Sign up for the symposium!

This summer CAnMove will host a symposium in the "Behavioural Ecology of Animal Movement" at Lund University on August 18^th. The symposium will follow the ISBE meeting in Lund and will reflect upon the synergies between the two disciplines of behavoural ecology and movement ecology. We have 6 plenary speakers from around the globe who will present talks on a variety of topics, from the role of personality in animal movement to the psychology of movement to the mechanisms of navigation. It will be a really fascinating day and you are all welcome to join in the discussions and see the talks! There is also the opportunity to present your own work at our poster session and join for a symposium dinner that evening.

For more information and registration see here: http://canmove.lu.se/node/814

We plan to submit a meeting report to Animal Migration (http://versita.com/am/).  Animal Migration is a new, international journal that publishes cutting-edge research on the biology of migratory species.  The editor of the journal, Melissa Bowlin (a CAnMove alumnus), invites symposia participants to submit additional manuscripts to the journal.  Animal Migration publishes research articles, brief communications, reviews, and commentaries on all migratory species and all aspects of migration biology, from genetics and physiology to ecosystem-level interactions between migrants and their environment.  

Have a great summer and we hope to see you there !

Ben, Susanne, Miriam and Rachel

Newsletter CAnMove Summer 2012-06-26

Dear CAnMovians,

It is hard to believe today with this weather, but we are approaching the summer holidays and field work period might soon end for those of you studying migration. It will be a very useful break from normal office and lab routines before the teaching and office work starts again. Others are lucky to spend the summer in the field, collecting data on movements and migration in various organisms.

It has been a very active spring in the CAnMove program and for instance we have had many more PhD students defending their PhD Thesis at the department than we have had in a long time. We have had many inspiring seminars and meetings, including the spring BBQ event which was excellently organized by Cecilia, Christoffer, Sylvie and Helena. Thank you all for fun games and socializing BBQ!

I am happy to welcome Emily O’Connor as a new CAnMove postdoc working with Helena Westerdahl, Dennis Hasselquist and Jan-Åke Nilsson. I also wish to thank Brianne Addison for her hard work as a CAnMove postdoc, good luck with your future job in Australia!  

This spring CAnMove has decided to fund four new research projects, directed to energetic of flight, nano-tracking of daphnia, optical remote bird and insect detection and genetics of morphological traits in a bird migrant. I hope this will result in many new insights and exciting results which will be shared and new for the program!

Autumn 2012 will be dedicated to the production of a text book for Oxford University Press, covering the research topics of CAnMove. This has been in the plan from the program start and will now be realized. Working title is: “Animal movement across scales”. Lars-Anders Hansson is coordinating the work with the book and we hope to meet a public of undergraduate students and interested PhD students. One mission is to use the book as literature at our own courses in the future.  

We are approaching the time of evaluations and will have an internal financial evaluation of the program at Lund University this autumn, and next year the half-time evaluation from the Swedish Research Council will take place. In due time you will one way or the other be approached to contribute to these two evaluations.

I hope many of you will be signing up for a field blog and wish to share your experiences from your research experiences within the program this summer and autumn period. It is very inspiring for young students and interested people to hear more about the life of a scientist and PhD student. Please, remember how you were inspired as a kid and share your knowledge widely!

Please, do not forget to sign up for the workshop on Behavioural Ecology of Animal Movement in August – form at CAnMove web-page!

At last three final messages:

Take care of yourselves and your family!

Do something unexpected and fun!

Have a great summer!

Photo: Esben Rasmussen

Susanne & co

New technology reaveals common swift migration

Finally summer is here and we may enjoy the scream of the aerial acrobats - the common swifts - from our hammocks or garden coffee tables. To further enlighten the summer holiday I wish to recommend a paper in the most recent issue of the eminent popular science journal Forskning & Framsteg. The publication will be a challenge for non-native Swedish speakers, as it is published in Swedish, but I suggest a try. In this paper Anders and I describe recent findings of movement studies of the common swift - a true aerial migrant. For instance in a lifetime the common swift may cover 7 journeys to the moon and back!

Have a nice summer (read)!

Susanne

New research projects!

One of CAnMoves strategies to reach a high set research level has been to run a postdoc-programme and recruit well educated, creative and independent young researchers. This strategy has been very successful, and since the start in 2008 CAnMove has employed six excellent postdocs - currently Sylvie Tesson and Emily O’Connor.

For 2012 the CAnMove PIs has decided on a complementary strategy by setting aside some of the financial support for new research initiatives to boost research and after summer, four new research projects will start! During spring, CAnMove PIs and collaborators were encouraged to come up with new research projects and it was possible to apply for funding up to 700 000 SEK. All applications were then evaluated and ranked by the PI group and the science advisory board, based on scientific quality, relevance to CAnMove, synergy and novelty. In total we received 18 applications, of which the four top ranked projects will share 2.1 millions in research funding and which will be initiated during 2012. The projects are:

Measuring cost and conversion efficiency of animal flight
Animal flight is powered by the cyclic contraction of flight muscles, which are supplied by metabolism of fuel substrates (mainly fat and protein). During flight only a fraction of the metabolic energy is directed into useful mechanical work on the surrounding air, the difference is lost as excessive heat. A fundamental question is how efficient animals are at converting metabolic power into mechanical power, i.e. what is the conversion efficiency of the flight engine? Now, with the expertise we have developed over the years in the Lund flight group to study and measure the aerodynamic power output from flying animals and the extensive experience of estimating metabolic rates, we believe we are prepared to take this next necessary step, and simultaneously obtain power output and power input from a flying animal. This will require the set-up of a new fast-response respirometry system for use in the wind tunnel (for insect and bats), and the use of short-duration labelled isotope methods. Project group: Anders Hedenström. Jan-Åke Nilsson, Christoffer Johansson

Tracking small organisms using nanotechnology
The aim of our project is to advance our newly developed method of tracking small animals with nanoparticles from laboratory to (semi)natural scale. This will also allow us to simultaneously address how different species of zooplankton handle the everyday threats from predation and ultraviolet radiation. Hence, we have now the potential to quantify, understand and explain one of the largest biomass movements on Earth – the diel vertical migrations of zooplankton! Research group: Lars- Anders Hansson, Mikael Ekvall and Giuseppe Bianco. Collaborations with the nanometer structure consortium and Inst. of Biochemistry

Genetics of Migratory Traits in a Long-Distance Migrant
The project aim is to deepen our understanding of the genetics of migration using morphology, fitness and pedigree information from our 29-year long study of great reed warblers (a long-distance migrant wintering in tropical Africa), and combine these data with a new much more marker-dense genome map to conduct QTL analyses with the aim to fine-map wing morphology and thus dissect the genetic architecture of an important migratory trait. Research group: Dennis Hasselquist, Maja Tarka and Bengt Hansson.

Remote optical detection and identification of nocturnal bird migrants – a mobile observatory
A mobile lab will be equipped with automated observatory based on the application of electro-optical detection of free-flying animals: based on the infrared iridescence phenomenon and detection of the microscopic geometrical arrangement of some of the smallest constituents of feathers represented by the barbules. Further fast sampling provide detailed wing beat waveforms and accurate time occurrences for animal interaction. The platform will initially be designed for long term automated passive monitoring of nocturnal bird migration. The methods include spectrally resolved infrared tracking and digital lunar obscuration, where the detailed waveforms are the basis for classification. The platform can in time be expanded to include other functions like LIDAR, fluorescence marking, and dark field spectroscopy. Research group: Susanne Åkesson, Mikkel Brydegaard and co-workers.