From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. If you've ever posted a photo on the Massive Community Science project called I Naturalist and wondered how such contributions get used in research, well, today's guest is here to tell us about one especially stunning example. It involves 1.6 million such crowdsourced observations and the timing of the migration of hummingbirds in eastern North America. You've probably heard it said that hummingbirds love red flowers and scientists in the Hopkins lab at the Arnold Arboriedem of Harvard University took a much closer look at that connection thanks to all that community data and the use of artificial intelligence to sort through it all. One of the Harvard scientists, a postdoctoral researcher in the Plant Evolution Lab named Patrick McKenzie, is here to explain what they learned and how, so more in a moment but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs. A third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by high-moving seeds, Wolcott Vermont, professional, Flower, and Erbil Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, highmoengseeds.com and by White Flower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflowerfarm.com. Patrick Mackenzie has written that why at hours in the sun meditating with the bugs plants and birds are my inspiration as an evolutionary biologist. Patrick is always on the lookout for patterns and then asking himself why each pattern unfolds like the why of red flowers and hummingbirds for example. He was part of the team at Dr. Robin Hopkins lab at the Arnold Arboretum that published the hummingbird research that's our topic today. Besides his extensive training and plant evolution, Patrick is a keen birter and I'm glad to welcome him to the show Hi Patrick, how are you? Hi Mark Red, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Yes. So on a non hummingbird, well, it might be hummingbird pop. It put a non-un non red flower topic. I read that your favorite wild flower species is monartifistulosa, the wild berumot or bivon. You spent many hours watching bumblebees forage from its lavender colored flowers. So that's one of your favorite observations that you like to go watch. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, Monardi Fistilosa is one that I grew up around in Arkansas and it's kind of followed me my whole life. So now there's a giant patch of it next to the building where I work. And so in the summertime, actually starting in just a few weeks, the Monardi Fistilosa will be blooming here. And yeah, watching the pollinator interactions with them is really, really amazing, because they're visited by bumblebees very obviously, but if you stand around and watch long enough, you'll see all sorts of different insect visitors, occasionally hummingbirds to come by to visit those flowers. Yeah. So how did the question about the commonly repeated notion that hummingbirds favor red

and I think tubular and nectar-rich flowers? How did that sort of question get on your radar

or something to look deeper into at the lab? And then that led to the publication, I believe,

it was last May in the journal Current Biology, yes. I love your research. So where did that, you know, were you watching Hummingbird's Orbid flowers or what happened? Well, yeah, there are a few things. So the concept of what makes a hummingbird flower is something that scientists have talked about back and forth in the literature for a long time. And whether it's truly a red flower, a preference for hummingbirds, whether that pattern, that truly hummingbirds, red flowers are more often hummingbird flowers, whether that's true to begin with. And then also there are these other physical characteristics that are common in hummingbird flowers we think, like having a tubular shape, so like trumpet-shaped flowers kind of and being rich in nectar. That scientists have been trying to study at large scales for a long time. I think for us there's this observation that if you track the flowering time or the phenology, the seasonality of when flowers are appearing in nature up the eastern US, I think a simple observation that was motivating for us is that flowers are appearing in the eastern US before hummingbird migration has occurred.

