Behavioural and physiological monitoring of sea ducks over the annual cycle

鸟类是流动性很强的动物。特别是，候鸟跨越边界在大地理范围(300-8000公里)的不同地点繁殖、换羽和越冬。这一特点使得对候鸟的研究和保护具有挑战性。在拟议的研究计划中，我的目的是描述海鸭的年度周期，并了解不同的生物阶段是如何按时间和能量整合在一起与繁殖成功有关的。在过去的15年里，我的工作一直致力于繁殖种群的野外工作，部署数据记录器，开发数据提取软件，以及对圈养和野生普通eiders(我们的模式物种Somateria mollissima)进行实验。我们发现，日能量消耗(Dee)在年度周期中变化，在孵化后、蜕皮和迁徙期间，与生产成本相关的各种起伏不同，尽管有一些策略可以使能量最小化，如行为补偿和在有利条件(高水温)下选择重要活动(换羽)的时间。对圈养鸭子的实验支持了水温被用作蜕皮时间的外源线索的观点。此外，我们还发现野鸭的每日体温与全年的光周期和水温高度相关，这表明日光是代谢活动的重要驱动因素。因此，我希望从以前的提案以及我的实验室产生的新问题中追求总体目标。我将用不同亚种的圈养鸟类进行实验，以确定生物钟在年度阶段(生物季节)的时间安排中的性质和作用，并调查体重和觅食努力在这方面的作用，以及新部署的数据记录器对来自另一个种群(亚种)的野生个体进行比较。在过去的六年里，我们还探索了羽毛鸭的迁徙策略，发现在飞行过程中反复发生体温过高，然后定期停下来降温，这表明鸟类迁徙需要意外的生理和时间成本。为了在实验方案下通过测量氧化应激指标来记录飞行诱导的体温过高的有害影响，建议对印记和被捕获的个体进行未来的工作。我相信这里提出的这项研究具有很高的创新性，因为它基于一种定制技术，允许记录野生个体的高度相关信息，以及对圈养鸟类进行的实验，旨在确定决定鸟类年度周期的潜在机制。

Birds are highly mobile animals. In particular, migratory birds cross frontiers to breed, moult and winter at various locations over large geographic scales (300-8000 km). This very characteristic makes the study and conservation of migrating birds challenging. In the proposed research program, my aim is to describe the annual cycle of sea ducks and understand how the various biological phases are integrated chronologically and energetically in relation to breeding success. In the past 15 years, my work have been devoted to field work on breeding colonies, deployment of data loggers, development of software for data extraction, and experiments with captive and wild Common Eiders (Somateria mollissima, our model species). We found that daily energy expenditure (DEE) varied during the annual cycle with various ups and downs associated with productive costs occurring during post-hatching, moult and migration, despite strategies enabling energy minimisation like behavioural compensation and timing of important activities (moult) with favourable conditions (high water temperature). Experiments with captive ducks supported the notion that water temperature was used as an exogenous cue for the timing of moult. Moreover, we found that daily body temperature of wild ducks were highly correlated with photoperiod and water temperature for a full year suggesting that daylight was an important driver of metabolic activity. Therefore, I wish to pursue the general goal from former proposals together with new questions stemming from my lab. I will perform experiments with captive birds of different sub-species to determine the nature and the role of biological clocks in the timing of annual phases (biological seasons) and investigate the role of body mass and foraging effort in this respect, together with new deployments of data loggers on wild individuals from another population (sub-species) for comparative purposes. In the past six years, we also explored the migration strategy of eider ducks to discover that hyperthermia was occurring repeatedly during flights followed by regular stops to cool down, suggesting unexpected physiological and time costs to bird migration. Future work with imprinted and captive individuals is proposed in order to document the deleterious effects of flight-induced hyperthermia by measuring oxidative stress indicators under an experimental scheme. I believe the research proposed here to be highly innovative as it is based on a custom technology that allow the recording of highly relevant information of individuals in the wild together with experiments performed on captive birds aiming at identifying the underlying mechanisms shaping the annual cycle of birds.