Preface to the Princeton Landmarks in Biology Edition vii Preface xi Symbols Used xiii 1. The Importance of Islands 3 2. Area and Number of Speicies 8 3. Further Explanations of the Area-Diversity Pattern 19 4. The Strategy of Colonization 68 5. Invasibility and the Variable Niche 94 6. Stepping Stones and Biotic Exchange 123 7. Evolutionary Changes Following Colonization 145 8. Prospect 181 Glossary 185 References 193 Index 201

The Theory of Island Biogeography

Statistics for Spatial Data.

Genetics and analysis of quantitative traits

Climate change 2014 - Synthesis Report

Recent studies suggest that populations and species often exhibit behavioral syndromes; that is, suites of correlated behaviors across situations. An example is an aggression syndrome where some individuals are more aggressive, whereas others are less aggressive across a range of situations and contexts. The existence of behavioral syndromes focuses the attention of behavioral ecologists on limited (less than optimal) behavioral plasticity and behavioral carryovers across situations, rather than on optimal plasticity in each isolated situation. Behavioral syndromes can explain behaviors that appear strikingly non-adaptive in an isolated context (e.g. inappropriately high activity when predators are present, or excessive sexual cannibalism). Behavioral syndromes can also help to explain the maintenance of individual variation in behavioral types, a phenomenon that is ubiquitous, but often ignored. Recent studies suggest that the behavioral type of an individual, population or species can have important ecological and evolutionary implications, including major effects on species distributions, on the relative tendencies of species to be invasive or to respond well to environmental change, and on speciation rates. Although most studies of behavioral syndromes to date have focused on a few organisms, mainly in the laboratory, further work on other species, particularly in the field, should yield numerous new insights.

/pdf/behavioral-syndromes-an-ecological-and-evolutionary-overview-53ct6xj1u3.pdf

Behavioral syndromes: an ecological and evolutionary overview.

Theory and evidence suggest that some selective pressures are more common on islands than in adjacent mainland habitats, leading evolution to follow predictable trends. The existence of predictable evolutionary trends has nonetheless been difficult to demonstrate, mainly because of the challenge of separating in situ evolution from sorting processes derived from colonization events. Here we use brain size measurements of >1900 avian species to reveal the existence of one such trend: increased brain size in island dwellers. Based on sister-taxa comparisons and phylogenetic ancestral trait estimations, we show that species living on islands have relatively larger brains than their mainland relatives and that these differences mainly reflect in situ evolution rather than varying colonization success. Our findings reinforce the view that in some instances evolution may be predictable, and yield insight into why some animals evolve larger brains despite substantial energetic and developmental costs.

/pdf/predictable-evolution-towards-larger-brains-in-birds-4dvhi0pyv3.pdf

Predictable evolution towards larger brains in birds colonizing oceanic islands

Behavioural Innovation: A Neglected Issue in the Ecological and Evolutionary Literature?

The capacity to behave innovatively facilitates adaptation to changing environmental conditions and accelerates speciation rates. Innovation tendencies show substantial variation both among and within species, but the sources of this variation remain poorly understood. There has been much debate on the role of cognition and significant amounts of empirical research on the influence of motivational and state-dependent processes, but the prediction that innovation might also be facilitated by motor processes has only recently begun to gain traction. Here, we measured innovative foraging in 7 common urban avian species under free-ranging conditions and explored the role of motor flexibility as well as several potential other predictors of innovation such as motivation and morphology. Species differed significantly in their tendency to forage innovatively, with a true corvid, the Australian raven, Corvus coronoides, outperforming all other species. Across species, motor flexibility was the strongest predictor of the capacity to forage innovatively. Our results extend previous work demonstrating the role of motor diversity in individual differences in the tendency to forage innovatively and provide the impetus for future research on links between motor and cognitive flexibility.

The role of motor diversity in foraging innovations: a cross-species comparison in urban birds

Despite growing interest in the evolution of enlarged brains, the biological significance of brain size variation remains controversial. Much of the controversy is over the extent to which brain structures have evolved independently of each other (mosaic evolution) or in a coordinated way (concerted evolution). If larger brains have evolved by the increase of different brain regions in different species, it follows that comparisons of the whole brain might be biologically meaningless. Such an argument has been used to criticize comparative attempts to explain the existing variation in whole-brain size among species. Here, we show that pallium areas associated with domain-general cognition represent a large fraction of the entire brain, are disproportionally larger in large-brained birds and accurately predict variation in the whole brain when allometric effects are appropriately accounted for. While this does not question the importance of mosaic evolution, it suggests that examining specialized, small areas of the brain is not very helpful for understanding why some birds have evolved such large brains. Instead, the size of the whole brain reflects consistent variation in associative pallium areas and hence is functionally meaningful for comparative analyses.

/pdf/relative-brain-size-and-its-relation-with-the-associative-2u1aqpq03i.pdf

Relative Brain Size and Its Relation with the Associative Pallium in Birds.

http://biology.mcgill.ca/faculty/lefebvre/articles/Ferronetal_2004.pdf

Daniel Sol

Papers

Predictable evolution towards larger brains in birds colonizing oceanic islands

Behavioural Innovation: A Neglected Issue in the Ecological and Evolutionary Literature?

The role of motor diversity in foraging innovations: a cross-species comparison in urban birds

Relative Brain Size and Its Relation with the Associative Pallium in Birds.

Dunking behaviour in Carib grackles