Profiles: Brendan Borrell

By Lee Drutman

Three years ago, integrative biology graduate student Brendan Borrell was in Costa Rica, trying to come up with a topic for his research. Nothing seemed to be working out.

“I was having a pretty depressing day,” Borrell relates. “I wasn't happy with what I was doing.”

Then he noticed a couple of Euglossia imperialis orchid bees, which he thought were interesting because they have tongues that, when fully extended, are four times their body length.

“I just started playing with these bees, getting them to drink sugar solutions,” Borrell says. “It was a pretty neat experience, to have this completely bizarre organism drinking sugar off my finger tip. That was the beginning.”

Now, three years and six trips to Costa Rica later, Borrell's research on big-tongued bees has been featured in The Royal Society Biology Letters and Science Magazine (see other article).

Good luck or hard work? Perhaps a little of both.

“The biggest thing is just never knowing what's really going to work when you try it,” Borrell says. “It's so hard to know what direction things are going to take, and if you're going to get lucky. I sort of stumbled on a neat system and a whole bunch of questions to answer.”

Then again, Borrell has never been short on leaving a lot of options open.“My philosophy has always been to come up with as many ideas as possible,” he explains. “If you come up with 10, 9 are not going to work. Always have a backup plan when you do field work.”

Professor Robert Dudley, Borrell's advisor in the Department of Integrative Biology, describes Borrell as “diligent.” “He's just hard-working,” Dudley said. “He's obviously well-traveled, and if you want to work in tropical biodiversity, you have to be just willing to come to terms with new flora and fauna.”

“It's easy to work in well-tempered ecosystems,” adds Dudley.“But the tropics are amazing and confounding. Most biologists are not tropical biologists. It takes a certain open-mindedness to put in the time and have the breadth of appreciation for these sort of faunas.There are hundreds of thousands of species. It's a bigger playground, and you have to be willing to work and play in that playground.”

There are also logistical difficulties of operating in the tropics. “Last time I was there, we had a huge flood at the station where we were working and one of the houses we were working in had a tree fall on it,” Borrell says. “Someone else had his data stolen on a bus. Two years of work on his laptop, and somebody came and stole his laptop.”

Then there's all the stuff that Borrell has to bring down there every time he goes-basically his entire experiment, power supply and all. It means that he has to be prepared for anything.


FROM BOOKS TO BEES

As a kid, Borrell played with lizards and snakes. But it was literature that really got him going, and as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he started out as a literature major. Then, halfway through, he made a fateful switch.

The formative experience, he says, was doing computer animation in a geology lab that was modeling the ocean floor.A semester later, tired of taking literature classes and inspired by his newfound interest in science, he switched to biology.

As for his interest in bees, Borrell says,“They're very smart and they have personality, individual differences. For example, in my artificial flower study, I had ten bees, all marked with a color, and I'd say, here comes the pink bee, and I'd know what it was going to do. It would look at the
flower longer than the others and sometimes probe it.Whereas the blue bee would just charge toward to flower and feed quickly and leave.”

Holding a preserved bee from a set, Borrell says,“Right now it's just a piece of insect cuticle on a stick, but when it's alive, it's just incredible. How does something that small work?”

Though most people think of honeybees or bumblebees when they think of bees, orchid bees are in many ways quite different. Native to a range of tropical countries from Mexico to Argentina, they pollinate about 20 percent of the world's species of plants. Unlike honeybees, orchid bees
are not social-they have no hives.

Most are solitary, except for the mating part. They also live longer than honey bees-up to 8 months, compared to just one month for honeybees. In particular, Borrell has focused his energy on one specific orchid bee, the Euglossa imperialis (Euglossa means good tongue), which has the
remarkably long proboscis.

When he's not working with bees, Borrell enjoys mountain biking in Tilden Park, hanging out in San Francisco, and playing on the Integrative Biology ultimate Frisbee team.

And eating breakfast, which lab mate Matt Medeiros called the secret of Borrell's success. “He likes to get his day going,” Medeiros says.“Waffles, eggs, things with cream cheese. Breakfast is an important part of life. Unlike many graduate students, Borrell always takes time out of the day to pay attention to his physical health. He's a tremendous ultimate player, a racquetball player. He eats healthy food, exercises and does science.”

“Breakfast is important,” Borrell says. “Breakfast is a critical part of the day. Waffles. Cream cheese. Smoked salmon.”

Of course, there's a scientific reason for it, too.“Your brain consumes 20 percent of your metabolic expenditures,” explains Borrell. “It's critical!”