So there's this couple of week long period. I think in late March or early April, right before hummingbirds have moved up to Virginia, New York, where I am in Massachusetts, where flowers are blooming, but the birds aren't here yet. I have this you know this idea that like if this is true probably these hummingbird flowers are going to be underrepresented among among the flowers that we see. And maybe we won't be seeing many of these red or orange tubular nectar rich flowers. Okay. So that got you wondering, but it wasn't like, you could get nine million researchers to go man the coast all the way from the overwintering grounds to the breeding grounds for a month or something or a few weeks or a couple of weeks. I mean, how do you possibly, so you had this idea, right? How you could possibly accomplish this. Right, yeah, so there's these phenology studies being done, these studies of seasonality at local scale. You can find within a state park or something, a botanist would have recorded the flowering phenology of the flowering time of these different plant species and published that in the literature. And so there was some of that like highly localized information, but kind of in parallel to all of this, I've been getting more and more fascinated with, I naturalist, this community science, or you can, I call it community science, other people call it citizen science or participatory science. It's all referring to these platforms by which anyone can walk around in nature with a cell phone and not have a science background but still be contributing useful data. And I, naturalist, is I think one of, if not the most popular platform by which people are often engaging with community science. And so I'm starting to get really excited just in all aspects of the science I'm doing with the opportunity to use this data to study natural history at these really giant scales. So like you said, yeah, it would be really, really difficult to send thousands of researchers up and down the Eastern US to track when things are flowering and where hummingbirds are, right? But because we have people walking around with their cell phones, taking pictures of plants and birds and uploading them to I naturalist. We can do it from our living room couch or in my case, in the building where I work, I can look at observations from all over the country and all over the world. So yes, I think in North America, there are millions of observations of flowering plants, and that provided a really amazing dataset for us to dive into for this project. And now you didn't really sit on your living room couch going through the pieces of data. You actually did something even more forward thinking in modern, you know, which is I think you used artificial intelligence to help do the analysis. Is that correct?

Right. That is correct. And actually, so this idea is something that I originally had probably like I think I started trying to work on this with some friends during my PhD five or six years ago. And at the time, artificial intelligence as an opportunity for data processing wasn't really on our radar at all. And at the time, I took a bunch of people and a giant spreadsheet and tried to subdivide the work of manually labeling flower colors across the spreadsheet among, eight or 10 people, something like that. I was like, if we all spend 10 hours picking rows, maybe we can come out with a data set of 10,000 label observations, and maybe that would be enough to study this phenomenon. And so fast forward to, I think, late 2023 is when I was able to revisit this project and chat GPT had just matured in kind of a new way. They had introduced this computer vision model. And computer vision is something that I think is famously hard for doing complex tasks, but really excels at very simple tasks. And so the kind of question that I had been asking up to this point was, you know, looking at INaturalist observations and asking what flower color I'm looking at in a given image. And this is the exact kind of question that something like the chat GPT vision model is really, really good at performing, answering very simple questions and then doing that many times. And so I was able to come back to this dataset and rather than trying to rope in a bunch of people to just assemble a small dataset. Suddenly, I could turn the computer loose on this dataset of what ended ended up being a data set of 1.6 million observations. And for every observation, we can ask this very simple question of there is a flower in this image out of this list of colors. Yellow, blue, green, red, what color is the flower that you're seeing? And scaled up, you know, massively that becomes a very rich source of information that humans have a very difficult time assembling. And so we know it also from other observations we know where the hummingbirds are, like from the migration reports so forth do we. Yeah, because I mean I guess we should have maybe we should say that I mean hummingbirds. They're not just taking nectar they also act as pollinators to some of these plants too right they say it's it's a is that correct there's like a two way relationship. That's exactly right. Yeah. The plants provide a service to the hummingbirds and the hummingbirds provide a service to the

plants.

