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The cost of migration: spoonbills suffer higher mortality during trans-Saharan spring migrations only
Explanations for the wide variety of seasonal migration patterns of animals all carry the assumption that migration is costly and that this cost increases with migration distance. Although in some studies, the relationships between migration distance and breeding success or annual survival are estab...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321157/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25589489 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2014.0944 |
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author | Lok, Tamar Overdijk, Otto Piersma, Theunis |
author_facet | Lok, Tamar Overdijk, Otto Piersma, Theunis |
author_sort | Lok, Tamar |
collection | PubMed |
description | Explanations for the wide variety of seasonal migration patterns of animals all carry the assumption that migration is costly and that this cost increases with migration distance. Although in some studies, the relationships between migration distance and breeding success or annual survival are established, none has investigated whether mortality during the actual migration increases with migration distance. Here, we compared seasonal survival between Eurasian spoonbills (Platalea leucorodia leucorodia) that breed in The Netherlands and migrate different distances (ca 1000, 2000 and 4500 km) to winter in France, Iberia and Mauritania, respectively. On the basis of resightings of individually marked birds throughout the year between 2005 and 2012, we show that summer, autumn and winter survival were very high and independent of migration distance, whereas mortality during spring migration was much higher (18%) for the birds that wintered in Mauritania, compared with those flying only as far as France (5%) or Iberia (6%). As such, this study is the first to show empirical evidence for increased mortality during some long migrations, likely driven by the presence of a physical barrier (the Sahara desert) in combination with suboptimal fuelling and unfavourable weather conditions en route. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4321157 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-43211572015-02-11 The cost of migration: spoonbills suffer higher mortality during trans-Saharan spring migrations only Lok, Tamar Overdijk, Otto Piersma, Theunis Biol Lett Evolutionary Biology Explanations for the wide variety of seasonal migration patterns of animals all carry the assumption that migration is costly and that this cost increases with migration distance. Although in some studies, the relationships between migration distance and breeding success or annual survival are established, none has investigated whether mortality during the actual migration increases with migration distance. Here, we compared seasonal survival between Eurasian spoonbills (Platalea leucorodia leucorodia) that breed in The Netherlands and migrate different distances (ca 1000, 2000 and 4500 km) to winter in France, Iberia and Mauritania, respectively. On the basis of resightings of individually marked birds throughout the year between 2005 and 2012, we show that summer, autumn and winter survival were very high and independent of migration distance, whereas mortality during spring migration was much higher (18%) for the birds that wintered in Mauritania, compared with those flying only as far as France (5%) or Iberia (6%). As such, this study is the first to show empirical evidence for increased mortality during some long migrations, likely driven by the presence of a physical barrier (the Sahara desert) in combination with suboptimal fuelling and unfavourable weather conditions en route. The Royal Society 2015-01 /pmc/articles/PMC4321157/ /pubmed/25589489 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2014.0944 Text en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2015 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Evolutionary Biology Lok, Tamar Overdijk, Otto Piersma, Theunis The cost of migration: spoonbills suffer higher mortality during trans-Saharan spring migrations only |
title | The cost of migration: spoonbills suffer higher mortality during trans-Saharan spring migrations only |
title_full | The cost of migration: spoonbills suffer higher mortality during trans-Saharan spring migrations only |
title_fullStr | The cost of migration: spoonbills suffer higher mortality during trans-Saharan spring migrations only |
title_full_unstemmed | The cost of migration: spoonbills suffer higher mortality during trans-Saharan spring migrations only |
title_short | The cost of migration: spoonbills suffer higher mortality during trans-Saharan spring migrations only |
title_sort | cost of migration: spoonbills suffer higher mortality during trans-saharan spring migrations only |
topic | Evolutionary Biology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321157/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25589489 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2014.0944 |
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