Dear colleagues,
Biology Thursday seminar continues on 3rd May, 12:15pm
Join us live, room IT106, for the first session of the semester!
Jonathan Drury from Durham University will present his research on:
The eco-evolutionary consequences of behavioural interference in birds Interactions between closely-related species are an important factor determining which species are able to coexist. A widespread but understudied competitive interaction is behavioural interference (any aggressive, territorial, or mating behaviour by one species that has a negative impact on the fitness of another species). Such interactions are often costly and lead to decreased fitness as individuals waste energy, are driven to use suboptimal habitat, or miss out on mating opportunities with conspecifics. Yet, if behavioural interference diminishes interspecific resource competition by reducing spatial overlap between species, such interference may enable ecologically similar species pairs to coexist. In this talk, I'll present the results from several recent studies on birds that demonstrate that interspecific territoriality arises as an adaptive response to competition for resources and mating opportunities, that interspecific territoriality actually stabilizes coexistence between species, and that interspecific dominance hierarchies emerge and are maintained by similar mechanisms as intraspecific dominance hierarchies. Collectively, these studies demonstrate the importance of accounting for behavioural interactions between species in studies that analyze assembly dynamics, such as those forecasting the effects of global change on future bird distributions.
Related research:
Drury et al. 2020. Competition and hybridization drive interspecific territoriality in birds. PNAS. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1921380117
Nesbit et al. 2022. Interspecific territoriality has facilitated recent increases in the breeding habitat overlap of North American passerines. BioRxiv.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.08.23.504954v1
The seminars program for this semester can be found here: https://thursdayseminarbiology.wordpress.com/
See you live on Thursday!
Noémie
Noémie Pichon Post-doctoral researcher University of Oulu, Finland
noemie.pichon@oulu.fimailto:noemie.pichon@oulu.fi