Partial Secrets

The ability and right to have secrets may be a condition of social ethics (Derrida, A Taste for the Secret), but at the same time the nature of secrets is that they undermine themselves. Once told, secrets are no longer secret but are known. Even to name them as possibilities is to bring them into view as objects of knowledge. Secrets are thus always in some ways partial secrets, but their “openness” also connotes the lack of certainty of any knowledge about them, their evasiveness, their lack of fixity, and hence, their partial character and openness to change. In this article, I explore partial secrets in relation to a 2011 interview study of HIV support in the United Kingdom, where HIV’s relatively low prevalence and high treatment access tends toward its invisibilization. I suggest that in this context, HIV is positioned ambiguously, as a “partial secret,” in an ongoing and precarious tension between public knowledge and acceptance of HIV, HIV’s constitution as a condition of citizenship attended by full human rights, and HIV’s being resecreted through ongoing illness, constrained resources, citizenly exclusion, and the psychological and social isolation of those affected.

The role of dietary breadth in national bumblebee (Bombus) declines: Simple correlation?

Bumblebee species declines have been reported in Europe, North America and Asia. Loss of suitable habitat to agricultural intensification is considered to be the main cause of declines in Europe. Differential impacts on species have been recorded but insufficient knowledge of species ecology means that effective conservation management prescriptions cannot be put into place with certainty. Dietary specialisation, specifically on flowers of Fabaceae, has been hypothesised as driving differential declines but the reliability of previous studies has been questioned. Here we present a three-year study of the foraging behaviour of two UK Biodiversity Action Plan bumblebee species. For the first time, analysis of nectar and pollen foraging was performed on sites where nationally rare UK bumblebees were as abundant as more nationally ubiquitous species. Results indicated that the nationally rare Bombus sylvarum collected the majority of its pollen from flowers of Odontites verna and had a significantly narrower mean nectar dietary breadth than ecologically similar species Bombus humilis and Bombus pascuorum (p = 0.004 and 0.008 respectively). In contrast, the dietary breadth of the nationally rare B. humilis was similar to the more nationally ubiquitous species B. pascuorum and Bombus lapidarius. Moreover, B. lapidarius was recorded as having the narrowest pollen dietary breadth, collected pollen from the least number of floral taxa and was the most specialised of the Bombus species on pollen of Fabaceae. Patterns of dietary specialization were inconsistent with national declines and results highlighted a need for further detailed investigation into the factors contributing to differential declines.