NEWS

Blog post in Oikos blog about the phylosophy behind the Oikos paper "Colony size and foraging range in seabirds" Selected by R Jovani
Study Projects How Climate Change Will Affect the Functions Birds in Ecosystems Worldwide SciTech Daily (Global Change Biology paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Swift Incredible Journey Selected by R Jovani
Flowers make the menu for nearly all Galapagos birds Science News (Nature Communications paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Habitat degradation and climate shifts impact survival of the white-collared manakin EurekAlert! (Oecologia paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Birds flying in a V take turns in the top spot, study finds Los Angeles Times-Science (PNAS paper) Selected by JL Alcantara Play the caterpillar defense National geographic (American Naturalist paper) Selected by J Broggi
Darwin 2.0: Scientists shed new light on how species diverge Phys.org (Nature paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Agriculture Is Reshaping the Avian Tree of Life American Scientist (Science paper) Selected by JL Alcantara Fatal Attraction of Short-Tailed Shearwaters to Artificial Lights Science daily ( PloS One paper) Selected by J Broggi
Winter bird feeders: Get ready for a busy season Science/AAAS (Global Change Biology paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Dinosaur family tree gives fresh insight into rapid rise of birds Phys.org (Current Biology paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Migrating birds sprint in spring, but take things easy in autumn ScienceDaily (Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology paper) Selected by Jose L. Alcantara
Hummingbirds evolved a strange taste for sugar ScienceNews (Science paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Group foraging in little penguins ScienceDaily ( PLoS ONE paper) Selected by R Jovani
Mixed Genes Mix Up the Migrations of Hybrid Birds ScienceNewsline (Ecology Letters paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Dinosaurs 'shrank' regularly to become birds BBC (Science paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Parrot Who Was Among Last of Its Kind, Said to Have Inspired ‘Rio,’ Dies National Geographic Society Selected by JL Alcantara
Researchers declassify dinosaurs as being the great-great-grandparents of birds Phys.org (Journal of Ornithology paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Pristine fossil confirms Archaeopteryx as original bird United Press International (Nature paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
All gone: How erasing billions of birds shocked us Yahoo! News (PNAS paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Plants hitch a lift on migrating birds BBC Nature (PeerJ paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Mapping the evolution of a ring species Univ. British Columbbia (Nature paper) Selected by R Jovani
Closest Living Relative of Ancient Elephant Bird Is Tiny LiveScience (Science paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Identifying evolutionary distinct birds WIRED (Current Biology paper) Selected by R Jovani
Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology since Darwin Myriad Birds Selected by JL Alcantara
The 100 most distinct and rare birds BBC Nature (Current Biology paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Hummingbird Evolution Soared After They Invaded South America 22 Million Years Ago ScienceNewsline (Current Biology paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Bird’s Extinction Is Tied to the Arrival of Humans The New York Times (PNAS paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
A bird-like dinosaur called “Chicken from Hell” NPR news (PLOS One paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Wintering irruptions of Snowy owls in North America and Europe (in Spanish) SEO/BirdLife blog Selected by R Jovani
Punk Amazon pheasant is a European emigrant NewScientists (Naturwissenschaften paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Flights of Fancy in Avian Evolution American Scientist Selected by JL Alcantara Why do birds fly in a V? Endangered ibis reveals its amazing secret (VIDEO) Los Angeles Times (Nature letter) Selected by J Broggi
Sharp-toothed tigerfish jumps to eat a bird (VIDEO) (J Fish Biol paper) Nature News Selected by J Broggi
On the evolution of bird fingers. PHYS.ORG (J Exp Zool paper) Selected by R Jovani
Albatross colony shows benefits of same-sex pairing ABC Science (J Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper) Selected by JL Alcantara Swifts stay airborne for six months at a time New scientist(Nature communications paper) Selected by J Broggi
100 years ago bird lovers were encouraged to use the field glasses rather than the gun The Guardian Selected by R Jovani
Trees send distress signals that birds use to find insects Sinc(Ecol Lett paper) Selected by R Jovani
I’m singing in the rainforest Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (journal of interdisciplinary music studies paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Fossil Poo Reveals Where Ancient Giant Bird Ate Discovery News (PNAS paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Colonizing songbirds lost sense of syntax e! Science News (Current Biology paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Songbirds may have 'borrowed' DNA to fuel migration Phys.org (Evolution paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Collision Course ScienceNews (ScienceNews paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Social learning of migratory performance PhysOrg (Science paper) Selected by R Jovani
Evolution of parasitic egg colouration: parasites also select. Not Exactly Rocket Science blog(Biol Lett paper) Selected by R Jovani
European birds adjust their flight initiation distance to road speed limits BBC News(Biol Lett paper) Selected by R Jovani
The secret of male beauty (in turkeys) UCL News (PLOS Genetics paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Bird hunters 'emptying Afghan skies' BBC News Asia Selected by JL Alcantara
Secrets of the world’s toughest little bird Griffith U. News (Nature Communications paper) Selected by JL Alcantara Outdoor Cats: Single Greatest Source of Human-Caused Mortality for Birds and Mammals American Bird Conservancy (Nature communications paper) Selected by J Broggi
Hiding in plain sight: New species of bird discovered in capital city e! Science News (Forktail paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Foraging space partitioning without territoriality in a seabird ScienceDaily (Science paper) Selected by R Jovani
Bird extinction leads to rapid evolution of seed size The Red Notebook (Science paper) Selected by R Jovani
Bird song changes in translocated birds ScienceDaily (J Appl Ecol paper) Selected by R Jovani
Why penguins lost their wings ABC Science (PNAS paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Simulated patternity uncertainty: Males care about intruders but feed nestlings regardless of patternity uncertainty ScienceDaily (PLoS ONE paper) Selected by R Jovani
Seabird Bones Reveal Changes in Open-Ocean Food Chain Science Daily(PNAS paper) Selected by F Mateos-Gonzalez
New fossil brings new light on the evolution of hummingbirds and swifts Science NOW(Proc R Soc B paper) Selected by R Jovani
Testosterone vs. audience on the regulation of bird fights and social status ScienceDaily (Hormones and Behavior paper) Selected by R Jovani
Lead bullet fragments poison rare US condors BBC News Selected by JL Alcantara
Avoiding cuckoo parasitism by breeding indoors Live Science(Beh Ecol Sociobiol paper) Selected by R Jovani
Why I study duck genitalia... or... why basic science matters Slate Selected by R Jovani
A study about play in cranes BBC Nature(Ibis paper) Selected by R Jovani
Pretty great tits make better mothers Discover (Frontiers in Zoology paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Humans wiped out Pacific island birds ABC Science (PNAS paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
The Rise and Fall of Four-Winged Birds Not Exactly Rocket Science (Science paper) Selected by R Jovani
Sex role reversal: Female shorebirds rule the roost BBC News (Nature Communications paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Birds communicate their size through song ScienceDaily(PLoS ONE paper) Selected by R Jovani
How Birds of Different Feathers Flock Together ScienceDaily (Animal Behaviour paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
The Owl Comes Into Its Own The New York Times-Science Selected by JL Alcantara
On the evolution of UV vision in birds ScienceDaily(BMC Evol Biol paper) Selected by R Jovani
A great tit predating upon a common redpoll (video; Finnish) Ilta Sanomat Selected by R Jovani
Killing Barred Owls To Save the Spotted Owl CNN Selected by JL Alcantara
New dinosaur fossil challenges bird evolution theory e! Science News (Nature paper) Selected by JL Alcantara
Fractal geometry of a plumage pattern changes with physical condition in partridges ScienceNow(Proc R Soc B paper) Selected by I Galván
As Andean condors decline, tradition draws critics Reuters Selected by JL Alcantara





