
Maxence GérardUniversity of Mons · Department of Zoology
Maxence Gérard
PhD in Zoology
About
69
Publications
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Introduction
FNRS Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mons (Zoology Department). I am an ecologist who studies the impact of stressors, as well as biotic/abiotic conditions on pollinators, particularly on their behaviour. I was previously involved in INVISMO (INsect Vision and MOvement), POSHBEE, CLIPS (CLImate change and effect on Pollination Services ; Excellence Of Science) and STEP (Status and Trends of European Pollinators).
Publications
Publications (69)
With the expansion of industrial activities, the escalation of pollution by trace metals poses an increasing threat to bees. While the effects of metals on adult bees have been extensively studied in ecotoxicological research, a critical gap persists concerning their impact on bee larvae. Here, we conducted the first study exposing bumble bee larva...
Global warming threatens wild bees and their interaction with plants. While earlier studies have highlighted the negative effects of elevated temperatures on bee–plant interactions, we still lack knowledge about how they impact the foraging behaviours that are central to bee pollination activities. To address this knowledge gap, we investigated how...
Ecotoxicological research has increasingly focused on the interactive effects of chemical mixtures on biological models, emphasising additive, synergistic, or antagonistic interactions. However, these combination studies often test chemicals at unique concentrations (e.g. x:y), limiting our understanding of the effects across the full spectrum of p...
Body size is a trait that can affect plant–pollinator interaction efficiency and plant reproductive success. We explored the impact of intraspecific size shifts on the interactions between pollinators and flowering plants under controlled conditions. We considered two development conditions leading to the production of large and small individual fl...
Climate change impact on insect pollinators
has largely focused on changes in abundance
and range, yet pollination capacity also relies
on ability to acquire, process and respond to
information. We argue for the urgent need to
focus on these largely overlooked processes
by describing how insect sensory ecology and
behaviour are affected by temperat...
Stingless bees are important pollinators of wild and cultivated plants, and they produce medicinal honey. However, their taxonomy and systematics are still debated and would benefit a continent-wide revision. Here, we explore the potential of wing shape in delineation and classification of Afrotropical Meliponini using geometric morphometrics. We s...
The impact of global warming on wild bee decline threatens the pollination services they provide. Exposure to temperatures above optimal during development is known to reduce adult body size but how it affects the development and scaling of body parts remains unclear. In bees, a reduction in body size and/or a reduction in body parts, such as the a...
Eusocial insect colonies act as a superorganism, which can improve their ability to buffer the negative impact of some anthropogenic stressors. However, this buffering effect can be affected by anthropogenic factors that reduce their colony size. A reduction in colony size is known to negatively affect several parameters like brood maintenance or t...
Foraging behavior is driven by diverse factors, notably life history traits. Foraging strategies are particularly complex among eusocial species such as bumblebees, because they depend primarily on the needs of the colony, rather than on individual's needs. Colony size, i.e. the number of workers in a colony vary a lot among eusocial insects. While...
In a context of rapid global change, understanding how environmental stressors can impact phenotypic variation, and which phenotypic traits are predominantly affected can be particularly relevant. Indeed, potential pheno-typic modifications could affect the functionality of traits from taxa that are in decline but that are keystone species in many...
Bee foraging behavior provides a pollination service that has both ecological and economic benefits. However, bee population decline could directly affect the efficiency of this interaction. Among the drivers of this decline, global warming has been implicated as an emerging threat but exactly how increasing temperatures affect bee foraging behavio...
Specific floral resources may help bees to face environmental challenges such as parasite infection, as recently shown for sunflower pollen. Whereas this pollen diet is known to be unsuitable for the larval development of bumble bees, it has been shown to reduce the load of a trypanosomatid parasite (Crithidia bombi) in the bumble bee gut. Recent s...
Global warming has been identified as a key driver of bee declines around the world. While it is clear that elevated temperatures during the spring and summer months – the principal activity period of many bee species – is a factor in this decline, exactly how temperature affects bee survival is unknown. In vertebrates, there is clear evidence that...
