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日食发生后，蜜蜂停止了嗡嗡 2017 年日食期间，蜜蜂在太阳消失之后突然陷入了沉默，这也许是因为，它们被骗了，以为夜晚已经来临。
图片来源：Renee Grayson/Flickr, CC BY 2.0 2017 年夏天日全食的可观测范围正好穿过了美国密苏里州的哥伦比亚。“这太不同寻常了。作为生物学家，我一般只用'不同寻常’这个词形容生物现象。” 美国密苏里大学（University of Missouri）的生物学家坎达斯·盖伦（Candace Galen）想到，为何不利用这一天文现象来研究生物现象呢？具体来说，当天空一片黑暗时，像大黄蜂和蜜蜂这样的日间授粉昆虫会停下来吗？ “有什么比日食期间拿着录音机去野外记录蜜蜂更好的活儿呢？”（笑声） 于是，盖伦邀请 400 名包括年轻学生在内的公民科学家，在美国俄勒冈州、爱达荷州和密苏里州沿着日全食可观测区域在 16 片花丛中放置下录音机。他们分析了音频，发现在日偏食阶段，蜜蜂继续嗡嗡劳作。但进入日全食之后，蜜蜂陷入沉默，只剩下人类观察者的交谈声。随后，当月球挪开，太阳再次照亮天空，蜜蜂们又开始嗡嗡作响。 这项研究的完整论文发表在《美国昆虫学会年报》（Annals of the Entomological Society of America）上。 盖伦和同事注意到一个奇怪细节：在日偏食阶段，有些嗡嗡声比一般情况下拉得更长……[查看全文] Solar Eclipse Was a Buzzkill for BeesBees suddenly fell silent when the sun disappeared during last year's solar eclipse—perhaps because they were tricked into night mode. Christopher Intagliata reports. Last summer's total solar eclipse sliced right through Columbia, Missouri. 'It was remarkable. As a biologist I generally reserve that word 'remarkable' for biological phenomena.' Candace Galen is based at the University of Missouri, in Columbia. And, being a biologist, she thought, why not use this astronomical phenomenon to study a biological one? Specifically: as the skies darkened, would daytime pollinators, like bumblebees and honeybees, call it quits? 'What better activity during an eclipse than to go out with a recorder and record the bees? <laughter>' So Galen asked 400 citizen scientists—including young students—to place audio recorders in 16 flower patches along the path of totality, in Oregon, Idaho and Missouri. When they analyzed the audio, they found that during partial eclipse, bee buzzing continued. But when totality hit, the bees went silent…and only the conversational buzz of human observers could be heard. Then, as the moon passed and the sun again lit up the sky, the bees regained their buzz. The full write-up is in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America. Galen and her colleagues did notice one strange detail: the individual buzzes lasted longer than normal during the partial eclipse periods…[full transcript] “ Galen, C., Miller, Z., Lynn, A., Axe, M., Holden, S., Storks, L., Ramirez, E., Asante, E., Heise, D., Kephart, S. and Kephart, J., 2019. Pollination on the dark side: acoustic monitoring reveals impacts of a total solar eclipse on flight behavior and activity schedule of foraging bees. Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 112(1), pp.20-26. doi: 10.1093/aesa/say035 |
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