A coevolutionary conundrum (Ep 152)

When a bee visits a flower, what decides the match? How can a neutral model explain community assemblages? Why are long-term ecological studies so important?

In this episode, we talk with Diego Vázquez, a community ecologist at CONICET in Mendoza, Argentina, who has spent his career mapping the networks of interaction between plants and pollinators. Textbooks still teach coevolution as tight, faithful pairs, but Diego’s work tells a different story, that specialists mostly interact with generalists, and the best predictor of pollinator visits to plants turns out to be not matching traits or shared ancestry but abundance. Much of the structure ecologists prize in these networks can emerge from “neutral” models that know only who is common and when. We dig into why predicting these interactions remains hard, what his twenty-years of data on declining solitary bees is showing, and what it takes to keep long-term ecology alive in Argentina after deep cuts to science funding.

Cover art by Brianna Longo

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