SOLS Podcasts

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Peggy:- Hi, this is Peggy Coulombe, and welcome to science studio. On our podcast series we have had conversations of faculty from the School of Life Sciences, from entomologists to ecologists, from microbiologists to neuroscientists. But, probably wondering, given the diverse complement of faculty, and research interest that you've heard about, what professional and social under pinning styles all together?

It is no small task partnering conservation management of Pika in Tibet with bacterial or bio fuels research. Tasked was developing a coherent vision for more than a 100 faculty and 240 graduate students, and hundreds of staff, post docs and undergraduates is entomologist and honeybee researcher Robert Page, foundation professor and founding director of the School of Life Sciences. Welcome Rob.

Robert Page: Hi Peggy.

Peggy: You were the chair of the department of entomology in University of California, Davis before you came here to develop the school of life sciences. How did you go about creating one coordinated collective in this school?

Rob: I came in 2004, and creating one coordinated collective in the school, well I am not quite sure we are there yet...

Peggy: [laughter].

Rob: But we are certainly still working on it. Basically I did not have the plan initially. When I came here, there was already a plan in place and it was my job was to implement it.

Peggy: And who developed the plan?

Rob: The plan was developed by the faculty. There was a steering committee that put it together, and they had an idea of what they wanted at the time. And also David Young, who was the dean of the college of global arts and sciences. He had a vision on how he thought a school like this could be put together and how it ought to work.

Peggy: So what institutions did you model School of Life Sciences after, or what sources did you draw inspiration from, in addition from the input of the faculty?

Rob: Well, basically there was no model. This was the first of it's kind as far as I know. Again, it was an idea that, originally came from David Young, to break down the disciplinary barriers that you normally see when you have the traditional departments in schools of life science.

When I came, it was a challenge because there was not a model. There was not anyone that I could go to and say "How do I fix this or how do I fix that?" It was basically standing back, taking a look at it and trying to figure out how to make it work.

Peggy: Is this the challenge that ultimately brought you to ASU?

Rob: Yes, I think I was ready for a challenge. I had been chair of my department at University California, Davis for five years. And during that period of time, it was a period of retrenchment. I felt a lot like a custodian of the department where the University of California was retracting fiscally. There was the divestment of the state in the university, which was taking place across the whole country. Everyone was pretty much in the same boat.

Rob: I had that opportunity to come here, where there was a new vision. More than that, there were resources to go with it. The university has a president, Michael Crow, who really saw the importance of investing in the life sciences, he saw the connections of life sciences with the community, the valley here, Phoenix is in, looking at the biological sciences as an industry that could help grow Phoenix.

So there was a lot of investment, I had a lot of interests. When I looked at it thinking that there were things that I could actually do here other rather than be a custodian of a department. So that was what attracted me.

Peggy: Out of curiosity, and because your research is largely centered on the study of honeybees, I have to ask; Did 30 years of research with social insects help in some way with the creation of School of Life Sciences?

Rob: Well, I do not think so. I haven't yet seen that level of altruism in all my faculty, I think I have seen, just about that level of defensive behavior but, no I am teasing, I don't think so. I think that the thing about being a social insect biologist however, was that it directed me over my career to look at biology at a lot of different levels. That is the thing you can get from studying social insects.

So I basically started out looking at the social insects at the behavior level. I also had an interest in genetics, but it was more the genetics of, the group kind of behavior, the social behavior. But as biology changed, I was constantly having to retool. I found myself actually now working at the gene level and looking at the genome, being involved in a honeybee genome sequencing project.

So, I think it gave me an opportunity to span all these different levels of biology, which helped me appreciate more I think, what all the other faculty within the school of life sciences do. I had equal appreciation for the behaviorists and the molecular and cellular biologists.

Peggy: Did you always know you wanted to work with insects and pursue a scientific career?

Rob: I wanted to be a biologist, pretty much from the time that I can remember. There were times when I thought maybe I wanted to be a medical doctor, like most kids. But that was always sort of in the background. Biology was something that I had an interest in, by the first grade because I know I had a biology club, in my neighborhood.

Of course at that time, Biology, when you are that small, is like taking a magnifying glass and cooking ants on the sidewalk. Which is not what I do anymore.

