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      Mass or pace? Seasonal energy management in wintering boreal passerines

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          Abstract

          Research on winter energy management in small vertebrates has focused on the regulation of body mass (BM) within a framework of starvation-predation trade-off. Winter-acclimatized birds exhibit a seasonal increase in both BM and basal metabolic rate (BMR), although the patterns of co-variation between the two traits remain unknown. We studied this co-variation in three different species of wild titmice, great, blue and willow tits, originating from two boreal regions at different latitudes. Seasonal change in BM and BMR was inter-dependent, particularly in the great tit; however, by contrast, no seasonal change was observed in the willow tit. BMR changed non-linearly in concert with BM with a peak in midwinter for both blue and great tits, whereas such non-linear pattern in willow tit was opposite and independent of BM. Surprisingly, BMR appears to be more sensitive to ambient temperatures than BM in all three species studied. Energy management is a multifaceted strategy that cannot be fully understood without considering reserve levels and energy expenditure simultaneously. Thus, our study indicates that the prevailing conceptual framework based on variation in BM alone is insufficient to understand seasonal energy management in small wintering passerines.

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          The online version of this article (10.1007/s00442-018-04332-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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          Carry-over effects as drivers of fitness differences in animals.

          1. Carry-over effects occur when processes in one season influence the success of an individual in the following season. This phenomenon has the potential to explain a large amount of variation in individual fitness, but so far has only been described in a limited number of species. This is largely due to difficulties associated with tracking individuals between periods of the annual cycle, but also because of a lack of research specifically designed to examine hypotheses related to carry-over effects. 2. We review the known mechanisms that drive carry-over effects, most notably macronutrient supply, and highlight the types of life histories and ecological situations where we would expect them to most often occur. We also identify a number of other potential mechanisms that require investigation, including micronutrients such as antioxidants. 3. We propose a series of experiments designed to estimate the relative contributions of extrinsic and intrinsic quality effects in the pre-breeding season, which in turn will allow an accurate estimation of the magnitude of carry-over effects. To date this has proven immensely difficult, and we hope that the experimental frameworks described here will stimulate new avenues of research vital to advancing our understanding of how carry-over effects can shape animal life histories. 4. We also explore the potential of state-dependent modelling as a tool for investigating carry-over effects, most notably for its ability to calculate optimal rates of acquisition of a multitude of resources over the course of the annual cycle, and also because it allows us to vary the strength of density-dependent relationships which can alter the magnitude of carry-over effects in either a synergistic or agonistic fashion. 5. In conclusion carry-over effects are likely to be far more widespread than currently indicated, and they are likely to be driven by a multitude of factors including both macro- and micronutrients. For this reason they could feasibly be responsible for a large amount of the observed variation in performance among individuals, and consequently warrant a wealth of new research designed specifically to decompose components of variation in fitness attributes related to processes across and within seasons. © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 British Ecological Society.
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            Do telomere dynamics link lifestyle and lifespan?

            Identifying and understanding the processes that underlie the observed variation in lifespan within and among species remains one of the central areas of biological research. Questions directed at how, at what rate and why organisms grow old and die link disciplines such as evolutionary ecology to those of cell biology and gerontology. One process now thought to have a key role in ageing is the pattern of erosion of the protective ends of chromosomes, the telomeres. Here, we discuss what is currently known about the factors influencing telomere regulation, and how this relates to fundamental questions about the relationship between lifestyle and lifespan.
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              Rapid reversible changes in organ size as a component of adaptive behaviour.

              Organ structures and correlated metabolic features (e.g. metabolic rate) have often taken as fixed attributes of fully grown individual vertebrates. When measurements of these attributes became available they were often used as representative values for the species, disregarding the specific conditions during which the mesurement were made. Evidence is accumulating that the functional size of organs and aspects of the metabolic physiology of an individual may show great flexibility over timescales of weeks and even days depending on physiological status, environmental conditions and behavioural goals. This flexibility is a way for animals to cope successfully with a much wider range of conditions occurring during various life-cycle events than fixed metabolic machinery would allow. Such phenotypic flexibility is likely to be a common adaptive syndrome, typical of vertebrates living in variable environments.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                +46462224316 , julibroggi@gmail.com
                Journal
                Oecologia
                Oecologia
                Oecologia
                Springer Berlin Heidelberg (Berlin/Heidelberg )
                0029-8549
                1432-1939
                7 January 2019
                7 January 2019
                2019
                : 189
                : 2
                : 339-351
                Affiliations
                [1 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0930 2361, GRID grid.4514.4, Section of Evolutionary Ecology, Department of Biology, , University of Lund, ; 223 62 Lund, Sweden
                [2 ]ISNI 0000 0001 1091 6248, GRID grid.418875.7, Estación Biológica de Doñana (CSIC), ; Av. Americo Vespucio 26, 41092 Seville, Spain
                [3 ]ISNI 0000 0001 0941 4873, GRID grid.10858.34, Department of Ecology and Genetics, , University of Oulu, ; P.O. Box 3000, 90014 Oulu, Finland
                Author notes

                Communicated by Indrikis Krams.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1706-4014
                Article
                4332
                10.1007/s00442-018-04332-6
                6394691
                30617630
                738b79b2-e4c0-4d73-b957-7b17721591da
                © The Author(s) 2019

                OpenAccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

                History
                : 17 October 2018
                : 20 December 2018
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100011265, FP7 Regions of Knowledge;
                Award ID: 291780
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Physiological Ecology–Original Research
                Custom metadata
                © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019

                Ecology
                basal metabolic rate,parus,phenotypic integration,winter ecology,optimal body mass theory
                Ecology
                basal metabolic rate, parus, phenotypic integration, winter ecology, optimal body mass theory

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