And it's thought that this specialization of these physical traits of the flowers of being red and of being tubular and of being nectar-rich are often more to the flowers benefit. I think specifically the specialization on red is thought to be the plants specializing to the hummingbirds. There's been some previous work showing that hummingbirds are really great learners. And if they aren't in an environment where there aren't red and orange flowers, that they can learn to find nectar in flowers of other colors. That this red color, the flowers take, help them stand out to the hummingbirds to the exclusion of things like bumblebee. So they can specialize really well on hummingbird visitors for pollination. And then the hummingbirds help plants cross-pollinate with one another, which helps maintain diversity for the plants. But yes, getting back to your original question, hummingbirds are also very frequent in the I naturalist dataset. They're also tracked separately. There's a separate community science platform called E-Bird that has loads of information about hummingbird migration as well. For simplicity for this paper, we just use the INaturalist dataset. But we did check informally to see that there was really good concordance in both datasets for tracking this Northward advancement of hummingbird migration. So here you have all this data. It's getting analyzed by AI and it's all and what kind of what did you find out? Because again, I've heard for years, oh, they like red flowers or oh, you know, and there may be some correlation to migrate their migration patterns or whatever. Oh, they come at the time of people say things. Sometimes it sounds like a little bit of conventional wisdom or an old wise to, oh, they come at the time of the such and such flower. You know, right. Right. But, you know, not necessarily backed up by research. So what did you find out? Yes. What we found was something that to me is really delightfully simple, which is that if you just forget about the species identity of all of these different flowers, if you just take these 1.7 million observations and you break them down into colors, you know, red, blue, green, yellow, we see this sort of perfect looking concordance in flowering time for everything that's not red and orange flowers. So basically early in the year, all of these different colors start flowering in the southern United States and in the eastern half of the country. And then throughout the spring, this flowering advances northward. So we sort of have early in the year, Everything's blooming in the south. Later in the spring, by May and by June, flowers are peaking in the northeast. And then red and orange really stand out as lagging behind in this northward advancement. And so in March, in April, when the hummingbirds haven't yet arrived, there are basically no red and orange flowers blooming in the eastern US. And then, as soon as the hummingbirds show up, we see this really perfect correlation in the northward advancement of the eastern US, of hummingbird migration alongside where these red and orange colored flowers are appearing. And so it's the first time that this lag driven by flower color alone has been documented in the scientific literature. And as an evolutionary biologist, this is really exciting because it suggests something about a generality. Generalities can be hard to come by in evolution and in ecology because biology is just so messy. But it suggests there's this generality of a link between red and orange flowers, regardless of the evolutionary histories of these different species and the time of the season at which they're appearing. And that's we think driven by the appearance of hummingbirds seasonally. So because again, relationship, because overall these, however many millennia, etc, beyond relationship relationship, is that why? I mean, the two organisms, they're not two, but you know what I mean? The flowers of these colors and the hummingbirds. I guess we don't do we know that or is that? Yeah, we, I think they're so more testing to be done. So what we have right now is a good correlation between the appearance of the red and orange flowers and the appearance of the hummingbirds. But I think it's really highly suggestive of a co-evolutionary relationship between these things. So there is some dependence on hummingbird presence of success for these red and orange flowers and getting successfully pollinated. Yeah, I think for millions of years, they will have been building this relationship. It's contingent on the fact that hummingbirds are migratory. This aspect of flowering time is contingent on this completely separate tax on which which if you look, you know, across on the other side of the country at the West Coast, like California, Anna's hummingbirds are there a year round and we don't see the same pattern. And so it's this process of migration in the Ruby-throated hummingbirds in the eastern U.S. that I think is driving this. I kind of love that it's Ruby-th that it's the red and orange flowers. I just kind of love that. It's all just very like styled, you know? It's very fashionable. So some of the flowers just as examples that in this palette going up the country, are there other some that people would recognize, you know, that as quote, hummingbird plants kind of? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, some popular garden plants for native flower gardens. I think lowbellia cardinal flower is one of the most frequent in the data set, as well as aquaia, canadinsis, wild columbine. If you're more in the southeast campuses, radicans, the the trumpet creeper is a more common orange flower. Later in the season we see jewel weed appear as well. So all of these, the data sets really interesting because yeah, there are, it's dominated very much by some of these, these very, very, I think, common and showy flowers. I think something that sort of innately appeals to me about these questions of Hummingbird pollination is that I think the flowers that are very attractive to, Hummingbirds are also the flowers that are very attractive to me personally. So I think of these as being the very, you know, the showy charismatic flowers that are often associated with hummingbird pollination. Right. Right. And it is interesting, you know, of course, now thinking about it, I'm thinking, well, you're completely right. I never thought of it consciously. I mean, I always thought about the part of early spring is pastelli, right? But I never thought about the other part, dot, dot, dot, but the red and orange stuff comes later. You know, I didn't think of it exactly that way. I thought of what was present, not what was missing. Right, right. Well, you know, for the early spring stuff and actually just I think looking across all of the other