Safeguarding crop pollination services requires the identification of the pollinator species involved and the provision of their ecological requirements at multiple spatial scales. However, the potential for agroecological intensification of pollinator-dependent crops by harnessing pollinator diversity is limited by our capacity to characterise the...
Climate change and increasing average temperatures are now affecting most ecosystems. Social insects such as bumblebees are especially impacted because these changes create spatial, temporal and morphological mismatches that could impede their ability to find food resources and mate. However, few studies have assessed how the colony and life cycle...
The decline of pollinators has been demonstrated scientifically and this phenomenon is widely recognized by both the general public and by stakeholders. Since pollinators face different threats that are all linked to human activities, there is a unique and unprecedented responsibility for people to conserve pollinators, requiring political action t...
The selection of appropriate food resources by bees is a critical aspect for the maintenance of their populations, especially in the current context of global change and pollinator decline. Wild bees have a sophisticated ability to forage selectively on specific resources, and can assess the quality of pollen using contact chemosensory perception (...
Global changes are severely affecting pollinator insect communities worldwide, resulting in repeated patterns of species extirpations and extinctions. Whilst negative population trends within this functional group have understandably received much attention in recent decades, another facet of global changes has been overshadowed: species undergoing...
• Against the context of global wildlife declines, targeted mitigation strategies have become critical to preserve what remains of biodiversity. However, the effective development of conservation tools in order to counteract these changes relies on unambiguous taxonomic determination and delineation.
• In this study, we focus on an endemic bumblebe...
Single page summary of Vanderplank et al (2021) - contains a QR code for accessing the paper
Current global change substantially threatens pollinators, which directly impacts the pollination services underpinning the stability, structure and functioning of ecosystems. Among these threats, many synergistic drivers such as habitat destruction and fragmentation, increasing use of agrochemicals, decreasing resource diversity as well as climate...
Recent bumble bee declines have made it increasingly important to resolve the status of contentious species
for conservation purposes. Some of the taxa found to be threatened are the often rare socially parasitic bumble
bees. Among these, the socially parasitic bumble bee, Bombus flavidus Eversmann, has uncertain species
status. Although multiple s...
Body size is a key parameter of organism fitness. While the impact of climate change on body size has received increasing attention, the long‐term consequences of landscape fragmentation are still poorly known. These two major global threats may potentially induce opposite trends: the decrease of body size in warmer environments (e.g. individuals d...
Global change affects species by modifying their abundance, spatial distribution, and activity period. The challenge is now to identify the respective drivers of those responses and to understand how those responses combine to affect species assemblages and ecosystem functioning. Here we correlate changes in occupancy and mean flight date of 205 wi...
Abstract: Wild bees are facing a global decline mostly induced by numerous human factors for the last decades. In parallel, public interest for their conservation increased considerably, namely through numerous scientific studies relayed in the media. In spite of this broad interest, a lack of knowledge and understanding of the subject is blatant a...
Wild and managed bees are essential for global food security and the maintenance of biodiversity. At present, the conservation of wild bees is hampered by a huge shortfall in knowledge about the trends and status of individual species mainly due to their large diversity and variation in life histories. In contrast, the managed Western honey bee Api...
The mutualism between plants and their pollinators provides globally important ecosystem services, but it is likely to be disrupted by global warming that can cause mismatches between both halves of this interaction. In this review, we summarise the available evidence on (i) spatial or (ii) phenological shifts of one or both of the actors of this m...
Since the beginning of taxonomy, species have been described based on morphology, but the advent of using semio-chemicals and genetics has led to the discovery of cryptic species (i.e. morphologically similar species). When a new cryptic species is described, earlier type specimens have to be re-evaluated, although this process can be challenging a...
Bumble bees ( Bombus spp.) are a widespread corbiculate lineage (Apinae: Corbiculata: Bombini), mostly found among temperate and alpine ecosystems. Approximately 260 species have been recognized and grouped recently into a simplified system of 15 subgenera. Most of the species are nest-building and primitively eusocial. Species of Bombus have been...
