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!