Payo-Payo, A., Genovart, M., Sanz-Aguilar, A., Greño, J.L., García-Tarrasón, ., Bertlero A. and Oro, D., Colonisation in social species: the importance of breeding experience for dispersal in overcoming information barriers. Scientific Report. doi:10.1038/srep42866
Abstract:
Studying
colonisation is crucial to understand metapopulations, evolutionary ecology and
species resilience to global change. Unfortunately, few empirical data are
available because field monitoring that includes empty patches at large
spatiotemporal scales is required.
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| from wikipedia.com |
We examine the colonisation dynamics of a
long-lived seabird over 34 years in the western Mediterranean by comparing
population and individual data from both source colony and the newly-formed
colonies. Since social information is not available, we hypothesize that
colonisation should follow particular dispersal dynamics and personal
information must be crucial in decision making. We test if adverse breeding
conditions trigger colonisation events, if personal information plays a role in
colonisation and if colonisers experience greater fitness. Our results show a
temporal mismatch between colonisation events and both density-dependence and
perturbations at the source colony, probably because colonisers needed a longer
prospecting period to compensate for the lack of public information. Colonisers
were mostly experienced individuals gaining higher breeding success in the new
colony. Our results highlight the demographic value that experienced
individuals can have on metapopulation dynamics of social long-lived organisms.
The Workshop on Capture-Recapture and -Recovery at MUSE in collaboration with Dr. S. Tenan ended last Friday. It has been a very nice and interesting meeting with data on wolves, migratory birds, wild boards, gulls... surrounded by Trento mountains. Thank you all and thank to Simone for organizing this. The next workshop is scheduled in Mallorca this November.
