Shearwaters sometimes take long homing detours when denied natural outward journey information

Padget, Oliver; Gillies, Natasha; Syposz, Martyna; Lockley, Emma C.; Guilford, Tim

doi:10.1098/rsbl.2021.0503

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Thorup et al, 2003;Wynn et al, 2020a) and topographic differences across space (e.g. Padget et al, 2022Padget et al, , 2019 offer perhaps the best examples of such a paradigm, though biologging technology might also allow other navigational phenomena to be tackled using natural experiments.…”

Section: Conclusion: the Shape Of Animal Navigation To Comementioning

confidence: 99%

Lost: on what level should we aim to understand animal navigation?

Wynn

Liedvogel

2023

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Given that all interactions between an animal and its environment are mediated by movement, questions of how animals inherit, refine and execute trajectories through space are fundamental to our understanding of biology. As with any behavioural trait, navigation can be thought of on many conceptual levels – from the mechanistic to the functional, and from the static to the dynamic – as laid out by Niko Tinbergen in his four questions of animal behaviour. Here, we use a navigation-centric interpretation of Tinbergen's questions to summarise and critique advances in the field of animal navigation. We discuss the ‘state of the art’; consider how a proximal/mechanistic understanding of navigation is not a prerequisite to understanding ultimate questions of evolutionary/adaptive importance; propose that certain aspects of animal navigation research – and certain taxa – are being neglected; and suggest that extreme experimental manipulations might lead to the mischaracterisation of non-adaptive ‘spandrels’ as functional navigational mechanisms. More generally, we highlight pressing questions within the field, the answers to which we believe are within reach, and highlight the important role that novel methods will have in helping us elucidate them.

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Section: Conclusion: the Shape Of Animal Navigation To Comementioning

confidence: 99%

Lost: on what level should we aim to understand animal navigation?

Wynn

Liedvogel

2023

Journal of Experimental Biology

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“…Like other procellariiforms, they can be extremely long-lived ( 23 , 24 ), are capable of long foraging trips during the breeding season ( 25 , 26 ), and are generally dependent on patchy and ephemeral resources which might shift rapidly with climate change ( 27 , 28 ). Furthermore, shearwaters have become a model system for the study of avian spatial cognition in the wild ( 26 , 29 – 35 ). As a result, Balearic shearwaters provide an excellent opportunity to explore the processes generating range shift in migratory taxa and investigate the underlying behavioral and spatial cognitive mechanisms.…”

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confidence: 99%

Climate change drives migratory range shift via individual plasticity in shearwaters

Lewin,

Wynn,

Arcos

et al. 2024

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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How individual animals respond to climate change is key to whether populations will persist or go extinct. Yet, few studies investigate how changes in individual behavior underpin these population-level phenomena. Shifts in the distributions of migratory animals can occur through adaptation in migratory behaviors, but there is little understanding of how selection and plasticity contribute to population range shift. Here, we use long-term geolocator tracking of Balearic shearwaters ( Puffinus mauretanicus ) to investigate how year-to-year changes in individual birds’ migrations underpin a range shift in the post-breeding migration. We demonstrate a northward shift in the post-breeding range and show that this is brought about by individual plasticity in migratory destination, with individuals migrating further north in response to changes in sea-surface temperature. Furthermore, we find that when individuals migrate further, they return faster, perhaps minimizing delays in return to the breeding area. Birds apparently judge the increased distance that they will need to migrate via memory of the migration route, suggesting that spatial cognitive mechanisms may contribute to this plasticity and the resulting range shift. Our study exemplifies the role that individual behavior plays in populations’ responses to environmental change and highlights some of the behavioral mechanisms that might be key to understanding and predicting species persistence in response to climate change.

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Shearwaters sometimes take long homing detours when denied natural outward journey information

et al. 2022

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The cognitive processes (learning and processing of information) underpinning the long-distance navigation of birds are poorly understood. Here, we used the homing motivation of the Manx shearwater to investigate navigational decision making in a wild bird by displacing them 294 km to the far side of a large island (the island of Ireland). Since shearwaters are reluctant to fly over land, the island blocked the direct route home, forcing a navigational decision. Further still, on the far side of the obstacle, we chose a release site where the use of local knowledge could facilitate a 20% improvement in route efficiency if shearwaters were able to anticipate and avoid a large inlet giving the appearance of open water in the home direction. We found that no shearwater took the most efficient initial route home, but instead oriented in the home direction (even once the obstacle became visible). Upon reaching the obstacle, four shearwaters subsequently circumnavigated the land mass via the long route, travelling a further 900 km as a result. Hence, despite readily orienting homewards immediately after displacement, shearwaters seem unaware of the scale of the obstacle formed by a large land mass despite this being a prominent feature of their regular foraging environment.

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Shearwaters sometimes take long homing detours when denied natural outward journey information

Cited by 3 publications

References 25 publications

Lost: on what level should we aim to understand animal navigation?

Lost: on what level should we aim to understand animal navigation?

Climate change drives migratory range shift via individual plasticity in shearwaters

Shearwaters sometimes take long homing detours when denied natural outward journey information

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