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2 results

  • 2 - Avian Adaptations to High Mountain Habitats

  • Edited by Dan Chamberlain, University of Turin, Aleksi Lehikoinen, Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki, Kathy Martin, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
  • Book:
    Ecology and Conservation of Mountain Birds
    Published online:
    30 June 2023
    Print publication:
    20 July 2023, pp 35-89

  • Summary

    Alpine birds face many challenges to live in habitats characterized by low temperatures, high winds, short growing seasons and delayed breeding schedules. Breeding in alpine environments is always a race against time due to the shortened egg laying period and frequent storms that may result in delayed development or reproductive failure. Since daily temperatures in the alpine zone can range from below freezing to >450C, developing embryos may require cooling as well as heating to maintain homeothermy. To cope with such conditions, birds breeding in alpine habitats have developed physiological, morphological and behavioural adaptations, and have adopted a slower lifestyle where they may produce fewer offspring each year compared to populations at low elevations, but may live longer. In the northern hemisphere, only a few birds live exclusively in the alpine zone, with many mountain species breeding in both alpine and lower elevation habitats, while in the Southern Andes, most alpine birds breed exclusively above the treeline. In summary, there may be high ecological costs to living in open habitats at high elevations. However, alpine birds likely experience lower levels of interspecific competition, habitat degradation and parasites and diseases than birds living at lower elevations.

  • Transmission networks and ectoparasite mite burdens in Oecomys paricola (Rodentia: Cricetidae)

  • Fernanda Rodrigues Fernandes, Somayra da Silva Abreu, Leonardo Dominici Cruz
  • Journal:
    Parasitology / Volume 148 / Issue 4 / April 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 December 2020, pp. 443-450

  • The host contact network structure results from the movement and behaviour of hosts (e.g. degree of sociability; vagility and greater or lesser fidelity of shelters), which can generate heterogeneity in the transmission of parasites and influence the parasitic burden of individual hosts. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that the burdens of Gigantolaelaps oudemansi mites are related to the characteristics of the transmission networks of individuals of Oecomys paricola, a solitary rodent. The study was carried out in a savannah habitat in north-eastern Brazil. In the dry season, the rodent network presented sub-groups of rodent individuals interacting with each other, whereas in the wet season, no modules were formed in the network. Mite burden was positively related to the number of connections that an individual host had with other host individuals in the dry season. The pairwise absolute difference between the mean mite burdens among individual rodents was negatively correlated with the similarities of node interactions. No relationships were observed during the wet season. There was a higher heterogeneity of mite burden among hosts in the dry season compare to that in the wet season. In solitary species, spatial organization may show seasonal variation, causing a change in the opportunities of host contacts, thereby influencing the transmission and dispersion of their ectoparasite burdens.