Macro-scale relationship between body mass and timing of bird migration

Wang, Xiaodan, Somveille, Marius ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6868-5080, Dokter, Adriaan M., Cao, Wenhua, Cheng, Chuyu, Liu, Jiajia and Ma, Zhijun (2024) Macro-scale relationship between body mass and timing of bird migration. Nature Communications, 15. ISSN 2041-1723

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Abstract

Clarifying migration timing and its link with underlying drivers is fundamental to understanding the evolution of bird migration. However, previous studies have focused mainly on environmental drivers such as the latitudes of seasonal distributions and migration distance, while the effect of intrinsic biological traits remains unclear. Here, we compile a global dataset on the annual cycle of migratory birds obtained by tracking 1531 individuals and 177 populations from 186 species, and investigate how body mass, a key intrinsic biological trait, influenced timings of the annual cycle using Bayesian structural equation models. We find that body mass has a strong direct effect on departure date from non-breeding and breeding sites, and indirect effects on arrival date at breeding and non-breeding sites, mainly through its effects on migration distance and a carry-over effect. Our results suggest that environmental factors strongly affect the timing of spring migration, while body mass affects the timing of both spring and autumn migration. Our study provides a new foundation for future research on the causes of species distribution and movement.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data availability statement: The data in this paper come from published papers, which are listed in Supplementary Data 1. All migration timing data used for the analyses are available in an online repository at Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24613599). The body mass data is available from the Handbook of Avian Body Masses (Dunning, J. B. Jr CRC Handbook of Avian Body Masses. 2nd edn (CRC Press, 2008)). Source data are provided with this paper. Code availability statement: The data analysis codes used in this study are all open-source software, which is available in an online repository at Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24613599). Funding Information: This study was financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant number 2023YFF1304504) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 31830089 and 31772467).
Uncontrolled Keywords:	chemistry(all),biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology(all),physics and astronomy(all) ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1600
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	22 Jul 2024 16:32
Last Modified:	09 Oct 2024 13:40
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/96000
DOI:	10.1038/s41467-024-48248-7

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