In March 2025, we also started our work for MountBuzz on the island of Borneo, in the Malaysian state of Sabah in Northern Borneo. We – that is a team of three students from the University of Vienna (Imran Sadovic, Andrea Errante, Isadora Skudelny) together with Agnes, our collaborators from the Universiti Malaysia Sabah (botanist Florina Anthony and insect evolutionary ecologist Sze Yek Huei) and Belle Damasus, who is a Master student with Florina and working on filmy fern ecology on Mount Kinabalu. On our initial exploration trip in the first week, we were accompanied by several expert botanists from the Universiti Malaysia and from Sabah Parks, whose knowledge helped us not only to identify different Melastomataceae genera which we all saw for the first time in Borneo, but also to learn a lot about other rainforest plants and which ones can be used for medicinal purposes, or prodcue yummy fruits. Eating and cooking became a thing in the team in the course of the trip, with our Malaysian colleagues introducing vegetables and cooking techniques to the European team members that they hadn’t known about, such as the use of differnet Cucurbitaceae shoots in stir fries and soups… and vice versa, the European team members prepared a few classical central European meals, such as Gulasch (a paprika-heavy beef stew) with Spätzle (a type of pasta) or boiled potatoes with butter and salt.

Our exploratory trip featured different areas of Mount Kinabalu, including lowland foothills around Poring hotsprings (where the world’s biggest flowers, Rafflesia, grow!), mid-elevation montane rainforests with beautiful streams, and a hike into the higher elevations of Mount Kinabalu where one transitions from montane forest to cloud forests and will, eventually, reach treeline. Interestingly, Melastomataceae on Mount Kinabalu do not reach the Alpine zone above treeline, which they do on all other gradients. We do not know the reason for this difference, but it is an interesting question to ponder on in the future. Initially, we found many species just with fruits or sterile, but as always, as we kept looking and exploring more in the forest, more and more individuals with flowers and buds started showing up. The most common genera we found were Medinilla, Melastoma and Sonerila, with the latter being small herbs growing on the shaded forest floor in dense moss layers. We also found some more rare genera such as Catanthera, Astronia, Phyllagathis and Dissochaeta. At this phase of the project, any flowers we find are exciting, since almost all of these genera don’t have any information on their reproductive biology, and if they do, often only for one species from a single locality, while many genera (such as Medinilla, Melastoma and Sonerila) are actually large and geographically widespread. Again, we put up cameras for video monitoring of pollinators, backed up by direct observations and bee catching to identify bees and collect pollen samples from them. We further started manual pollination experiments to understand whether the species can reproduce in the absence of pollinators, monitor flower longevity and flower traits. The team will employ this protocol and data collection across multiple different sites in different areas of Mount Kinabalu in order to understand how reproductive strategies change across elevation.

At the end of February, Agnes travelled to Madagascar for an exploratory trip to prepare fieldwork later in 2025. In Antananarivo, the capital city, Agnes was warmly welcomed by Lalaina Ramiliarisona, our Malagasy team member and PhD student in the MountBuzz project, and Richard Randriatsitohaina, field assistant. Lalaina had done a great job in the previous months getting research permits ready and gathering as much information as possible to prepare the trip to Northern Madagascar to Marojejy National Park. Fieldwork at Marojejy is different from all other fieldsites in MountBuzz because there are no research stations, but the team will actually camp in the forest. We are very lucky, however, in that Mount Marojejy counts with a trail from almost sea level all the way to the summit, making our work along the elevational gradient a lot easier! Furthermore, there are camps established at three different elevations, and they feature basic cabins and roofed kitchen areas for preparing food and sorting specimens. And, a luxury: the first two camps are right next to beautiful rivers, which make for refreshing baths at the end of fieldwork days, while just a few meters away in the pristine primary rainforest, different lemur species forage on leaves and fruits (including from Melastomataceae!).

When we arrived, Lalaina had already made arrangements with a local guide, cook and porters who greatly helped us bring our equipment and luggage to the camps, find plants and keep us fed throughout the trip. We embarked on the first week-long journey into the forest, with many to follow in the coming months. In the course of her project, Lalaina will get to know Marojejy very well since she does not only study the Melastomataceae pollination and breeding system ecology in the frame of MountBuzz, but also will look into flowering and fruiting phenology as well as dispersal. To this end, Lalaina will return to Marojejy repeatedly over the next two years. In our exploratory trip in March 2025, our aim was to find and identify as many different Melastomataceae species as possible along the summit trail. We could locate many species of different genera, including Gravesia, Medinilla, Rousseauxia and Dichaetanthera. The genus Memecylon is notoriously hard to find since leaves don’t have the typical Melastomataceae venetation and resemble the leaves of other genera – we found some candidate individuals, but will need to wait for flowers in order to be sure. All Melastomataceae we found, we marked with bright orange tape to make it easier to relocate them on future trips, took GPS points, made herbarium collections, measured flowers and fruits and recorded the phenological state of the plants (so if they were flowering, fruiting, sterile, …). If flowers were accessible for experiments, we also placed mesh bags over buds to prevent pollination by animals – if fruits form in the bags regardless, this would tell us that the plants can actually reproduce without animal pollinators. The results of these pollinator exclusion experiments we will only have once Lalaina goes back to the field later in 2025. Well… hopefully we will have results! Although no detailed studies have been conducted, it seems like lemurs do actually forage on Melastomataceae fruits – thus, we are curious to see whether lemurs will remove the bags we placed on inflorescences to get to the juicy, sweet fruits!