Peggy: [laughter].

But I did have an interest in biology very early on. Not necessarily insects, I did not really get interested in Entomology until I did my undergraduate work.

Peggy: Why did you come to focus on social insects, bees in particular?

Rob: At San Jose State University, I was a biology major and that was the first Entomology course I ever took It was on the husbandry and culturing of honeybees. And I found it to be fascinating. So, then I decided to take another course in entomology, and then another, and another, and another. And through the process I became very interested in Entomology but more from the evolutionary perspective.

That is what really turn me on. All the diversity of insects, the diversity in their behavior. I especially loved beetles. That was something, I thought maybe I wanted to be a beetle taxonomist like our current dean at the college of global arts and sciences Quentin Wheeler, but I didn't go that way. But I did change my major from biology to entomology.

Peggy: It was at San Jose State University, that you had your first publication too, in the pan pacific entomologist in 1976. Do you still remember that publication?

Rob: I do, it was about beetles. And actually today, I check the citations of that paper and it has not yet been cited by anyone.

Peggy: [laughter].

So I hoping that some day someone will see that paper and actually cite it.

Peggy: What role did your first undergraduate research experience and publication play in fueling your career in research?

Rob: I do not know to what extent. That was more of a natural history jaunt. This paper was a consequence of being in the right place at the right time, and being someone who basically does not like to do what everybody else is doing.

So, there is this annual ritual, associated with the entomology club at San Jose State University to go out after the first or second rain of the season, which usually occurred in September, and collect these beetles that were really kind of rare and hard to find, that would burrow up out of the ground and fly around, right at dusk and only during the very first rains. They were known as rain beetles.

And there were certain places where they were located that everybody went. But there was this other place where they had only been collected once, 30 years ago and nobody else had gone back there. And so, I decided "Well maybe I will just go back and look but the ones that are really rare". There had never been any females collected because the males fly around in search of females and they're tracking their pheromones. Nobody had ever collected any of the females.

So, I went out in the evening with this other guy, and the two of us his name was Fisher went out and we came up with a strategy. We figured we would let the males help us find the females, which was not a bad idea. And so that evening we collected this rare species and we collected the first females as the males guided us to them. The two of us wrote this little paper for the Pan Pacific entomologist.

So, it was not like getting into research into a laboratory like what we try to encourage our students to do here. So, I do not know if it had that much of an impact on me getting into research. But I was definitely interested in research.

Peggy: School of Life Sciences invests in and extensively promotes undergraduate research experiences. We have our mark program and our pre mark program which is minority access in research careers administered by professor Jennifer Field and funded by the National Science Foundation and then there is SOLUR: the School Of Life Sciences Undergraduate Research program, and the REU program which is also known as the Summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates. Both managed and directed by professors Ronald L. Rutowski and Andrew T. Smith. Who is also the associate director of undergraduate programs.

And we also have the Howard Hughs Medical Institute backed, the AZ Bionet, which started just recently. It is designed to place students as interns at bio medically based business research, medical, and legal institutions in the valley.

Why do you feel that all these internship possibilities and research for undergraduates are crucial?

Rob: Well, I think, undergraduates having hands on experience with research, teaches them about the value of science. It teaches them what science really is.

When you go out and start listening to adults, even if you listen to politicians; they very often do not have a clue about what science is about. They do not understand the scientific method, they do not understand the process, they do not understand what it is that science does and what science does not do.

It also gives students additional depth and breadth, with respect to their education and biological sciences or geological, it does not matter. Things that they are not going to get in the classroom they can get it working in the lab and being mentored by a faculty member.

I encourage students in my classes to get involved in research, to go find a professor that they can work with, that they can have those kinds of opportunities. That is what you get, when you go to a research university like ASU. You have the opportunity to work with people who really are engaged in research.

Many universities do not have faculty like that and those opportunities are not available. And I think that all students should take advantage of that.

Peggy: Who was a critical mentor for you?

Rob: Well, the one that really got me interested in Entomology and in research was Gordon Edwards, and he was at San Jose State.

