Welcome to CAnMove activities

Very welcome back after the summer break and field work! I hope your summer was relaxing and enjoyable.

There are a number of upcoming CAnMove activities that I hope will interest you all. Please, make sure to sign up for the meetings and workshops that are planned, and do not miss the new Moon watching project and associated events! More information is available at our home page.

This is the list to remember:

1. Symposium on “Insect flight” including CAnMove BBQ, 29-30 August.

2. New “Moon watch” project is initiated and celebrated with a social event and associated technology information (LIDAR show at the Physics Department). We will meet at the Ecology Roof 9 September at 19.30h, visit the LIDAR lab at the Physics Department and then return to the Ecology Building roof to observe nocturnal bird migration and socialize. “Varmkorv etc” and drinks will be served. All CAnMovians are Welcome!!

3. BECC/CAnMove symposium “Beyond the Climate Envelope”, 10-12 October.

4. Migration course for PhD students will start 18 October and run for 12 days. You are all welcome to visit lectures at the course.

All the best!

Susanne

Genetics of migration – perspectives and challenges

In a diversity of organisms, closely related species, or even various populations of the same species exhibit strikingly different migratory behaviours, spanning from intercontinental movements to complete residency. We know that a significant proportion of phenotypic variance in migratory traits has a genetic basis, and migratory traits are under strong selection and can change within few generations.

But we still don't understand which genes are responsible for variable expression of specific migratory traits, such as migratory direction, timing and migratory distance? How many genes are involved in variation of migratory strategies? What is the magnitude of their effects?

Given the revolutionary technological achievements in the field of genomics, we think that this can be a turning point for the field, and finally allow us to evolve migratory genetics from phenotypic to molecular approaches enabling us to incorporate genetic architecture into our understanding of migratory traits.

Thus, we thought this is a great time to synthesise and review the state-of-the art in the field in an opinion paper (doi:10.1016/j.tree.2011.07.009).


Our review covers a diverse range of taxa (sketching key studies currently carried out in insects, fish and birds) with focus on different technical aspects, experimental paradigms, and presents the various methodological approaches ready to be applied to study migration in order to make major advances in this research field.

We hope that this paper will contribute to providing the necessary forum to enhance discussion in this newly emerging field, encourage interdisciplinary dialogue, foster collaborations and promote debate.

New Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation

During summer CAnMove member Rachel Muheim got appointed Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation "in recognition for her research into light-dependent magnetoreception and how migratory birds navigate".

Rachel has been working with orientation and navigation in birds since the mid-90s and is now assistant professor in the department of Biology, Lund University. Find out more about her research here.

To boldly go: Animal personality and migration

Roach, a common cyprinid fish (photo: Jakob Brodersen)

Until quite recently personality was considered to be a uniquely human characteristic. Yet many studies now show that individual behavioural variation analogous to personality can be found in a diverse range of other animals, from birds to fish to ants. Animal personality has been linked to many important ecological processes involving movement, such as dispersal, but few studies have studied how personality traits can influence migratory behaviour in animals.

In a study recently published in Ecology Letters (see here), we investigated whether a common personality trait - boldness (an individual’s propensity to take risks) – influences the migratory behaviour of a widespread fish, the roach. Roach show an interesting form of migratory behaviour known as partial migration, which means that only a fraction of the population migrates out of shallow lakes overwinter into the connecting streams, and the rest remain resident the whole year around in the lake. We caught 460 fish prior to migration in two consecutive years and first quantified their risk-taking behaviour, and then followed their migratory behaviour using passive telemetry. We found that in both years individual boldness influenced migratory tendency in roach, with bold fish being more likely to migrate than shy fish. This data suggests that an extremely widespread personality trait in animals can have important ecological consequences via influencing individual-level migratory behaviour.

Why bold fish are more likely to migrate is an interesting question. One idea is that bold fish are more at risk of predation, and so when the food resources are low in the winter they migrate to refuge in the streams where predators are scarce, and only return to the lake when food availability increases in the spring. Another hypothesis is that bold fish are also more exploratory, and more likely to undertake the risky migratory journey into potentially new and unusual habitats when the benefits of living in the lake decline over winter. Work is underway to test some of these ideas, so watch this space!

/Ben

New migration strategy found in Great Snipes

Great Snipe. Photo: Patrik Olofsson

Virtually nothing is known about the migration routes and wintering habitats of the enigmatic but endangered great snipe (Gallinago media). We tracked great snipes using minute data loggers to reveal their yearly movements. To our surprise, the snipes made exceptionally long and speedy non-stop flights, traveling directly from Scandinavia into Africa (6000 km) in 2-3 days. En route they not only crossed deserts and seas but also wide areas of favorable feeding habitat. As migrants normally travel in shorter flight steps when possibilities for re-fueling are available, the spectacular great snipe flights represent a previously unknown strategy in bird migration.

You can find abstract and contact information to the authors here

Data logger. Photo: Raymond Klaassen

Snipe with logger. Photo: Raymond Klaassen

//Raymond

The first swift has returned!

Yesterday the first swift returned to the colony on the roof of the Ecology Building! This swift is one of those that have been wearing a light logger during the migration season and now is ready to give us some answers about where it has been during the winter. To learn more about the swift migration research, click here.

If you want to have your own swift colony in your garden you can learn more about how to build swift-houses here (only in Swedish).

Today prof. Anders Hedenström has talked about how swifts can fly so fast, they can actually fly faster than 100 km/hour. This is possible due to their extreme wing construction. Click here to listen to the interview made by "Vetenskapsradion" (in Swedish).

Tomorrow prof. Susanne Åkesson will participate in "Kossornas planet" (also in Swedish) and talk more about swifts and their life style.

Effects of landscape context on populations of Bumblebees

On Friday (May 13) at 13.00, Anna Persson is defending her thesis ”Effects of landscape context on populations of bumblebees” in Blue Hall, Ecology Building. In it she document severe losses of bumblebees, in particular species with above ground nests and small colonies, in intensively farmed landscapes. This can be understood in the context of animal movement, because different bumblebee species utilize landscapes at different spatial scales and may thus be differently sensitive to the increased spatial and temporal variation in nectar and pollen resources in these landscapes. In addition she demonstrates that the loss of pollinators may have secondary consequences for the pollination of wildflowers in agricultural landscapes.