Fine-scale plasticity in nest placement can compensate for poor quality junipers as nesting trees for gray vireos
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Harris J
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8588862 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Bees are the primary pollinators of flowering plants in almost all ecosystems. Worldwide declines in bee populations have raised awareness about the importance of their ecological role in maintaining ecosystem functioning. The naturally strong philopatric behavior that some bee species show can be detrimental to population viability through increased probability of inbreeding. Furthermore, bee populations found in human-altered landscapes, such as urban areas, can experience lower levels of gene flow and effective population sizes, increasing potential for inbreeding depression in wild bee populations. In this study, we investigated the fine-scale population structure of the solitary bee Colletes inaequalis in an urbanized landscape. First, we developed a predictive spatial model to detect suitable nesting habitat for this ground nesting bee and to inform our field search for nests. We genotyped 18 microsatellites in 548 female individuals collected from nest aggregations throughout the study area. Genetic relatedness estimates revealed that genetic similarity among individuals was slightly greater within nest aggregations than among randomly chosen individuals. However, genetic structure among nest aggregations was low (Nei's GST = 0.011). Reconstruction of parental genotypes revealed greater genetic relatedness among females than among males within nest aggregations, suggesting male-mediated dispersal as a potentially important mechanism of population connectivity and inbreeding avoidance. Size of nesting patch was positively correlated with effective population size, but not with other estimators of genetic diversity. We detected a positive trend between geographic distance and genetic differentiation between nest aggregations. Our landscape genetic models suggest that increased urbanization is likely associated with higher levels of inbreeding. Overall, these findings emphasize the importance of density and distribution of suitable nesting patches for enhancing bee population abundance and connectivity in human dominated habitats and highlights the critical contribution of landscape genetic studies for enhanced conservation and management of native pollinators.
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Project description:Nest survival is a vital component of breeding success, and affects population dynamics, as the loss of nests is the main cause of reproductive failure in birds. To identify key factors for the conservation of Chinese grouse Tetrastes sewerzowi, we tested the effects of nest concealment, nest age, nesting season, and habitat edge on nest daily survival rate (DSR) of Chinese grouse using 54 nests found at Lianhuashan Nature Reserve, Gansu, China, 2009-2012. Moreover, we controlled for the effect of research activity by testing the effect of nest checks on DSR. Overall, mammal predation caused 93% of nest failures. DSR was 0.986 ± 0.0038 in the constant model and the probability of a nest with a full clutch of 6 eggs surviving the entire 40-day nesting period was 0.526 ± 0.090. DSR decreased with nest age and nesting season (from 19 May to 3 July). Mammals instead of avian predators being responsible for most nest failures suggest that nest sites might be selected to avoid visual avian predators, but not olfactory mammalian predators, and the decreasing trend of DSR with nest age and nesting season could attribute to an additive exposure effect. Moreover, nest checks conducted by investigators significantly lowered nest DSR, especially during the late period of nesting season and for older nests. Mammalian predators might locate the nest site by following the investigator's odor. Based on our results, we suggest that the late incubation stage is a particularly vulnerable period for nest survival of Chinese grouse and those researchers should adjust their activities around nests to balance the need of acquiring accurate data and decreasing nest predation risk.
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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-literature
Project description:Weather has a dominant impact on organisms, including their life histories and interspecific interactions. Yet, for nesting birds, and the arthropods inhabiting bird nests, the direct and cascading effects of weather are poorly known. We explored the influence of ambient temperatures and rainfall on the cohabitation of dome-shaped bird nests by Wood Warblers Phylloscopus sibilatrix, their blowfly Protocalliphora azurea ectoparasites, and predatory Myrmica and Lasius ants that may provide nest sanitation. We sampled blowflies and ants in 129 nests, and measured warbler nestlings during 2018-2020 in the primeval Białowieża Forest, eastern Poland. The probability of ectoparasites occurring in nests increased with increasing ambient temperatures and declining precipitation in the early nestling stage, when adult blowflies are ovipositing. Where present, the number of ectoparasites was greater if higher ambient temperatures had prevailed in the late nestling stage, but only when ants were absent from nests. However, the nestling growth was unrelated to ectoparasite abundance or ant presence within bird nests, although it was lower at high rainfall. The results suggest that weather can have conflicting impacts on interactions between nesting birds and nest-dwelling arthropods, but birds can mostly compensate for any related costs in old-growth forest, where food is generally abundant.
