Co-occurrence of birds and bats in natural nest-holes.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Myczko L
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7165987 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:BackgroundSpecies co-occurrences can have profound effects on the habitat use of species, and therefore habitat structure alone cannot fully explain observed abundances. To account for this aspect of community organization, we developed multi-species abundance models, incorporating the local effect of co-occurring and potentially associated species, alongside with environmental predictors, linked mainly to forest management intensity. We coupled it with a landscape-scale analysis to further examine the role of management intensity in modifying the habitat preferences in connection with the landscape context. Using empirical data from the Black Forest in southern Germany, we focused on the forest bird assemblage and in particular on the cavity-nesting and canopy-foraging guilds. We included in the analysis species that co-occur and for which evidence suggests association is likely.ResultsOur findings show that the local effect of species associations can mitigate the effects of management intensity on forest birds. We also found that bird species express wider habitat preferences in forests under higher management intensity, depending on the landscape context.ConclusionsWe suspect that species associations may facilitate the utilization of a broader range of environmental conditions under intensive forest management, which benefits some species over others. Networks of associations may be a relevant factor in the effectiveness of conservation-oriented forest management.
| S-EPMC8459526 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Bacteria of Rickettsiaceae and Anaplasmataceae families include disease agents spread by Ixodes ricinus ticks, the most common tick vector in Europe. The aim of the study was to compare the prevalence and co-infection prevalence of particular tick-transmitted Rickettsiales members: Rickettsia spp. (further referred as Rs), Anaplasma phagocytophilum (Ap), and "Candidatus Neoehrlichia mikurensis" (CNM) in I. ricinus ticks in two types of areas, different in terms of human impact: natural and urban. Using additional data, we aimed at investigating co-occurrence of these Rickettsiales with Borreliella spp. A total of 4189 tick specimens, 2363 from the urban area (Warsaw park and forests) and 1826 from the natural area (forests and park in the vicinity of National Parks), were tested for the presence of Rickettsiales DNA by PCRs. The prevalence of selected Rickettsiales was twice higher in urban than natural areas (13.2% vs. 6.9%, respectively). In total ticks, the prevalence of Rs, Ap, and CNM was 6.5%, 5.3%, and 3.6% in urban areas vs. 4.4%, 1.1%, and 2.1% in natural areas, respectively. Co-infections of Rickettsiales were also more prevalent in urban areas (2.6% vs. 0.3%, respectively). The most common Rs was R. helvetica; also R. monacensis and novel "Candidatus Rickettsia mendelii" were detected. Positive association between Ap and CNM infections was discovered. Rickettsiales bacteria occurrence was not associated with Borreliella occurrence, but co-infections with these two groups were more common in ticks in urban areas. In conclusion, three groups of Rickettsiales constituted the important part of the tick pathogen community in Poland, especially in the urbanized central Poland (Mazovia). In the Warsaw agglomeration, there is a greater risk of encountering the I. ricinus tick infected with Rickettsiales and co-infected with Lyme spirochaetes, in comparison to natural areas. This finding raises the question whether cities might in fact be the hot spots for TBDs.
| S-EPMC6478632 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Many species of birds incorporate feathers into their nest as structural support and to insulate the eggs or offspring. Here, we investigated the novel idea that birds reduce the risk of nest usurpation by decorating it with feathers to trigger a fear response in their rivals. We let prospecting birds choose between a dyad of nest-boxes in the wild, both containing some nest materials, but where one had a few white feathers and the other had none. All three species of cavity-nesting birds studied, the pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca, the blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus, and the tree swallow Tachycineta bicolor, hesitated to enter boxes with white feathers. A similar avoidance of white feathers was found when the alternative nest-box of a dyad held black feathers. However, the birds readily collected white feathers that we placed in front of their nest-box, showing the fear of such feathers was context-dependent. We suggest that naive prospecting birds may perceive feathers in nests as the result of a predation event, and that owners decorate nests with bright feathers that can be seen from the opening to deter others from entering.