see Older News on the left-hand column

Sunday 21 June 2009

The magic of a dancing flock of starlings

A dancing flock of starlings hypnotize us like the fire. The flock fly as a single bird; contracting and expanding, going up and then down into the trees of the avenue. The flock is clearly more than the messy sum of some hundreds of birds: it is a self-organized dynamic system showing emergent properties that escape to our comprehension.

This is why science exists, to explain the magic trick, and enjoy nature with renewed eyes. We know from a long time ago that in a flock of starlings there isn’t a single leader governing the dance: a flock is a decentralized system where the cohesion and movement of the group is created by the massive interaction among birds.

Italian researchers have gone a step further in this explanation by taking many pictures from starling flocks flying over the city of Rome. Then, they reconstructed on the computer the 3D position of each individual inside the flock, and studied how the flight of a given bird was shaped by its neighbors. They discovered that birds aren’t affected by the position of all neighbors within a certain distance (lineal distance), but only by those six closest neighbors (topographic distance). Implementing this rule as an algorithm into a simulation model, they showed that this individual behavior enhanced the compactness of flocks when attacked by a predator. In this way, starlings evade the attack of the falcon, leaving him hypnotized by their self-organized magic.


Photo by "He and Fi" (Flickr; Creative Commons)


This post was previously published in Catalan and Spanish in this blog (see here)


Ballerini, M., Cabibbo, N., Candelier, R., Cavagna, A., Cisbani, E., Giardina, I., Lecomte, V., Orlandi, A., Parisi, G., Procaccini, A., Viale, M., & Zdravkovic, V. (2008). From the Cover: Interaction ruling animal collective behavior depends on topological rather than metric distance: Evidence from a field study Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (4), 1232-1237 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0711437105

Wednesday 3 June 2009

Out of the harvester, into the shotgun

Common quails (Coturnix coturnix) breed in Spanish wheat and barley fields; when harvesters arrive, destroy their habitat as if you cut the forest of a woodpecker. Harvesting is not simultaneous through Spain and the authors of this paper already suspected from long ago that quails respond to this ecological threat migrating from early towards later fields. But…. How to test this hypothesis?

