New paper on wind tunnels

CAnMove postdoc Dr. Sophia Engel and co-workers have published a new paper on the utility of wind tunnels in animal flight research. This paper reviews the ways in which wind tunnel studies can advance our understanding on animal flight, covering aerodynamics, energetics and physiology. One issue that is brought up is whether power-speed relationships are U-shaped, as prescribed by theory, or if they take on some other shape. The answer to this, and many other other, question can be read the paper at

http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/icq063? ijkey=DrX0zbhijLWSnOX&keytype=ref

Lake quality affects waterfowl migratory routes: A joint CanMove project

In a cooperative CanMove project we used long-term databases on fluctuations in regional bird abundances as well as on limnological monitoring to study interactions between migrating waterfowl and stop-over lake ecosystems quality. We show that despite the large amount of migratory waterfowl, our study site L. Krankesjön, was not negatively affected by the waterfowl which removed less than 3% of the macrophyte biomass per year. Moreover, we show that most waterfowl species occured in lower abundances during periods with low density of macrophytes, than when submersed macrophytes flourished and the water was clear. This pattern was not affected by regional fluctuations in abundances. Hence, our study suggest that some migratory waterfowl taxa select stop-over lakes based on stop-over habitat quality, suggesting that migratory routes are not fixed but instead adjusted over time. If you are interested in reading the whole paper go to: http://www.limnol.lu.se/limnologen/publikationer/834.pdf