ways that a flower can look there are other types of pollination syndromes. So pollination syndrome is a word that's referring to you know whether something is a hummingbird flower or a bumblebee flower or a fly flower like these There's groups of traits that are associated with one type of floral visitor versus another. And so we have our, you know, we've been talking about this, this red and orange tubular nectar rich flower for hummingbirds, but they're also associated suites of traits with with bumblebees, often having, you know, spotting on the petals, sort of like, you know, they often have like a landing pad for the bumblebees to hold onto. Just the sort of generalities of the appearance of these flowers. And in contrast, we have for fly pollinated flowers, we often have, you know, really strong aromas. They're often white or sometimes

like maroon or brown. And you know, they're also, you know, famous like Huck Moth pollination syndromes, bat pollination, all of which are, you know, generalities because these syndromes can arise sort of across sort of the tree of life and might look slightly different in, you know, agave versus morning glory or something. But still, you might see this trend toward, oh, if it's Hockmoth-pollinated, it might be white. I think what stands out here is that there is this lag, the seasonal lag, and the appearance of Ruby Thruated Hummingbirds

that we don't see in like bumblebees versus flies.

I think maybe we would also see a similar difference

in flowering time of our bumblebee pollinated things

and our fly pollinated things, except I think both

of those groups of pollinators get,

no, they become active around the same time of

year and so we don't see the same lag there.

I made me want to ask, you know, we have maybe three or so four minutes left. I wanted to

maybe want to ask about, does this experience with this research done this way using this kind

of data, do you have, do you have now a list of like all the other things you want to explore this this way? Uh-oh, I guess he does. I guess he does. It can really spiral, can't it? I think, yes, absolutely. I think I naturalist and community science in general is something that like if I were if we were to awaken a botanist from 200 years ago and show that person I naturalist and and what it can provide as a resource for asking these kinds of natural history questions at large scale. I really think it would just be it'd be absolutely absolutely mind blowing for that person. It is a treasure trove that I think provides, you know, endless opportunities for question about, questions about the natural world. And so, yeah, I've started digging in more to, you know, specific organisms. So we brought up Menardifistulocer earlier, and we have a recent paper out about exploring flower color variation in monartifistulose specifically. So rather than asking, you know, are we looking at red versus yellow versus blue? We're asking, okay, all of these flowers are generally lavender colored, but like, is there variation in that color across space? And in that project, we find that all of the, you know, the Western Men Artifasterlosis seem to be this richer, deeper lavender than those in the East. And so I've explored that a bit more with more of an organismal target. There are also new discoveries every day with a naturalist of new species or it can be used to track sort of the spread of invasive plants too. So I'm thinking about these things as well. I think maybe in the short term something I've been really excited about exploring in the future is to actually turn to eBird this other community science platform, and browse through all of the images of hummingbirds, and try to assemble a list or a map or something of, if there is a flower being visited by the hummingbird in that picture, what type of flower is that? and can this community science data set also just generally support the idea that this physical association of this red tubular flower really does hold up? Again, I think this is something that we generally know to be true, but every different facet we can take to support that, I think, makes that generality more convincing. And selfishly, I want to say as a gardener, I always say to people, plant some hummingbird, flowers, quote unquote, near your favorite windows. That's right. Because there's such little birds in their fast and so forth, but it it's so incredible to watch them up close to have the privilege to watch them up close do you know what I mean? And so you know I have some honey suckle, lonesome, or semi-pervierance, a porch post right outside my kitchen windows and so you know and it's just like I mean just watching you know it's just selfish but wonderful so hopefully they're as happy as I am about it. Yeah well they're so entertaining right and we had yeah exactly. I've lived near Minarta did a mob before the scarlet people. Yes and yeah really really similar experience it can provide a whole lot of entertainment when you especially when you get more than one one hummingbird. Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah. They can be a lot of fun. Well Patrick McKenzie, I'm so glad to talk to you and I was so glad that you shared with me in correspondence and so forth recently. This research and alertedly to this because this is just really fascinating. Both the process and what you learned. So thank, and I hope I'll talk to you again soon.

And happy birding meantime, right?

That's right, yeah.

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