Our exploratory trip was also interesting because it happened during the cyclone or rainy season of Madagascar, where usually not many botanists go to the forests. Preparing for our trip, we had been told by several colleagues that likely, we wouldn’t find any flowers because of the rainy season making it less likely for bee pollinators to be around. Our first interesting observation was that there were actually a lot of species bearing flowers, but obviously, if no biologists go to the field in the rainy season, no one knows. On the other hand, it will be very important for us to come back also in 2026, since flowering and fruiting phenologies in the tropics can be very variable and influenced by El Nino events, so multi-year data is a must. In the next months before returning to the field, Lalaina will be busy comparing the many herbarium collections we have made to existing collections in different herbaria in Antanananarivo to identify the Melastomataceae species we have found.

February has been a very busy month in project MountBuzz, with the Team Brazil continuing their fieldwork at different sites in the Atlantic Rainforest. After the high elevation sites in Itatiaia National Park, the team moved to the lowest sites at the seaside around beautiful Picinguaba to continue their work on plant-pollinator interactions and reproductive strategies of Melastomataceae. They were very successful and could find a species (Henriettea sp.) from a tribe we had not sampled yet, thereby importantly increasing our sampling across the phylogeny. Also, they managed to work with several species of Pleroma and could document very large carpenter bees on the flowers, as well as a high diversity of bee visitors on much smaller-flowered Miconia species. We all start dreaming about the pollination networks that we will be able to plot very soon after data collection and identifying the plants and pollinators we are working with. Photo credits: César Arvelos.

Also, at the end of February, Agnes travelled to Madagascar for the first time to meet local PhD student Lalaina Ramiliarisona, who will work in the MountBuzz project and collect additional data on Melastomataceae phenology and fruiting strategies. Agnes was received very warmly by her Malagasy colleagues and very much enjoyed the opportunity to interact with students from the University of Antanananarivo and the Madagascar Biodiversity Center in a lecture on Melastomataceae pollination and a workshop on the use of trait syndromes in ecology and evolution. Tomorrow, Agnes and Lalaina will head out to the field to explore the study sites for the MountBuzz project!

In early January, the Brazil team, consisting of César, Marcela, Jota and Carlos met at Sao Paulo Airport with Agnes, and together with Vini de Brito and more students from the Universidade Federal do Uberlândia, the team started scouting for suitable fieldwork sites in the Mata Atlantica. The Mata Atlantica, or Atlantic Rainforest, is a megadiverse wet rainforest on the Eastern coast of Brazil, with only fragments of the natural forest remaining at low elevations close to the popular beaches. Biogeographically, the AF is a very important region since it shows a very interesting connection to the Andean (cloud) forests, with many plant genera having closely related species both in the Andes and the AF.

We chose the AF as our first gradient for the MountBuzz project since it harbours a large diversity of Melastomataceae, and has relatively easy accessibility, perfect for a project where we want to work at different elevations and in different forest types. In the first days, we explored forests starting at the sandy beaches of Parque Estadual do Serra do Mar, and worked our way up through the mountain forests into the high elevation fields of Itatiaia National Park, Brazil’s oldest national park. Our aim is to study pollinator diversity of Melastomataceae communities, as well as reproductive strategies, flower longevity and flower traits of Melastomataceae along the gradient to understand how changes in abiotic and biotic conditions affect trait functioning. To do so, we set up the first three study plots over the past days and spend much time in the cloudy, rainy weather manually pollinating flowers. During sunny hours, we could capture bees and document their behavior. Bee pollinators of Melastomataceae exhibit a very exciting behavior called buzz-pollination, where bees vibrate flowers in order to extract pollen. We use cameras and special microphones to record these bee vibrations to better understand how bees extract pollen from flowers, and whether they vibrate different flowers differently. Besides bee-pollinated species, at high elevations, we also found species which produce nectar and are pollinated by more diverse pollinator assemblages, including wasps, flies, honeybees and hummingbirds.

Our first week of data collection was very successful, and Team Brazil will spend the next 2.5 months collecting these data along the AF elevational gradient. Stay tuned for updates!!