| S-EPMC8596015 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In social insects, collective choices between food sources are based on self-organized mechanisms where information about resources are locally processed by the foragers. Such a collective decision emerges from the competition between pheromone trails leading to different resources but also between the recruiting stimuli emitted by successful foragers at nest entrances. In this study, we investigated how an additional nest entrance influences the ability of Myrmica rubra ant colonies to exploit two food sources of different quality (1M and 0.1M sucrose solution) and to select the most rewarding one. We found that the mobilisation of workers doubled in two-entrance nests compared to one-entrance nests but that ants were less likely to reach a food source once they exited the nest. Moreover, the collective selection of the most rewarding food source was less marked in two-entrance nests, with foragers distributing themselves evenly between the two feeders. Ultimately, multiple nest entrances reduced the foraging efficiency of ant colonies that consumed significantly less sugar out of the two available resources. Our results highlight that the nest structure, more specifically the number of nest entrances, can impede the ant's ability to process information about environmental opportunities and to select the most rewarding resource. This study opens new insights on how the physical interface between the nest interior and the outside environment can act upon collective decision-making and foraging efficiency in self-organized insect societies.
| S-EPMC7329192 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Nest microbiota plays a vital role in the breeding and development of birds, which not only provides protection to bird hosts but also negatively affects the host. At present, it is unclear whether the composition of the microbes in the nests is affected by nesting. For this reason, we hung artificial nest boxes to simulate the natural nesting environment and combined 16S rRNA and ITS high-throughput sequencing technology to further study the differences in microbial composition and richness between used nests and control nests of Japanese tits (Parus minor). The study found that the bacteria in used nests and control nests showed significant differences at the phylum level (p < 0.05). It is also worth noting that the predominant bacteria in used nests were Proteobacteria (51.37%), Actinobacteria (29.72%), Bacteroidetes (6.59%), and Firmicutes (3.82%), while the predominant bacteria in control nests were Proteobacteria (93.70%), Bacteroidetes (2.33%), and Acidobacteria (2.06%). Both used nests and control nests showed similar fungi at the phylum level, which consisted mainly of Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, although significant differences were found in their relative abundance between both groups. The results of alpha diversity analysis showed significant differences in bacteria between the two groups and not in fungi. However, the beta diversity analysis showed significant differences between both bacteria and fungi. In summary, our results showed that the used nests had a higher abundance of beneficial microbiota and a lower presence of pathogenic microbiota. Therefore, we speculate that birds will change the characteristics of the nest microbial composition in the process of nest breeding to ensure their smooth reproductive development.
| S-EPMC10694247 | biostudies-literature
Project description:It is becoming apparent that birds learn from their own experiences of nest building. What is not clear is whether birds can learn from watching conspecifics build. As social learning allows an animal to gain information without engaging in costly trial-and-error learning, first-time builders should exploit the successful habits of experienced builders. We presented first-time nest-building male zebra finches with either a familiar or an unfamiliar conspecific male building with material of a colour the observer did not like. When given the opportunity to build, males that had watched a familiar male build switched their material preference to that used by the familiar male. Males that observed unfamiliar birds did not. Thus, first-time nest builders use social information and copy the nest material choices when demonstrators are familiar but not when they are strangers. The relationships between individuals therefore influence how nest-building expertise is socially transmitted in zebra finches.
| S-EPMC4822453 | biostudies-other
Project description:Habitat selection by animals is influenced by and mitigates the effects of predation and environmental extremes. For birds, nest site selection is crucial to offspring production because nests are exposed to extreme weather and predation pressure. Predators that forage using olfaction often dominate nest predator communities; therefore, factors that influence olfactory detection (e.g., airflow and weather variables, including turbulence and moisture) should influence nest site selection and survival. However, few studies have assessed the importance of olfactory cover for habitat selection and survival. We assessed whether ground-nesting birds select nest sites based on visual and/or olfactory cover. Additionally, we assessed the importance of visual cover and airflow and weather variables associated with olfactory cover in influencing nest survival. In managed grasslands in Oklahoma, USA, we monitored nests of Northern Bobwhite (Colinus virginianus), Eastern Meadowlark (Sturnella magna), and Grasshopper Sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum) during 2015 and 2016. To assess nest site selection, we compared cover variables between nests and random points. To assess factors influencing nest survival, we used visual cover and olfactory-related measurements (i.e., airflow and weather variables) to model daily nest survival. For nest site selection, nest sites had greater overhead visual cover than random points, but no other significant differences were found. Weather variables hypothesized to influence olfactory detection, specifically precipitation and relative humidity, were the best predictors of and were positively related to daily nest survival. Selection for overhead cover likely contributed to mitigation of thermal extremes and possibly reduced detectability of nests. For daily nest survival, we hypothesize that major nest predators focused on prey other than the monitored species' nests during high moisture conditions, thus increasing nest survival on these days. Our study highlights how mechanistic approaches to studying cover informs which dimensions are perceived and selected by animals and which dimensions confer fitness-related benefits.
