Tomas is a PhD student at ANU supervised by Joanne Bennett, Saul Cunningham, and Francisco Encinas-Viso (CSIRO). His research focuses on the dietary ecology of the native bee family Colletidae, which make up roughly half of the ~2,000 species of Australian bees. He plans to characterise bee diets by identifying pollen still attached to the bodies of pinned specimens stored in insect collections. By identifying the pollen attached to museum specimens using techniques such as DNA meta-barcoding, Tomas hopes to construct a ‘dietary catalogue’ spanning many Australian Colletidae.

Because Colletidae have been foraging from native Australian plants like Eucalypts for much longer than other pollinators, such as the recently introduced honeybee, these plants may have developed a degree of co-dependence with Colletidae, and thus their conservation is explicitly linked to the persistence of these native bees. A key outcome of his research is to identify species or lineages of Colletidae that may be specialised pollinators of endemic plants currently threatened by climate change, land-use change, and pollinator decline.

Tomas is also interested in using data on Colletidae diets to help answer unresolved evolutionary questions such as: What mechanisms allow bees to switch diets to distantly related plant hosts? What morphological, physiological, or neurological traits have bees evolved to forage from their host plants efficiently? and how have the diets of Australian Colletidae changed over time?