In the news: weevil brood pollinators

Julien Haran, Gael Kergoat and I just published this review on weevil brood pollinators:

Haran J, Kergoat GJ, de Medeiros BAS. 2023 Most diverse, most neglected: weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea) are ubiquitous specialized brood-site pollinators of tropical flora. Peer Community Journal, 3 https://doi.org/10.24072/pcjournal.279

In the article we review what we know about brood pollination in weevils and trying to understand why something so obvious for anyone that has looked closely has been missed both by many pollination ecologists and many weevil experts.

Much to my surprise, it caught a lot of media attention, so hopefully many more people will consider weevils when looking at flowers in the future! Here are a few of the news articles mentioning our review:

https://phys.org/visualstories/2023-05-weevils-long-nosed-beetles-unsung-heroes.amp

https://www.popsci.com/environment/weevil-beetle-pollination/

https://www.earth.com/news/weevils-the-unknown-and-underappreciated-pollination-heroes/


Ok, this last photo is NOT one of the pollinators, but I hope some day we will change what you can find when searching the internet for palm weevils!

More generally, it is nice to see more attention given to the role of insects as pollinators and other ecosystem functions. For example, The Nature Conservancy put together this nice page about pollinators in the Midwest: https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/priority-landscapes/great-lakes/stories-in-the-great-lakes/peculiar-pollinators/