Species can respond differently when facing environmental changes, such as by shifting their geographical ranges or through plastic or adaptive modifications to new environmental conditions. Phenotypic modifications related to environmental factors have been mainly explored along latitudinal gradients, but they are relatively understudied through t...
Body size clines have been widely explained by the Bergmann's rule (i.e. larger individuals in colder conditions) in homeothermic vertebrates. However, there is no general consensus in poikilotherms organisms particularly in insects. Among them, bees are a highly diverse pollinators group with high economic and ecological value. Nevertheless, no co...
While many bee species are experiencing population declines, some host plant generalist bees remain common in Europe, partly because they seem able to shift to new resources. However, foraging on a new alternative plant, such as an invasive species, can modify diet quality and have a potentially detrimental effect on bee health. Herein, we investig...
While bumblebees have been the focus of much research, the taxonomy of many species groups is still unclear, especially within circum-polar species. Delimiting species based on multisource datasets provides a solution to overcome current systematic issues of closely related populations. Here, we use an integrative taxonomic approach based on novel...
Abstract Human activities can generate a wide variety of direct and indirect effects on animals, which can manifest as environmental and genetic stressors. Several phenotypic markers have been proposed as indicators of these stressful conditions but have displayed contrasting results, depending, among others, on the phenotypic trait measured. Knowi...
Aim
Genetic diversity is a key factor to species survival. This diversity is unevenly distributed across the species range, delimiting genetic diversity hotspots (GDH). Focusing conservation efforts on regions where GDH of several species overlap (i.e., multispecies GDH) could rationalize conservation efforts by protecting several taxa in one go. H...
Body size latitudinal clines have been widley explained by the Bergmann's rule in homeothermic vertebrates. However, there is no general consensus in poikilotherms organisms in particular in insects that represent the large majority of wildlife. Among them, bees are a highly diverse pollinators group with high economic and ecological value. Neverth...
Population connectivity is an important source of information for planning conservation strategy. The degree of connectivity implies using alternative conservation prioritizations based on the appropriate spatial scale for management units. In species with low population connectivity, it is important to preserve local populations in order to mainta...
Morphological traits can be highly variable over time in a particular geographical area. Different selective pressures shape those traits, which is crucial in evolutionary biology. Among these traits, insect wing morphometry has already been widely used to describe phenotypic variability at the inter-specific level. On the contrary, fewer studies h...
Supplementary Figures A, B and C, and Supplementary Tables A, B and C.
Figure A: interpolation graphs generated with a distance weighting parameter a = 1. Figure B: interpolation graphs generated with a distance weighting parameter a = 10. Figure C: PCoA (principal component analysis) performed on the overall matrix of estimated morphological dista...
The current bumblebee decline leads to inbreeding in populations that fosters a loss of allelic diversity and diploid male production. As diploid males are viable and their offspring are sterile, bumblebee populations can quickly fall in a vortex of extinction. In this paper, we investigate for the first time a potential pre-mating mechanism throug...
Being efficient pollinators of many flowering plants, bumblebees are an important group for temperate ecosystems services. Over the last decades they experience a strong decline in Europe because of different primary factors such as habitat fragmentation. These primary factors lead to genetic stresses that can reinforce the decline. This is particu...
Presence of diploid males in wild bees reflects inbreeding and provide information about the health status of a colony or population. Detection of diploid males, and discrimination from haploid males and workers has, however, been limited to molecular diagnostics. Here we present a novel method based on differences in wing shape, e.g. venation patt...
Being efficient pollinators of many flowering plants, bumblebees are an important group for temperate ecosystems services. Over the last decades they experience a strong decline in Europe because of different primary factors such as habitat fragmentation. These primary factors lead to genetic stresses that can reinforce the decline. This is particu...
By detecting the presence or absence of vocal species, the study of soundscapes unveils information about ecosystems. The present work is an analysis of sound records collected at the beginning of July 2014 in the rural, publicly owned nature park of Chevetogne, Belgium. A continuous 24-hour window is focused on. The primary microphone is set up in...