Seven things that I learned at the SCAPE 2018 meeting in Ireland

The 32nd meeting of the Scandinavian Association for Pollination Ecology took place last week, and from Thursday through to Sunday 87 researchers from around the world met to discuss their latest findings.  For the first time the conference was held outside of Scandinavia, at Avon Rí, Blessington in Ireland.  As always it was a friendly and stimulating meeting, and a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and colleagues, and make new ones.

Here’s a link to the full programme with the abstracts.  I gave a talk about our recent work on the evolution of pollination systems in the plant family Apocynaceae which seemed to go down well enough and generated some discussion later in the bar and over breakfast.  The quality of the research and the standard of the presentations was very high and I don’t intend to single out individuals, but I did learn some things during the meeting that I wanted to highlight:

• Some bird pollinated penstemons produce scent volatiles, even if we can’t detect them (Amy Parachnowitsch, University of New Brunswick).  Relates to this post of mine from earlier in the year on how hummingbirds have a sense of smell.
• Staying with the theme of dispelling bird pollination myths – many of the supposedly sunbird-pollinated species of Aloe in southern Africa are in fact pollinated by non-specialist passerines such as bulbuls (Steve Johnson, University of KwaZulu-Natal).
• There’s a data set on plant-pollinator interactions from the far north of Finland from the end of the 19th century and this area is being re-surveyed to assess changes between then and now (Leana Zoller, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg).
• Farmers who grow watermelons in Tanzania can improve their yields by encouraging more pollinators in their fields; the yields are better than adding fertliser or irrigating the crop (Thomas Sawe, Norwegian University of Life Sciences).
• A weevil was introduced into Indonesia in the 1980s to improve yields of oil palm by increasing the rate of pollination (Lynn Jørgensen, University of Oslo).
• There’s strong evidence that the current distributions of plants with specialised pollination systems in southern Africa are constrained by the environmental niche, and thus the distribution, of their pollinators (Karl Duffy, University of Naples).
• Mobile saunas are a thing!  I took a photo of one (below) just to prove it.  Thanks to Dara Stanley and Jane Stout for organising that, and the rest of this brilliant conference!  Hope to see you all next year in Lund.

There was a lot more tweeting going on at SCAPE this year and you can see comments and images by searching Twitter for #SCAPE2018

If you attended SCAPE, what did you learn?  What surprised or interested you?  Please comment below.