GELIFES Seminars - Robert Paxton

Robert Paxton (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)

Viral infections as a cause of insect pollinator decline

Experimental and genomic insights

Insect pollinator decline has risen to become a major ecological and societal issue across the world. In temperate regions, the most important commercial insect pollinator, the honey bee, suffers from elevated overwinter mortality. Through a programme of observations and experiments on honey bees and bumble bees, I explore the extent to which viruses are causal in their decline and the degree to which those same viruses spill over across the community of flower-visiting insect species.

Biosketch:
Robert Paxton is a professor at the Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany, where he holds a chair in General Zoology. Robert got his PhD on sex ratios in solitary wasps at Sussex University in the UK, before a postdoc at Cardiff University on bees and pollinations, Uppsala on bee population genetics and Tübingen on the genetics of social evolution. He then took a position at Queen's University Belfast and then in 2010 in Halle. His main research interests are social evolution, host-parasite relations, pollination and conservation genetics, with a special interest of course on bees.