Long-term declines in winter body mass of tits throughout Britain and Ireland correlate with climate change

Ecology and Evolution
Euan N Furness, Robert A Robinson

Abstract

The optimum body mass of passerine birds typically represents a trade-off between starvation risk, which promotes fat gain, and predation pressure, which promotes fat loss to maintain maneuvrability. Changes in ecological factors that affect either of these variables will therefore change the optimum body masses of populations of passerine birds. This study sought to identify and quantify the effects of changing temperatures and predation pressures on the body masses and wing lengths of populations of passerine birds throughout Britain and Ireland over the last 50 years. We analyzed over 900,000 individual measurements of body mass and wing length of blue tits Cyanistes caeruleus, coal tits Periparus ater, and great tits Parus major collected by licenced bird ringers throughout Britain and Ireland from 1965 to 2017 and correlated these with publicly available temperature data and published, UK-wide data on the abundance of a key predator, the sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus. We found highly significant, long-term, UK-wide decreases in winter body masses of adults and juveniles of all three species. We also found highly significant negative correlations between winter body mass and winter temperature, and between winter body mass an...Continue Reading

References

Mar 1, 1990·Acta Biotheoretica·J M McNamara, A I Houston
Apr 29, 2008·Trends in Ecology & Evolution·Fred W AllendorfNils Ryman
Sep 4, 2008·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Chandler B AndrewsT Ryan Gregory
Mar 9, 2012·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Anna Kuparinen, Jeffrey A Hutchings
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Mar 9, 2018·The Journal of Experimental Biology·John R Speakman
Jun 8, 2018·Ecology and Evolution·Kate E PlummerJonathan D Blount

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