| S-EPMC5574794 | biostudies-other
Project description:Flight is one of the energetically most costly activities in the animal kingdom, suggesting that natural selection should work to optimize flight performance. The similar size and flight speed of birds and bats may therefore suggest convergent aerodynamic performance; alternatively, flight performance could be restricted by phylogenetic constraints. We test which of these scenarios fit to two measures of aerodynamic flight efficiency in two passerine bird species and two New World leaf-nosed bat species. Using time-resolved particle image velocimetry measurements of the wake of the animals flying in a wind tunnel, we derived the span efficiency, a metric for the efficiency of generating lift, and the lift-to-drag ratio, a metric for mechanical energetic flight efficiency. We show that the birds significantly outperform the bats in both metrics, which we ascribe to variation in aerodynamic function of body and wing upstroke: Bird bodies generated relatively more lift than bat bodies, resulting in a more uniform spanwise lift distribution and higher span efficiency. A likely explanation would be that the bat ears and nose leaf, associated with echolocation, disturb the flow over the body. During the upstroke, the birds retract their wings to make them aerodynamically inactive, while the membranous bat wings generate thrust and negative lift. Despite the differences in performance, the wake morphology of both birds and bats resemble the optimal wake for their respective lift-to-drag ratio regimes. This suggests that evolution has optimized performance relative to the respective conditions of birds and bats, but that maximum performance is possibly limited by phylogenetic constraints. Although ecological differences between birds and bats are subjected to many conspiring variables, the different aerodynamic flight efficiency for the bird and bat species studied here may help explain why birds typically fly faster, migrate more frequently and migrate longer distances than bats.
| S-EPMC3356262 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Nests are structures built to support and protect eggs and/or offspring from predators, parasites, and adverse weather conditions. Nests are mainly constructed prior to egg laying, meaning that parent birds must make decisions about nest site choice and nest building behavior before the start of egg-laying. Parent birds should be selected to choose nest sites and to build optimally sized nests, yet our current understanding of clutch size-nest size relationships is limited to small-scale studies performed over short time periods. Here, we quantified the relationship between clutch size and nest size, using an exhaustive database of 116 slope estimates based on 17,472 nests of 21 species of hole and non-hole-nesting birds. There was a significant, positive relationship between clutch size and the base area of the nest box or the nest, and this relationship did not differ significantly between open nesting and hole-nesting species. The slope of the relationship showed significant intraspecific and interspecific heterogeneity among four species of secondary hole-nesting species, but also among all 116 slope estimates. The estimated relationship between clutch size and nest box base area in study sites with more than a single size of nest box was not significantly different from the relationship using studies with only a single size of nest box. The slope of the relationship between clutch size and nest base area in different species of birds was significantly negatively related to minimum base area, and less so to maximum base area in a given study. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that bird species have a general reaction norm reflecting the relationship between nest size and clutch size. Further, they suggest that scientists may influence the clutch size decisions of hole-nesting birds through the provisioning of nest boxes of varying sizes.
| S-EPMC4224533 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Birds free from nest predators for long periods may either lose the ability to recognize and respond to predators or retain antipredator responses if they are not too costly. How these alternate scenarios play out has rarely been investigated in an avian community whose members have different evolutionary histories. We presented models of two nest predators (rat and snake) and a negative control (tree branch) to birds on Hawai'i Island. Endemic Hawaiian birds evolved in the absence of terrestrial predators until rats were introduced approximately 1,000 years ago. Introduced birds evolved with diverse predator communities including mammals and snakes, but since their introduction onto the island approximately one century ago have been free from snake predation. We found that (a) endemic and introduced birds had higher agitation scores toward the rat model compared with the branch, and (b) none of the endemic birds reacted to the snake model, while one introduced bird, the Red-billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea), reacted as strongly to the snake as to the rat. Overall, endemic and introduced birds differ in their response to predators, but some endemic birds have the capacity to recognize and respond to introduced rats, and one introduced bird species retained recognition of snake predators from which they had been free for nearly a century, while another apparently lost that ability. Our results indicate that the retention or loss of predator recognition by introduced and endemic island birds is variable, shaped by each species' unique history, ecology, and the potential interplay of genetic drift, and that endemic Hawaiian birds could be especially vulnerable to introduced snake predators.
| S-EPMC7042753 | biostudies-literature