Gordon Edwards was noted at the time, as the person who was running around eating DDT and telling people that DDT was not nearly as harmful as what everybody was saying. This was right after Rachel Carsons' "Silent Spring" came out and he had some points. His whole point was that, in a lot of ways DDT got a bum rap, because, it was being blamed for everything. And there really was not any scientific evidence for a lot of the things that it got blamed for. Now, eventually there was scientific evidence for a number of things that it was blamed for.

But he was very critical, not from the point of view that he represented a chemical company or whatever, but just looking at the science. And he use to bring that on to classes, and again I was a part of the Entomology club. He brought it up in these club meetings.

And I did in fact do some experiments with him. But it was not through an internship or through a formalized course. But I think that he really got me interested in thinking critically about scientific evidence. He also steered me in the direction to go to UC Davis for my graduate work.

Peggy: Now that you have published about 165 journal articles, including being part of the consortium that sequenced the honeybee genome. How has study of honeybees changed during this time?

Rob: Well it has changed dramatically. When you looked at social insect studies, 30 years ago they were primarily oriented towards ecology and behavior behavioral ecology. Basically, the starting point in these behavioral ecology studies was what was known as the "Phenotypic Gambit". A gambit is an opening move in chess. Well the opening move in behavioral ecology was the assumption that; everything that you observe, the differences that you observed between populations of any organisms that you are looking at were, because they vary genetically. But they vary genetically because they were subjected to different environments.

So, now to really understand the evolution of these traits that you are interested in the trait differences between these populations you did not have to worry about the genes because you just assume that they are responsible for it, now you just had to explain the environments.

So, there was this bias against doing the genetics. It was very much an ecological kind of and environmental kinds of studies, to look at organisms at the interface of their environment. Different environments shape organisms in different ways; like modeling clay.

Over time we have moved to looking more at the mechanisms, and then the genetics of behavior became important, and now the genomics of behavior has become important. Especially when genomes started being sequenced, we started finding out that the evolutionary history of life on earth is one of, using of the same building blocks, the same genes, and the same signaling pathways, and cascades in slightly different ways. That we really started changing the way that we looked at evolutionary processes, and differences in organisms, and populations of organisms. So, it has come a long way. And the honeybee genome sequence has opened up a whole new level of analysis for us.

Peggy: So what can social insects like; bees and ants tell us about the evolution of social behavior.

Rob: Well, of course, they are the most advanced social organisms. I mean, you can look at humans and say "Look at how advanced our societies are." But really when you sit down and you start looking at the things that we really mark as social behavior; altruism and parental care, and these kinds of traits, they really exemplify it. Yeah, we are smarter, in some ways I guess.

Peggy: [laughter]

Rob: And we have built larger structures and we have managed to manage more of our environment than they have. But when you look at their organizational structure in many ways they are far superior than us. And they are doing it with brains that are just a tiny, tiny fraction of what ours are. So, I think, they are the ultimate examples and if we understand their social behavior, we are understanding the most complex social behavior.

Peggy: And how do things like solitary bees and wasps help us gain understanding about social behavior?

Rob: I think in order to truly understand how complex social behavior in insects evolved, we have to understand what it evolved from. And it evolved from solitary species. Solitary species do everything that the social species do, and more, actually.

When you look at an individual female solitary bee, she emerges as an adult from her cell, she flies around, and maintains herself by feeding on flowers and getting nectar. She at some point in time mates, then she constructs a nest, she forages for resources, she lays an egg, she seals up the cell. I mean she goes through all these behavioral patterns repeatedly, where as a social insect may skip some of those jobs.

If you look at the total repertoire of all the individuals of a social insect colony the total repertoire behavior is greater than a single solitary bee. But a single solitary bee in her life, exhibits a larger repertoire than any single individual worker honey bee a social species.

Peggy: So, we are talking, essentially, about division of labor?

Rob: Talking about the division of labor and how it can actually subtract from the repertoire of an individual but increase the repertoire of the whole colony.

Peggy: So why is having the genome of the honey bee important? What kind of long range impacts do you see coming from that work?

Rob: I think that, first of all, it opens up the opportunity to comparative studies. And that is really what we need, if you really want to understand life on earth in any act at any level. Behavior, physiology, whatever we really have to do it at a comparative level.

And the genome sequence gives us the ability to do the comparisons at different levels of biological organization. You can look at the genome sequence; you can look at the gene products; you can look at the interactions of the gene products, the proteins. You can see how that affects particular structures or behavior. It just opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for doing comparative studies.

