Welcome new CAnMove PIs!

From 1 July 2013 we have recruited three new PIs in CAnMove, Ben Chapman, Bengt Hansson and Maren Wellenreuther, all based at the Department of Biology. Their research interests are related to e.g. movement ecology, dispersal, partial migration, risk of inbreeding, range expansion and speciation.

We welcome the three successful junior scientists to CAnMove and look forward to interactions and research progress within the coming years!

//Susanne and CAnMove Steering committee

CAnMove researcher in Sydsvenskan

For those who missed it - CAnMove PI Rachel Muheim and her resarch on animals' magnetic compasses were presented in Sydsvenskan this weekend!

Birds often migrate faster in spring than in autumn

The question whether birds might migrate faster in spring than in autumn has been debated for decades, and recently CAnMove researchers Cecilia Nilsson, Raymond Klaassen and Thomas Alerstam decided to use the rapidly increasing number of studies that track migrating birds to test this. 

And their study, published in the American Naturalist, do show a clear dominance of cases where spring migration is faster than autumn migration, in flight speed, stopover duration as well as total migration speed - suggesting that  spring and autumn migrations often constitute quite different evolutionary processes, involving different main selection pressures and adaptive solutions during the two seasons. For the future, first author Cecilia Nilsson hopes that this summary will open up the question of differences between spring and autumn migration and inspire critical tests of what determines migration speed.

Read the article here! (University log-in) or go to the American Naturalist.

Thanks and welcome!

Dr. Holk Cruse

We are very happy to welcome a new member to the CAnMove Science Advisory Board Dr. Holk Cruse at Bielefeld University and at the same time we wish to express our sincere gratitude to Prof. Rüdiger Wehner at Zürich University, who served in this board during the initial period of the CAnMove program. We are grateful to Prof. Rüdiger Wehner for important input and suggestions to research priorities and organisation of CAnmove and look forward to future interactions.
Dr. Holk Cruse in his research investigates how brains control behavior and in particular how brains control complex movements. Holk has studied the neuronal control of walking in multi-legged animals, insects and crustaceans. He is using a combination of behavioural studies including walking on various substrates and simulation studies on the basis of artificial neural networks. We are looking forward to future interactions with Dr Holk Cruse within the CAnMove program.
Read more about Dr. Holk Cruse

Susanne and CAnMove Steering committee