Tracey Quinlan Dougherty

Daniel Song, a third-year doctoral student in biology who studies plant-pollinator networks, is quick to note he’s not the first person to examine correlations between plants and the insects who fertilize them. “For as long as people have been collecting honey, they’ve been understanding pollinators,” he says. However, his distinctive approach to analyzing these networks could have significant implications for conservationists.

Each summer, Song travels to a valley in northern Mongolia, where he spends seven days a week observing which plants are flowering and which insects are landing on them. When he returns to campus each fall, he uses network analysis—a digital tool originally used to study food webs in aquatic environments—to parse the data to see which pollinators are drawn to which plants. He then correlates the physical traits of the plants with their pollinators’ to see what physical characteristics might cause certain insects to choose to pollinate certain flowers. Bigger flowers, for instance, have deeper corolla tubes to get the nectar from, and bigger-bodied insects have longer tongues.

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