Peggy: And what you mentioned earlier about the co opting of genes to do new types of jobs...

Rob: Yeah, I think that what we are finding is that the evolution of complexity, be it morphological, anatomical, physiological or social is derived from novelties that are basically the tweaking of systems that already existed. So, we can ask the question "Where do novel traits come from?". Well they do not come from novel genes. They come from slight changes in genes that result in the ways that those gene products interact with each other. Then through that interaction structure you build different kinds of physiological or anatomical structures that then might affect behavior, etcetera.

Peggy: Assistant Professor Drew Anderman and you, I believe, are doing some work with the honeybee model in terms of looking at things like aging. Tell me something about that kind of work.

Rob: Well, aging is a difficult discipline, if you want to study human aging. Where are you going to start? If I was going to do a study on human aging, I think I would start with people who are 90 years old, and I might get my study finished before I end my career.

Peggy: [laughter]

Rob: You have a real problem. You cannot go out and start changing their environments and trying to figure out what is going on experimentally. So it is difficult to do that. We are looking for systems that we can use that are in some ways homologous with human systems, where we can actually do experimental manipulations and look at the effects of the manipulations on length of life.

When you look at social insects, you see a dramatic difference in life span between say, reproductive individuals and non reproductive individuals. So we have comparison groups that are of the same species living side by side, even within the same nest. So, it gives us lots of opportunities to ask the question: "Well, why does the queen live so long and the workers don not?".

So we can test a lot of these different hypotheses that are out there with respect to aging that have been proposed even for human aging. Surprisingly, again, going back to this idea that, the history of life on earth is hundreds of millions of years of this same genes being around, and the same systems being around that have been modified in slightly different ways.

When you go in to and start looking at, say, the neurons in the brains of a honey bee, the machinery is the same as the neurons in the brain of humans. The same kinds of things that are breaking down structure and function of a honeybee brain are the things that are breaking down the structure and function of the human brain.

So, at least, that is ideally what we are looking at.

Peggy: One of directions that your research has been taking you recently concerns "Evo Devo." Could you tell me what "Evo Devo" is?

Rob: Well, "Evo Devo" is evolutionary development. It is studying the evolution of development patterns. I think what we're doing is more "Devo Evo", it is more developmental evolution. Actually, that word has been proposed by others as well.

What it really comes down to is, let us take the social structure of an insect colony. Let us take honeybees. In honeybees, we have some individuals that become workers and some individuals that become queens. The queens are bigger, and they have bigger ovaries, and they have a different kind of stinger. There are a lot of differences between them. Those differences had to have occurred as a consequence of differences in development in some point along the way.

A queen develops from an egg into a full sized adult in about 16 days. A worker takes 21 days and she is half the size of the queen. Some real developmental difference is taking place. When you look at behavioral differences of workers themselves, some workers specialize in becoming pollen foragers, some specialize in becoming nectar foragers. When you get down to looking at them really closely, you find out that the individuals that become pollen foragers, they tend to have larger size ovaries than the ones that tend to be nectar foragers.

Well, ovary size is determined when they're developing as larvae, about six days after the egg was laid. So there is a whole another 15 days before they become an adult and then there is another three weeks before they forage. So there was a real critical window of time developmentally that had profound effects later on.

If you want to talk about the evolution about the division of labor for foraging behavior, you have to understand the evolution of the developmental change. Developmentally, something different is going on, when they're about six days old, about six days after the egg was laid.

That is the "Evo Devo" perspective. We're trying to go back down and say, OK, this is really interesting, we can study these phenomena about division of labor and social structure. But really, someplace there has got to be this signature of a developmental change, that occurred that resulted in these differences in social structures that we see at the colony level.

Peggy: Tell me something about the project that you and Professor Manfred Liebherr are being asked to participate in in Germany.

Rob: In Berlin there's an Institute called "The Dissen Chafs Kollegen". And basically, it is an institute for dance studies. They bring people in, sort of like a think tank, for different periods of time. They invite fellows in for an academic year, which generally spans from September through July, and their academic year.

They like to build working groups where people come in and tackle specific kinds of problems, very much from getting together, interacting, having discussions, bringing in the right mixture of people to intellectually stimulate advances in particular areas.

