, he became an assistant lecturer in chemistry, and in 1954, he became a lecturer.
Born July 23, 1928 in Bangor, Wales, Prof. Pritchard was married to Margaret (Maggie) for 63 years, and the father to Karen (Sal) and David (Madeleine).
A private cremation took place. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, Toronto General Hospital.
Just how big is a proton? York scientists help resolve decade-old puzzle
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Eric Hessels
York University researchers have made a precise measurement of the size of the proton – a crucial step towards solving a mystery that has preoccupied scientists around the world for the past decade.
Scientists thought they knew the size of the proton, but that changed in 2010 when a team of physicists measured the proton-radius value to be four per cent smaller than expected, which confused the scientific community. Since then, the world’s physicists have been scrambling to resolve the proton-radius puzzle – the inconsistency between these two proton-radius values. This puzzle is an important unsolved problem in fundamental physics today.
Now, a study published in the journal Science finds a new measurement for the size of the proton at 0.833 femtometres, which is just under one trillionth of a millimetre. This measurement is approximately five per cent smaller than the previously accepted radius value from before 2010.
The study, led by researchers in York University’s Faculty of Science, presents a new electron-based measurement of how far the proton’s positive charge extends, and it confirms the 2010 finding that the proton is smaller than previously believed.
“The level of precision required to determine the proton size made this the most difficult measurement our laboratory has ever attempted,” said Distinguished Research Professor Eric Hessels, Department of Physics & Astronomy, who led the study.
Eric Hessels
“After eight years of working on this experiment, we are pleased to record such a high-precision measurement that helps to solve the elusive proton-radius puzzle,” said Hessels.
The quest to resolve the proton-radius puzzle has far-reaching consequences for the understanding of the laws of physics, such as the theory of quantum electrodynamics, which describes how light and matter interact.
Hessels, who is an internationally recognized physicist and expert in atomic physics, says three previous studies were pivotal in attempting to resolve the discrepancy between electron-based and muon-based determinations of the proton size.
The 2010 study was the first to use muonic hydrogen to determine the proton size, compared to prior experiments that used regular hydrogen. At the time, scientists studied an exotic atom in which the electron is replaced by a muon, the electron’s heavier cousin. While a 2017 study using hydrogen agreed with the 2010 muon-based determination of the proton charge radius, a 2018 experiment, also using hydrogen, supported the pre-2010 value.
Hessels and his team of scientists spent eight years focused on resolving the proton-radius puzzle and understanding why the proton radius took on a different value when measured with muons, rather than electrons.
The York University team studied atomic hydrogen to understand the deviant value obtained from muonic hydrogen. They conducted a high-precision measurement using the frequency-offset separated oscillatory fields (FOSOF) technique, which they developed for this measurement. This technique is a modification of the separated oscillatory fields technique that has been around for almost 70 years and won Norman F. Ramsey a Nobel Prize. Their measurement used a fast beam of hydrogen atoms created by passing protons through a molecular hydrogen gas target. The method allowed them to make an electron-based measurement of the proton radius that is directly analogous to the muon-based measurement from the 2010 study. Their result agrees with the smaller value found in the 2010 study.
Hessels’ team consisted of graduate students Nikita Bezginov and Travis Valdez, physics and astronomy Professor Marko Horbatsch, postdoctoral research assistant Alain Marsman, and former postdoctoral Fellow Amar Vutha, now assistant professor of physics at the University of Toronto.
Meet the researcher who single-handedly built Canada’s largest bee collection
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Sample from the collection. Euglossa analis, an orchid bee from Brazil. Image reproduced with permission.
Laurence Packer, professor of biology in the Faculty of Science at York University, who describes himself as having “an inordinate fondness for bees,” conducts research on the world’s 20,000-plus species of bees. An expert in wild bees, he oversees one of the most diverse bee collections in the world, housing specimens from over 100 countries.
In fact, his bee reference collection, the largest in Canada, has more than 10,000 species grouped into 460 genera out of a total of around 510 genera, so that’s 90 per cent. His collection also has more than 300,000 specimens, organized by continent. (Genera is the plural form of genus. It is used in the biological classification of living organisms.)
Laurence Packer
Today, Packer is very close to documenting the world’s bee genera in his digital archive, the most complete digital archive of its kind. Packer, a Distinguished Research Professor, sits down with Brainstorm to discuss the value of this work.
Q: Why are bees important?
A: A third of our food depends upon pollinators – organisms that move pollen from one flower to another, which enables those plants to reproduce. One of my favourite factoids, from a senior administrator at Agriculture Canada, is that 15 per cent of Canadian beef and dairy is dependent on pollinators. That’s because alfalfa, which requires pollination, mostly from alfalfa leafcutter bees, is an important winter food for cattle. So even if you don’t eat your fruits and vegetables, you need pollinators.
Without pollinators, most terrestrial ecosystems would start looking very different. If food production went down to two-thirds, we’d have a pretty massive die-off of people. Whether this would be from starvation or the wars that would be caused by the food shortages is another issue.
Q: What first captured your imagination about bees?
A: When I was very young, my parents tried to make sure I wasn’t scared of insects. So I must’ve overreacted! At first, it was butterflies and moths. As an undergrad, I took entomology, the study of insects, and collected all types. Then I realized that the ones I liked the most were bees and wasps. The reason for that was purely aesthetic.
