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Showy Males Most Vulnerable to Warming
Photo: Thomas SachlerSpottiswoode, C.N., A.P. Tøttrup and T. Coppack. 2006. Sexual selection predicts advancement of avian spring migration in response to climate change. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 273(1605):3023-3029.
As the world warms, many birds are migrating earlier in the spring, but some species are arriving on breeding grounds even earlier than others. A new study suggests that the difference may lie in the birds' mating systems: the most-affected species are those whose males vie hardest for females. Getting to the breeding grounds first is an advantage to these males—they are more likely to be chosen by a female, presumably because they were less taxed by the arduous migration than males straggling in later.
This work is presented in Proceedings of the Royal Society by Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and two coauthors.
To find out whether the birds migrating earliest are also those whose females are choosiest, the researchers analyzed
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