One of the areas they happen to be interested in is "Evo Devo". Specifically, they are interested in how social insects can be used as models for understanding evolutionary development, or developmental evolution. So, they basically asked us to submit a proposal to build a working group to come there and work for an academic year, exploring all the different issues associated with using social insects for studying "Evo Devo".

That's what we're doing. We'll be there for academic year 2009 2010.

Peggy: I am curious how you built such strong ties with researchers in Germany.

Rob: It actually goes all the way back to 1970, when I met my wife at an officer's club party in Heidelberg, Germany. I was a lonely lieutenant stationed over there. We were married there. When I got out of the army we came back to the States. We always had a fondness, she has this real propensity for Germany.

We were always looking for opportunities to go. So drives at UC Davis and had my program going there. I had opportunities to get German Post Doc's. I ended up having a series of them that came through my lab. Several of them came from Bert Hölldobler's lab at University in Bratsberg. Then in 1995 I received the Alexander von Humboldt research prize, which is the biggest prize that the German government gives a non German researcher. At least, that is what Bert told me.

I went to German for a year. I made a number of other connections with people. Since then, I have had several more German post doc's come and work in my lab. I have gone back to Germany most Summers to work there with different colleagues.

Peggy: We see bees about us pretty much daily. I do not think most people know much about them. For example, I certainly did not know that honeybees were introduced to North America. Being a bee researcher, I'm sure you can help enlighten us about bees in general. If the first bees in this area were of European descent, how does it come to pass that most are now Africanized?

Rob: European bees were brought into North America at Jamestown. When was it formed? 1608? Something like that? They were brought with the first European settlers. Actually, as they spread across the country, they were known as the white man's flies by the native Americans.

They thought that they were flies that would sting. They always showed up a little bit in advance of the settlers. The native Americans would find them on the flowers, then they knew it would not be long until the settlers were going to show up. It took them until well into the 1800's to spread across the plains of North America.

They did not spread across the Rocky Mountains into the Western states. They were actually taken around by ship into San Francisco in the 1850's, I think it was, or early 1860's, to get them established along the Pacific coast. What all this says, is they were very slow at spreading.

A good friend of mine, Warwick Kerr, is the man who actually introduced the Africanized bees into Brazil in 1956. But he was a kid who lived about 90 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro. The European bees were brought into Rio de Janeiro also about the 1850's, about the time that they were introduced into California. He was a hobby beekeeper as a kid, but he kept stingless bees the native bees that you find in South America.

He can remember his first experience with a European honey bee, finding him on a flower. And it was about 90 years after they were introduced into Rio de Janeiro. So again, showing how slowly they spread.

The Africanized bees were brought into Southern Brazil in the 1950's, and by the late 1980's had spread all the way up into Texas and Arizona. They were much more adapted for rapid spread. They have a higher rate of reproduction. They tolerate a lot of very adverse environmental conditions. They were very well adapted to invade both South America and North America.

So they spread through. They are the same species. It is a really an interesting phenomenon because you have one introduced genotype being replaced by another introduced genotype, and they interbreed. But the advantages of the African phenotype are so great that it has really swamped out most of the European genes that are in those populations.

Peggy: I heard too that there was a mite that also attacked European honey bees, did it effect Africanized bees as well?

Rob: The Varroa mite attacks both. There are indications that the Africanized bees might be somewhat more resistant to it, but they just have very, very high reproductive rates. They are still honey bees, they still pollinate, they still produce honey, but they are just much, much more defensive.

When you encounter them on flowers, they are no more likely to sting you on a flower than a European bee is. When you get near their nests, then you are much more likely to get stung. That is where the big difference in the behavior is, is at the defense of the nest. And their reproductive behavior. They produce reproductive swarms much more frequently than European bees.

Peggy: There's been a lot in the press about a mysterious ailment, Colony Collapse Disorder, that is decimating some commercial honey bee populations. I am assuming that's the European honey bee. Has this had any impact on your research or the research of your colleagues?

