Breeding in a warming world : evolution of avian breeding time under climate change

Het ziet ernaar uit dat de koolmees in Nederland zich niet op tijd zal kunnen aanpassen aan de gevolgen van de klimaatverandering, concludeert de bioloog Phillip Gienapp. Omdat het hoofdvoedsel van hun jongen uit rupsen bestaat, is het relatieve tijdstip van broeden ten opzichte van de rupsen belangrijk voor het broedsuccess van de mezen. In Nederland zijn de rupsen zich echter de afgelopen decennia door temperatuurverhogingen in het voorjaar twee weken eerder gaan manifesteren, terwijl de legdatum van de koolmees slechts gemiddeld drie dagen is vervroegd. Daardoor kan de mees zijn jongen niet meer onder optimale omstandigheden grootbrengen en is het broedsucces minder groot. Op basis van zijn onderzoeksgegevens uit het veld en langetermijnvoorspellingen van de klimaatveranderingsprocessen toont Gienapp, met theoretische rekenmodellen, aan dat de koolmees er ook in de komende honderd jaar niet in zal slagen zijn jongen groot te brengen in de periode dat het rupsenaanbod het gunstigst is. De snelheid van de klimaatverandering is namelijk groter dan de snelheid van de mogelijke evolutionaire verandering van de legdatum.

Fitness Consequences of Timing of Migration and Breeding in Cormorants

Peer reviewe

Faunistically remarkable evidence of ground beetles in agri-environmental measures on two farms near Lüneburg (NI) and in Havelland (BB)

Im FRANZ-Projekt werden seit 2017 in ausgewählten Betrieben der intensiv genutzten Agrarlandschaft naturschutzfachlich und wirtschaftlich tragfähige Maßnahmen zur Förderung der biologischen Vielfalt erprobt. Auf den Betrieben bei Lüneburg und im Havelland wurden dazu im Jahr 2020 und 2021 Laufkäfer mit Bodenfallen auf intensiv genutzten Kulturen wie Gerste oder Roggen und auf umgesetzten Maßnahmen, wie der Anlage von Blühflächen und Insektenwällen, erfasst. Dabei gelangen die Nachweise neun faunistisch bemerkenswerter Arten für die Region Niederelbegebiet und Brandenburg.As part of the FRANZ project, economically feasible measures to promote biological diversity were tested on selected farms in intensively managed agro-ecosystems since 2017. On the farms near Lüneburg and in Havelland, ground beetles were recorded in 2020 and 2021 with pitfall traps in intensively used crops such as barley or rye and on agri-environmental schemes such as wildflower areas and insect walls. In the course of the study, nine faunistically remarkable species were identified for the Lower Elbe Region and Brandenburg

High Fidelity - No Evidence for Extra-Pair Paternity in Siberian Jays (Perisoreus infaustus)

Peer reviewe

Genomic selection on breeding time in a wild bird population

Abstract Artificial selection experiments are a powerful tool in evolutionary biology. Selecting individuals based on multimarker genotypes (genomic selection) has several advantages over phenotype‐based selection but has, so far, seen very limited use outside animal and plant breeding. Genomic selection depends on the markers tagging the causal loci that underlie the selected trait. Because the number of necessary markers depends, among other factors, on effective population size, genomic selection may be in practice not feasible in wild populations as most wild populations have much higher effective population sizes than domesticated populations. However, the current possibilities of cost‐effective high‐throughput genotyping could overcome this limitation and thereby make it possible to apply genomic selection also in wild populations. Using a unique dataset of about 2000 wild great tits (Parus major), a small passerine bird, genotyped on a 650 k SNP chip we calculated genomic breeding values for egg‐laying date using the so‐called GBLUP approach. In this approach, the pedigree‐based relatedness matrix of an “animal model,” a special form of the mixed model, is replaced by a marker‐based relatedness matrix. Using the marker‐based relatedness matrix, the model seemed better able to disentangle genetic and permanent environmental effects. We calculated the accuracy of genomic breeding values by correlating them to the phenotypes of individuals whose phenotypes were excluded from the analysis when estimating the genomic breeding values. The obtained accuracy was about 0.20, with very little effect of the used genomic relatedness estimator but a strong effect of the number of SNPs. The obtained accuracy is lower than typically seen in domesticated species but considerable for a trait with low heritability (∼0.2) as avian breeding time. Our results show that genomic selection is possible also in wild populations with potentially many applications, which we discuss here

Recent natural variability in global warming weakened phenological mismatch and selection on seasonal timing in great tits (<i>Parus major</i>)

Climate change has led to phenological shifts in many species, but with large variation in magnitude among species and trophic levels. The poster child example of the resulting phenological mismatches between the phenology of predators and their prey is the great tit (Parus major), where this mismatch led to directional selection for earlier seasonal breeding. Natural climate variability can obscure the impacts of climate change over certain periods, weakening phenological mismatching and selection. Here, we show that selection on seasonal timing indeed weakened significantly over the past two decades as increases in late spring temperatures have slowed down. Consequently, there has been no further advancement in the date of peak caterpillar food abundance, while great tit phenology has continued to advance, thereby weakening the phenological mismatch. We thus show that the relationships between temperature, phenologies of prey and predator, and selection on predator phenology are robust, also in times of a slowdown of warming. Using projected temperatures from a large ensemble of climate simulations that take natural climate variability into account, we show that prey phenology is again projected to advance faster than great tit phenology in the coming decades, and therefore that long-term global warming will intensify phenological mismatches

Maternal effects in a wild songbird are environmentally plastic but only marginally alter the rate of adaptation

Despite ample evidence for the presence of maternal effects (MEs) in a variety of traits and strong theoretical indications for their evolutionary consequences, empirical evidence to what extent MEs can influence evolutionary responses to selection remains ambiguous. We tested the degree to which MEs can alter the rate of adaptation of a key life-history trait, clutch size, using an individual-based model approach parameterized with experimental data from a long-term study of great tits (Parus major). We modeled two types of MEs: (i) an environmentally plastic ME, in which the relationship between maternal and offspring clutch size depended on the maternal environment via offspring condition, and (ii) a fixed ME, in which this relationship was constant. Although both types of ME affected the rate of adaptation following an abrupt environmental shift, the overall effects were small. We conclude that evolutionary consequences of MEs are modest at best in our study system, at least for the trait and the particular type of ME we considered here. A closer link between theoretical and empirical work on MEs would hence be useful to obtain accurate predictions about the evolutionary consequences of MEs more generally