| S-EPMC9596701 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The quality of a breeding site may have major fitness consequences. A fundamental step to understanding the process of nest-site selection is the identification of the information individuals use to choose high-quality nest sites. For secondary cavity-nesting bird species that do not add nest lining material, organic remains (faeces, pellets) accumulated inside nest cavities during previous breeding events may be a cue for high-quality nest-sites, as they contain information about past successful breeding and may improve thermal insulation of eggs during incubation. However, cavities in which breeding was successful might also contain more nest-dwelling ectoparasites than unoccupied cavities, offering an incentive for prospective parents to avoid them. We exposed breeding cavity-nesting lesser kestrels (Falco naumanni) to nestbox dyads consisting of a dirty (with a thick layer of organic substrate) and a clean nestbox (without organic material). Dirty nestboxes were strongly preferred, being occupied earlier and more frequently than clean ones. Hatching success in dirty nestboxes was significantly higher than in clean ones, suggesting a positive effect of organic nest material on incubation efficiency, while nestbox dirtiness did not significantly affect clutch and brood size. Nestlings from dirty nestboxes had significantly higher ectoparasite load than those from clean nestboxes soon after egg hatching, but this difference was not evident a few days later. Nest substrate did not significantly affect nestling growth. We concluded that nest substrate is a key driver of nest-site choice in lesser kestrels, although the adaptive value of such a strong preference appears elusive and may be context-dependent.
| S-EPMC6280097 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Nest predation is an important determinant of reproductive success and ground-nesting birds exhibit a variety of nest defence strategies to mitigate the risk. Many small-bodied, ground nesting birds rely on deceptive behaviours such as injury-feigning to reduce nest predation: we call this behaviour active deception. However, active deception may entail risks to adults, and passive deceptive behaviour, where individuals effectively sneak away from the nest by flushing at long distances, may be an alternative means of avoiding nest predation. We provide a simple model to demonstrate that these tails of the flush distance distribution could minimize predation risk; an intermediate strategy of moderate flush distances means that birds flush more often than with short-distance flushes, and once flushed, the nest is more easily located than for long-distance flushes. We tested this model using two species of ground nesting shorebirds, the White-rumped Sandpiper (Calidris fuscicollis) and the Red Phalarope (Phalaropus fulicarius). We demonstrate that short-distance flushes are associated with active deception and intermediate-distance flushes are associated with an increased risk of nest predation. However, we found no evidence that this potential selective pressure against intermediate strategies has produced a bimodal distribution of nest defence traits. The heritability of defence behaviours, or the ability of individuals to learn, is unknown and other factors such as energetic constraints or risks to adults might also influence flush distances and defence behaviours.
| S-EPMC6175515 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Dinosaurs thrived and reproduced in various regions worldwide, including the Arctic. In order to understand their nesting in diverse or extreme environments, the relationships between nests, nesting environments, and incubation methods in extant archosaurs were investigated. Statistical analyses reveal that species of extant covered nesters (i.e., crocodylians and megapodes) preferentially select specific sediments/substrates as a function of their nesting style and incubation heat sources. Relationships between dinosaur eggs and the sediments in which they occur reveal that hadrosaurs and some sauropods (i.e., megaloolithid eggs) built organic-rich mound nests that relied on microbial decay for incubation, whereas other sauropods (i.e., faveoloolithid eggs) built sandy in-filled hole nests that relied on solar or potentially geothermal heat for incubation. Paleogeographic distribution of mound nests and sandy in-filled hole nests in dinosaurs reveals these nest types produced sufficient incubation heat to be successful up to mid latitudes (?47°), 10° higher than covered nesters today. However, only mound nesting and likely brooding could have produced sufficient incubation heat for nesting above the polar circle (>66°). As a result, differences in nesting styles may have placed restrictions on the reproduction of dinosaurs and their dispersal at high latitudes.