Rob: Well, I think that there are a lot of apicultural researchers in this country focusing on this as a problem. It's a serious problem. The bee industry in the United States has been plagued for at least the last 20, 25 years by recurring invasive parasites, predators, pathogens. It has been a wave of them, wave after the next coming through. It has had impact on the supply of bees for pollination. The supply of bees is shorter now, because the commercial bee keepers have lost a lot of colonies.

It has increased the cost of their operations. They have to replace the lost colonies, they have to treat with different kinds of pharmaceutical compounds that they put into them. So there are a lot of researchers who are working on the question about Colony Collapse Disorder. Most of the things that I hear about it and what I have seen, going on the Internet and looking, that it seems to be one of these multi factor problems. It is sort of like a colony of bees gets a checklist of things that can go wrong, and if you get ten or more, you're dead.

So you cannot put your finger on any one, it is just when they all line up. They get hit with insecticides when they are foraging on certain crops. They are being treated with a lot of compounds to treat for the mite diseases that they have. They are being stressed a lot because basically commercial bee keeping in this country is bees on wheels. They're being transported all over the place on trucks, they are dumped off on the ground. They go out, they forage on crops, they get hit with insecticides, it knocks down their strength, then they get moved some place else.

They also are probably somewhat protein deficient, because they are really being run really hard and used very hard for commercial purposes. So perhaps they are not getting enough of the right proteins or amino acids in the pollen that they are collecting. So a number of different things adding up.

And then maybe, maybe there is a new microorganism or something that is also out there. That is maybe just an opportunistic one, that when their healthy it does not bother them but when they get weak and sick it hurts them. The same thing happens to us.

So I think it is a complex problem. I suspect that it is one that's going to be solved by management. That the bee keepers are going to change the way that they are doing some things in order to resolve the problem.

As far as my colonies are concerned, I have not yet had any problems. We maintain about 150 hives of bees, and we do not have any evidence of Colony Collapse Disorder. Which is true for all of my research colleagues that I have talked to, that none of them have experienced this problem. It seems to be something associated with the commercial lifestyle of bees.

Peggy: Now, where do you think your research is going to take you next? We heard about evo devo and the bee genome.

Rob: Probably into retirement. That is what I suspect.

Peggy: [laughs]

Rob: I mean, as far as taking me somewhere. OK, first of all, originally I came from a background in population genetics and I really wanted to be a modeler. So I started out doing population genetics modeling, I really like the theory. And then there was a point in my career, early on, when I went to lunch with someone who was a very famous population geneticist.

We were sitting around talking and he told me that there is no way he could be a population geneticist today because he does not know enough math. And of course, he knew much more than I did. So that is when I decided I was going to be an empiricist. So I switched over and started doing empirical science, figuring I was not going to have much of a career as a theorist if that is the way he felt.

But I think that we are now at a point where we need to have a different kind of theory and we need to look at biological systems in a different way. We need to look at evolutionary processes incorporating "Evo Devo", incorporating genomics, incorporating signal transduction pathways. I think that we need a way to integrate between all these different levels and we really don't have one. I think that the biggest problem in biology today is the problem of complexity. That biology is becoming so complex, we need to be building ways to understand it.

So that is what I would like to do. I have been kind of the gamut from looking at colony level behavior, all the way down to genome sequence. So now I would like to step back and say, "OK, are there ways that we can build models that help us, with our feeble minds, grasp these these very, very complex systems?"

I'm not sure what it is, but I suspect it is going to somehow involve putting together the right teams of people. And it might include animation, ultimately. Getting the right teams to put the parts together and then getting somebody who is really smart with animation. Because that might be the only way that we can really bring all this stuff together and understand it.

I look at it as, we have in biology today the two centimeter view. We are down on our hands and knees on the beach, with a stereo microscope looking at grains of sand one at a time, and we are trying to figure out what it looks like at 30,000 feet. So we've got to get to 30,000 feet somehow.

Peggy: [laughter] Well Rob, I want to thank you for being with us today, it's been a really interesting conversation.

Rob: You are welcome. Thank you for having me.

Peggy: This is Peggy Coulombe and you've been listening to School of Life Sciences podcast "Science Studio". We hope you like our theme music, it was composed by Yongen from the collection "Moon Rise" and was made available by Magnatunes. School of Life Sciences is in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University.

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The A’s and Bees of Building Life Sciences

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SOLS Podcasts 2007