Archive for category: Publications

Article written by Alicja Laska, Lechosław Kuczyński and Anna Skoracka from our team in collaboration with Brian Rector from GBRR, USDA-ARS, was published in the latest issue of Experimental and Applied Acarology.

In this study, we showed that protogyne females of two Abacarus species had a larger overall body size in winter than in either spring or summer. The results are consistent with our hypothesis that mites of these species, for which deutogyny has not been observed, undergo physiological changes such as accumulation of nutritional reserves, that enable them to withstand adverse environmental conditions.

The full article available here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10493-017-0159-1

 

 

Recent Ecology paper co-authored by Jakub Szymkowiak from Pop Ecol Lab on system-specific roles of weather and pollination dynamics in driving seed production in European trees is now available online!

Using a 19-year data set from three sites in Poland, the authors investigated the relationship between weather, airborn pollen, and seed production in two oak species (Quercus petraea and Q. robur) and beech (Fagus sylvatica). They found that for oaks and beech, the warm summers preceding flowering correlated with high pollen abundance and warm springs resulted in high flowering synchrony (short pollen seasons). However, in beech the best predictor of seed crops was pollen abundance, while large seed crops in oaks correlated with short pollen seasons. These findings suggest that fundamentally different proximate mechanisms may drive masting in oaks and beech.

You can read the paper here and on ResearchGate. Read also what Jakub Szymkowiak wrote about this study on his page.

 

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Our recent paper on interspecific social information use in wood warblers (Phylloscopus sibilatrix) is now available online!

In a field experiment, we found that wood warblers use social cues from earlier-arriving migrant heterospecifics when deciding where to settle. In one of earlier studies, we also showed that wood warblers use conspecific social cues for settlement decisions. Together, the results of these two experiments suggest that con- and heterospecific attraction as strategies for habitat selection may coexist within a population, which likely results because the latter strategy complements using conspecific cues in the wild.

Importantly, we found that heterospecific attraction is not a phenomenon limited to resident-migrant interactions, but may involve also an information flow from early-arriving migrants to late-arriving species. This suggests that heterospecific attraction as a habitat selection strategy may operate under broader contexts than originally suggested.

In a broader context, results of our studies on the use of con- and heterospecific social cues for settlement decisions in wood warblers suggest an interplay of attraction and avoidance mechanisms, depending on the type of a cue being used. This highlights the importance of both positive and negative effects of social environment on settlement behavior of individuals.

The paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arx029

 

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