Bright moonlight triggers natal dispersal departures

Natal dispersal and senescence.

The potential existence of natal dispersal strategies depending on parental age has been suggested by Hamilton and May [Hamilton, W. D. & May, R. M. (1977) Nature 269, 578-581] for organisms whose survival rates decline with age. When competition between parent and offspring is strong, any individual should disperse a smaller fraction of its offspring when it ages. Here, we verify their verbal ...

Natal Dispersal in Birds & Mammals

Evolution of natal dispersal in spatially heterogenous environments.

Understanding the evolution of dispersal is an important issue in evolutionary ecology. For continuous time models in which individuals disperse throughout their lifetime, it has been shown that a balanced dispersal strategy, which results in an ideal free distribution, is evolutionary stable in spatially varying but temporally constant environments. Many species, however, primarily disperse pr...

Local Recruitment and Natal Dispersal Distances of American Kestrels

Variation in recruitment patterns and dispersal behavior can have important consequences for population viability, genetic structure, and rates of evolutionary change. From 1992 to 2006 we studied a marked population of American Kestrels (Falco sparverius) nesting in boxes in southwestern Idaho to identify factors that affect local recruitment and natal dispersal distances. A low proportion (4%...

Natal dispersal and personalities in great tits (Parus major).

Dispersal is a major determinant of the dynamics and genetic structure of populations, and its consequences depend not only on average dispersal rates and distances, but also on the characteristics of dispersing and philopatric individuals. We investigated whether natal dispersal correlated with a predisposed behavioural trait: exploratory behaviour in novel environments. Wild great tits were c...