| S-EPMC5854591 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundInterspecific interactions within ecological networks can influence animal fitness and behaviour, including nest-site selection of birds and ants. Previous studies revealed that nesting birds and ants may benefit from cohabitation, with interspecific attraction through their nest-site choice, but mutual interactions have not yet been tested. We explored a previously undescribed ecological link between ground-nesting birds and ants raising their own broods (larvae and pupae) within the birds' nests in a temperate primeval forest of lowland Europe. We tested whether the occurrence of ant broods within bird nests resulted from a mutual or one-sided interspecific attraction that operated through nest-site choice and was modified by weather conditions.ResultsWe found a non-random occupation of bird nests by ants raising their own broods within them, which indicated interspecific attraction driven solely by the ants. The birds' preference to nest near tussocks of vegetation showed little overlap with the most frequent placement of ant colonies among fallen deciduous tree-leaves, dead wood and moss. Additionally, birds did not appear to select forest localities with high densities of ant colonies. The occurrence of ant broods within bird nests was also unrelated to bird nest placement near to specific habitat features. The attractiveness of bird nests to ants appeared to increase with the thermal activity of the birds warming their nests, and also during cool and wet weather when the occurrence of ant broods within bird nests was most frequent. Ants often remained in the nests after the birds had vacated them, with only a slight reduction in the probability of ant brood occurrence over time.ConclusionsThe natural patterns of bird nest colonisation by ants support the hypothesis of ants' attraction to warm nests of birds to raise their broods under advantageous thermal conditions. Similar relationships may occur between other warm-blooded, nest-building vertebrates and nest-dwelling invertebrates, which depend on ambient temperatures. The findings advance our understanding of these poorly recognised interspecific interactions, and can inform future studies of ecological networks.
| S-EPMC8434696 | biostudies-literature
Project description:MotivationIn most metagenomic sequencing studies, the initial analysis step consists in assessing the evolutionary provenance of the sequences. Phylogenetic (or Evolutionary) Placement methods can be employed to determine the evolutionary position of sequences with respect to a given reference phylogeny. These placement methods do however face certain limitations: The manual selection of reference sequences is labor-intensive; the computational effort to infer reference phylogenies is substantially larger than for methods that rely on sequence similarity; the number of taxa in the reference phylogeny should be small enough to allow for visually inspecting the results.ResultsWe present algorithms to overcome the above limitations. First, we introduce a method to automatically construct representative sequences from databases to infer reference phylogenies. Second, we present an approach for conducting large-scale phylogenetic placements on nested phylogenies. Third, we describe a preprocessing pipeline that allows for handling huge sequence datasets. Our experiments on empirical data show that our methods substantially accelerate the workflow and yield highly accurate placement results.Availability and implementationFreely available under GPLv3 at http://github.com/lczech/gappa.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
| S-EPMC6449752 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Niche differentiation is a key concept in the field of ecology and refers to the process by which competing species within an ecological community partition utilization of environmental resources to achieve coexistence. The existence of niche differentiation is uniquely difficult to prove on account of the fact that historical interaction among species, which plays a key role in elucidating the current state of coexistence among species, is not well known. We created continuous niche gradients in nest-site resources between two sympatric secondary cavity-nesting birds, the green-backed tit (Parus monticolus) and the russet sparrow (Passer cinnamomeus), and investigated whether nesting site is a factor contributing to limiting breeding overlap by regular inspection and 388,160 min of film recording. Our results indicate that although we manipulated nest site availability to be uniformly high along the habitat gradient, the two bird species have little overlap in nest sites and rarely compete for them. Furthermore, the green-backed tit possessed a wide range of fundamental niche that covered that of the russet sparrow, while their reproductive time was largely segregated. The sparrow was more aggressive and outcompeted the tit in their overlapped range. These results suggest that even though nesting sites are crucial to the reproduction of cavity-nesting birds, some other factor plays a more important role in limiting niche overlap between sparrows and tits in space and time. Given that these two cavity-nesting birds continued to use different habitats and breed in segregated time after our manipulation, their relationship is better explained by the ghost of competition past theory.
| S-EPMC6822027 | biostudies-literature