Janko Šet1, dr. David Stanković2, dr. Denis Kutnjak2, dr. Matjaž Gregorič1, Dr Klemen Čandek2, Dr Rok Šturm2, Blaz Koderman2, Dr Danilo Bevk2
1Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2National Institute of Biology, Ljubljana, Slovenia
In the last few decades, Earth’s ecosystems and their climates are changing massively. As we are experiencing mass extinctions among most organism groups, we are becoming increasingly aware of the worrying decline of pollinators, especially wild-bee populations around the globe. Bee monitoring projects are underway in much of the developed world but are being held back by slow and labor-intensive protocols – drawbacks of traditional monitoring techniques, similar to those in the monitoring of other invertebrate groups. Molecular approaches, particularly the use of eDNA, can potentially overcome some of these drawbacks. Here, we use spider webs as emerging biofilters of aerial eDNA, to investigate for new potential protocols in wild-bee monitoring. To do that, we conducted a season-long collection of spider webs, that paralleled a wild-bee monitoring using classical methodology (passive traps and morphological species determination). We obtained COI barcodes for all collected bee species, designed primers for DNA metabarcoding of eDNA from spider webs, and performed high-throughput sequencing using the Ilumina MySeq technology. We compared the classical versus eDNA approaches in alpha and beta diversities of inferred bee communities, and estimated differences in resources needed to conduct both monitoring regimens.
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