Location: Stirling Campus

The Post

A 12-month postdoctoral position, with the possibility of extension to 36 months pending a first-year progress review of the appointee, is available for a Leverhulme Trust funded project on the ecology and evolution of buzz pollination at the Vallejo-Marin Lab, University of Stirling, UK. The project will support two postdocs, each specialising on either flower or bee perspectives of buzz pollination, but who will work collaboratively using functional analyses of the vibrational properties of flowers, bee behavioural experiments, and field surveys in the tropics. The postdocs will form part of a 3-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled “Buzz pollination: Integrating bee behaviour and floral evolution”. The project is a collaboration between Dr. Mario Vallejo-Marin (Plant Evolution and Pollination, Stirling), Prof. Fernando Montealegre-Zapata (Bioacoustics and Sensory Biology, U. Lincoln) and Dr. Gema Martin-Ordas (Psychology, Stirling).

Buzz pollination, in which bees use high frequency vibrations to extract pollen from flowers with specialised morphologies, occurs in more than 22,000 species of flowering plants, including some crops. Despite being known for more than 100 years, many fundamental questions in buzz pollination remain unanswered. The last few years have seen a rapid surge of interest in buzz pollination, with remarkable studies on the components including bee behaviour, pollen release, and natural history. The two postdocs will join an ambitious project to link floral morphology and the vibrational characteristics of flowers with bee behaviour and cognition to determine how floral and bee characteristics affect buzz pollination.

The research team will employ a variety of approaches and tools including 3D microscanning laser-vibrometry, 3D printing, and conceptual advances in the study of insect behaviour and cognition to consider jointly both flower and bee components of buzz pollination. The project consists of three main components (1) Vibrational properties of flowers, (2) Behaviour and cognition of buzz-pollinating bees, and (3) Buzz pollination in tropical communities. Each postdoc will be mainly involved with either (1) or (2) and both postdocs will contribute to (3).

The appointee for the post “Postdoctoral researcher on the vibrational properties of buzz-pollinated flowers” will investigate what is the relationship between flower characteristics and the vibrations required to release pollen. To address this topic, the postdoc will need to characterise the vibrational properties of flowers using a variety of approaches and high-resolution tools, including vibrational and acoustic analysis, 3D microscanning laser-vibrometry, X-ray micro CT scanning, and potentially biophysics modelling of floral form. The postdoc will also contribute to the field component of the project by carrying out fieldwork in tropical ecosystems in Latin America (Mexico and/or Brazil).

The post is based in Stirling, but postdocs will conduct short research visits to the Bioacoustics and Sensory Biology lab of Prof. Montealegre-Zapata for project planning, data collection, and paper writing.

The appointee will be part of a thriving research environment within the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences (BES) at the University of Stirling with more than 40 principal investigators, alongside postdoctoral researchers and 60 PhD students.

For further information, including essential criteria and details on how to apply, please see www.stir.ac.uk/about/work-at-stirling/list/details/?jobId=1815&jobTitle=Postdoctoral%20Research%20Fellow%20on%20the%20vibrational%20properties%20of%20buzz-pollinated%20flowers