Domingo Rodríguez-Teijeiro and his team have confronted the issue with three information sources: ring recoveries, agrarian information, and hunting reports. As they suspected, fields at lower altitude and latitude are the first to harvest, leaving some last remnants of unharvested fields at high altitude and latitude. Ring recoveries oriented from early to late fields, and it was in these late crops (in the Castilian Plateau) where it was the highest number of quails shot per shotgun.

Therefore, not only hunting but also agriculture is key to manage in order to conserve quail populations in Spain. The authors discuss that this migrations may be a local adaptation of quails in front of a human-mediated ecological pressure. This exemplifies how difficult is to separate natural and artificial selection in our increasingly humanized world.

> Rodríguez-Teijeiro, J.D., Sardà-Palomera, F., Nadal, J., Ferrer, X., Ponz, C. i Puigcerver, M. (2009) The effects of mowing and agricultural landscape management on population movements of the common quail. Journal of Biogeography doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02109.x

Picture courtesy of Antón Pérez to Birds and Science (visit his blog: Biólogo y Becario)

-------------------------------CATALÀ--------------------------------

Fugint de les segadores per topar-se amb les escopetes

Les guatlles (Coturnix coturnix) crien en camps de blat i civada; quan arriben les segadores es destrueix el seu hàbitat. És com si a una picot li tallessin el bosc. Però no totes les zones d’Espanya seguen els camps de cereals simultàniament - els autors d’aquest article ja fa molts anys que estudien les guatlles i ja fa temps que sospitaven que les guatlles responien a aquesta pressió ecològica migrant cap a zones de cultius més tardans. Però... com testar aquesta hipòtesis?


Domingo Rodríguez-Teijeiro i el seu equip han atacat el problema amb tres fonts d’informació: amb recaptures d’anelles, amb informació agrària, i amb informes de caçadors. Han vist que, com ja pensaven, el cereal es sega més aviat en zones de baixa latitud i altitud, quedant els últims reductes de camps sense segar en les zones de major altitud i latitud. A més, han vist que les recuperacions d’anelles s’orienten cap a aquestes zones més tardanes de sega, i que és en aquestes localitats (de l’altiplà de Castella) on el nombre de guatlles caçades per escopeta és major.

Per tant, no només la caça, sinó també la seva interacció amb l’agricultura, són dos elements claus a gestionar per poder conservar les poblacions de guatlles. Els autors discuteixen que aquestes migracions de les guatlles podrien ser un exemple interessant d’adaptació local en front d’unes condicions ecològiques creades per l’home. Això posa de manifest la fina línea que separa la selecció natural de la selecció artificial en un món cada vegada més humanitzat.

>Rodríguez-Teijeiro, J.D., Sardà-Palomera, F., Nadal, J., Ferrer, X., Ponz, C. i Puigcerver, M. (2009) The effects of mowing and agricultural landscape management on population movements of the common quail. Journal of Biogeography doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02109.x

Fotografia cortesia d’Antón Pérez a Birds and Science (visita el seu blog: Biólogo y Becario)


-------------------------------ESPAÑOL--------------------------------


Huir de las cosechadoras para dar en las escopetas

En España las codornices (Coturnix coturnix) crían en campos de trigo y cebada; cuando llegan las cosechadoras se destruye su hábitat. Es como si a un picapinos le talaran el bosque. Pero no se cosecha el cereal simultáneamente en toda España – los autores de este estudio ya hace mucho tiempo que sospechaban que las codornices respondían a esta presión ecológica migrando hacia zonas de cultivos más tardíos. Pero... ¿como testar esta hipótesis?

Domingo Rodríguez-Teijeiro y su equipo han abordado el problema con tres fuentes de información: con recapturas de anillas, con información agraria, y con informes de cazadores. Han visto que, como sospechaban, la cosecha de los cereales es más temprana en zonas de baja latitud y altitud, quedando los últimos reductos sin cosechar en zonas de alta latitud y altitud. Además, han visto que las recuperaciones de anillas se orientan hacia estas zonas más tardías, y que es en estas localidades (de la meseta de Castilla) donde el número de codornices cazadas por escopeta es mayor.


Por lo tanto, no sólo la caza, sino también la agricultura es clave que se gestione para conservar las poblaciones de codornices. Los autores discuten que las codornices podrian estar evolucionando una adaptación local a estas condiciones ecológicas provocadas por el hombre. Esto pone de manifiesto la fina línea que separa la selección natural de la selección artificial en un mundo cada vez más humanizado.


>Rodríguez-Teijeiro, J.D., Sardà-Palomera, F., Nadal, J., Ferrer, X., Ponz, C. i Puigcerver, M. (2009) The effects of mowing and agricultural landscape management on population movements of the common quail. Journal of Biogeography doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02109.x


Fotografía cortesía de Antón Pérez a Birds and Science (visita su blog: Biólogo y Becario)

Rodríguez-Teijeiro, J., Sardà-Palomera, F., Nadal, J., Ferrer, X., Ponz, C., & Puigcerver, M. (2009). The effects of mowing and agricultural landscape management on population movements of the common quail Journal of Biogeography DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02109.x

 
Ir Arriba