Student Poster Display
Plant-Insect Ecosystems
Student
Samantha Pryer
University of Florida
Hawthorne, Florida
Rachel E. Mallinger
Assistant Professor
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida
Micro-CT scanning is a non-destructive method of examining specimens in detail and allows for quantifying novel aspects of the specimen. CT has been used on arthropods to examine morphological and evolutionary aspects of species such as determining the location of mycangia in ambrosia beetles and Kolencík (et al. 2023) showed that morphological diversity of feather lice was a result of selective pressures by the host. CT has not been used to explore bee biology until now. The goal of this work was to determine the possibility of visualizing and quantifying pollen inside the digestive tract of a bee using micro-CT. In past studies, bees were dissected to obtain their gut contents and determine their diet breadth. Since dissection is destructive, it cannot be used on natural history specimens. The Phoenix v|tome|x CT scanner was used to scan a worker Bombus impatiens dyed with PTA, a contrasting agent. Pollen was clearly visible on the inside and outside of the bee. Scans were rendered and pollen load was quantified using the software VolumeGraphics©. Pollen grains were rendered at the highest resolution for identification. This work demonstrates that CT is a viable method to examine bee diet without the need to destroy the specimen and opens new avenues of ecological exploration using natural history collections.