Sample from the collection. Euglossa analis, an orchid bee from Brazil. Image reproduced with permission
Q: You single-handedly built the largest bee collection in Canada. How did you do this?
A: When I came to York, there wasn’t a bee collection. I started off with a very small one. Now, we have 22 large cabinets and 32 small ones filled with specimens – that’s over 900 drawers and roughly 300,000 specimens from over 100 countries, as you noted.
I’ve built up this collection through collaborations with others on a global scale. I’ve got one of the best bee collections from Thailand, and a great collection from Colombia and Malawi, for example, without having visited those countries.
Q:You are one of the world’s experts.
A: I’m the world expert on some groups of bees, because I have almost all of the specimens in that group on the planet here at York for me to study.
Q:You have species that are undescribed and described. Please explain this, and what it’s like to find something entirely new.
A: “Undescribed” means that nobody has published a name for it, along with its description, so we don’t have a name for it. For a species name to mean anything, someone had to have described and named it.
There are over 20,300 described bee species that we know about. My lab has described over 180 species. There are at least 400 species that are undescribed in the collection at York. There are 20,355 described species on the online Discover Life database, and we’ve got at least 9,000 of those. If you add the number of undescribed species that I predict there are to the number of described species, there’s likely 25,000 species in total … and we might have half of those here at York.
Sample from the collection: Aglae caerulea Lepeletier and Serville, Male. The common name for this is a cuckoo orchid bee. Image reproduced with permission
I’ve collected specimens that I immediately recognized nobody had ever seen before. These are some of the most exciting moments in a taxonomist’s life – when you find something, and you realize that nobody has ever seen this before. (A taxonomist is a biologist that groups organisms into categories.)
“These are some of the most exciting moments in a taxonomist’s life – when you find something, and you realize that nobody has ever seen this before.” – Laurence Packer
Q:What’s the value of this kind of collection?
A: Collections house the raw material through which organisms can be identified. Without extensive collections, we can’t produce identification guides to allow people to identify organisms.
The collection is also important because it includes online images that can be used to educate researchers, farmers and citizens worldwide about the diversity of bees in their own regions. I’m frequently asked to identify a specimen in another researcher’s collection or from a photograph taken in the field. In many cases, it’s against a country’s regulations for that person to send me the specimen – this is the case in India and Brazil, for example – and it is usually not possible to confirm a species-level identification, but possible to identify a bee to genus from a good photograph.
Sample from the collection. Ctenocolletes smaragdinus (Smith), Male. Image reproduced with permission
Additionally, if a country’s laws permit it, we can perform DNA barcoding to help identify the specimen. This is a method whereby, from a tiny fragment of an insect, you can use genetic methods to find out what it is based on an online sequence database maintained by the University of Guelph.
In fact, because it’s comparatively young, this collection at York is probably the best in the world from which to collect DNA samples for identification purposes.
We’ve obtained DNA barcodes for about a third of the world’s bee species. What this means is that you can take off an antenna from a bee, in the wild, release it and be able to tell what the bee is from its DNA. This non-destructive sampling is important for rare species or endangered habitats. If we have the DNA sequencing in the database, then we can usually identify the bee from just the DNA in its antenna.
“Without the collegiality and flexibility of the Biology Department at York University, the collection would be only half as good as it is.” – Laurence Packer
Collections are also extremely useful in terms of plotting distribution changes that occur as a result of climate change. When we compare recent collections, such as the one at York, to older ones, we can see that bee distributions have changed substantially.
Q:What’s the greatest challenge to collecting?
A: The regulations in the countries that have the most biodiversity. It’s impossible for me to go to Brazil, India or Indonesia and collect specimens and bring them out. And it’s illegal for anyone in these countries to send me anything. Everyone loses as a result of these regulations.
Sample from the collection: Ancylandrena larreae (Timberlake), Male. Image reproduced with permission
Q: How has the University supported your work?
A: Some deans have been very supportive. The faculty association has enabled me to do a lot of collecting on two sabbaticals through awarding me funds. This has substantially facilitated the growth of the collection, including rare specimens from South Africa, Chile and Peru.
In the Biology Department, the main benefit has been collegiality, which has led to my being able to decide which terms I teach. This flexibility has enabled me to go to many parts of the world where I need to collect. Without this flexibility, the collection would be only half as good as it is.
To learn more about Packer’s work, visit his lab’s website. To see the archive, visit the website. Packer also maintains an Instagram account, thepackerlab, which features the photos. To see the Discover Life database, visit the website. To read a related article in the Toronto Star, visit the website.
To learn more about Research & Innovation at York, follow us at @YUResearch; watch our new animated video, which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity such as artificial intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the snapshot infographic, a glimpse of the year’s successes.
By Megan Mueller, senior manager, research communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, York University, muellerm@yorku.ca
![Wolfgang Wander [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]](https://yfile.news.yorku.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/FEATURED-image-White-Crowned-Sparrow.jpg)
![Wolfgang Wander [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)] White-Crowned Sparrow](https://yfile.news.yorku.ca/files/2019/09/White-Crowned-Sparrow.jpg)
