Love Is A Bird Arctic [WORK]

Arctic Terns breed in treeless areas with little to no ground cover, in open boreal forests, and on small islands and barrier beaches along the northern Atlantic Coast. They forage over streams, ponds, lakes, estuaries, and the open ocean. They tend to migrate offshore although some individuals may migrate overland. Arctic Terns winter on the edge of pack ice in Antarctica during the Southern Hemisphere summer.

Love Is A Bird Arctic

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Arctic Terns take small fish from the surface of the water or plunge-dive just below the surface. They eat a variety of small fish species generally less than 6 inches long including sandlances, sandeels, herring, cod, and smelt. They also grab insects from the air or the surface of the water. During migration, they frequently forage with groups of other seabirds following schools of predatory fish that drive smaller fish to the surface.

Arctic Terns are buoyant and graceful fliers that frequently hover above feeding grounds and nesting colonies. They take small fish from the surface of the water or plunge to a depth of around 20 inches, rising out of the water with a shake and swallowing fish head first. They are often the target of food pirates such as jaegers and gulls that steal their catch. Arctic Terns are gregarious and breed in noisy colonies. Males fly low over breeding colonies with their fish-filled bill pointed downward to grab a female's attention. Interested females follow the crouching male in flight while the female passes over him with her body held straight. Courting continues on the ground with the male tipping his head down and holding his wings down and out from the body while the female stands nearby with her head pointed upward. The male starts offering food to the female, eventually feeding her almost exclusively as the pair bond is cemented. Pairs form monogamous bonds for the breeding season. Adults vigorously defend their nest site. Intruding birds are first met with a "bent posture"; adults tip their heads down and hold their wings down and out. Intruders that continue to approach are met with a more aggressive posture with the bill pointed upward and wings held down and out. When posturing fails, adults attack the intruder, often wrestling and fencing with their bills both on the ground and in the air. If humans enter the breeding colony they often dive towards them, peck their heads, and defecate on them.

Arctic Terns are common, but their arctic tendencies make estimating population trends challenging. The North American Waterbird Conservation Plan lists Arctic Tern as a species of high conservation concern, whereas Partners in Flight rates it an 11 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score, which means it is not on their Watch List and is a species of low conservation concern. Partners in Flight estimates the global population at 3 million breeding birds. In the late nineteenth century Arctic Terns as well as Common Terns were targeted for the feather trade, which caused populations to decline. Most populations recovered following the enactment of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918. Other potential threats to Arctic Terns include human disturbance at colonies, degradation of barrier beach and island nesting habitat, and reductions in fish stocks.

Kushlan, J. A., M. J. Steinkamp, K. C. Parsons, J. Capp, M. A. Cruz, M. Coulter, I. Davidson, L. Dickson, N. Edelson, R. Elliott, R. M. Erwin, S. Hatch, S. Kress, R. Milko, S. Miller, K. Mills, R. Paul, R. Phillips, J. E. Saliva, W. Sydeman, J. Trapp, J. Wheeler and K. Wohl (2002). Waterbird conservation for the Americas: The North American waterbird conservation plan, version 1. Washington, DC, USA.

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Emily S. Choy, Ryan S. O'Connor, H. Grant Gilchrist, Anna L. Hargreaves, Oliver P. Love, François Vézina, Kyle H. Elliott; Limited heat tolerance in a cold-adapted seabird: implications of a warming Arctic. J Exp Biol 1 July 2021; 224 (13): jeb242168. doi:

The Arctic is warming at approximately twice the global rate, with well-documented indirect effects on wildlife. However, few studies have examined the direct effects of warming temperatures on Arctic wildlife, leaving the importance of heat stress unclear. Here, we assessed the direct effects of increasing air temperatures on the physiology of thick-billed murres (Uria lomvia), an Arctic seabird with reported mortalities due to heat stress while nesting on sun-exposed cliffs. We used flow-through respirometry to measure the response of body temperature, resting metabolic rate, evaporative water loss and evaporative cooling efficiency (the ratio of evaporative heat loss to metabolic heat production) in murres while experimentally increasing air temperature. Murres had limited heat tolerance, exhibiting: (1) a low maximum body temperature (43.3C); (2) a moderate increase in resting metabolic rate relative that within their thermoneutral zone (1.57 times); (3) a small increase in evaporative water loss rate relative that within their thermoneutral zone (1.26 times); and (4) a low maximum evaporative cooling efficiency (0.33). Moreover, evaporative cooling efficiency decreased with increasing air temperature, suggesting murres were producing heat at a faster rate than they were dissipating it. Larger murres also had a higher rate of increase in resting metabolic rate and a lower rate of increase in evaporative water loss than smaller murres; therefore, evaporative cooling efficiency declined with increasing body mass. As a cold-adapted bird, murres' limited heat tolerance likely explains their mortality on warm days. Direct effects of overheating on Arctic wildlife may be an important but under-reported impact of climate change.

There is growing evidence that the heat tolerance limits of endotherms have ecological consequences (Rezende and Bacigalupe, 2015). In birds, which maintain their core body temperature at levels higher than in mammals (41C versus 37C), heat waves have caused mass mortality events (McKechnie et al., 2012) and reproductive failures (Bolger et al., 2005; Boersma and Rebstock, 2014). The forecasted increase in heat wave frequency is predicted to cause declines in select avian populations (Conradie et al., 2019; McKechnie and Wolf, 2010). However, as most avian heat tolerance studies have focused on desert birds (Gerson et al., 2014; Smit and Mckechnie, 2015; Whitfield et al., 2015), less is known about heat tolerance in Arctic birds. Recent evidence suggests that an Arctic passerine may be limited in its capacity to withstand even moderately high air temperatures (O'Connor et al., 2021). As larger birds have proportionally less surface area to volume ratios, and therefore less surface to dissipate heat, they may be even more sensitive to heat stress.

We characterized the onset of heat stress as the Ta inflection point for Tb, RMR, EWL and EHL/MHP in murres, obtained by fitting broken-stick regressions to identify significant changes in slope, using the R package SiZer ( -project.org/package=SiZer). To examine the effect of body mass (Mb, measured before heat tolerance runs) and Ta on Tb, RMR, EWL and EHL:MHP, we took a subset of the data at the inflection points and fitted linear mixed effect models on the data below and above the inflection points using the lme4 package in R (Bates et al., 2015). We built a global model with Mb, Ta and their two-way interaction as predictors. To account for repeated measurements on the same individual, we included individual bird identification as a random factor. We then performed model selection using the dredge function in the MuMIn package ( -project.org/package=MuMIn) based on Akaike's information criterion adjusted for small sample size (AICc). The minimum adequate model within a ΔAICc

To our knowledge, murres displayed the lowest maximum evaporative cooling efficiency ever reported in a bird. However, we acknowledge that our dew points, and resulting absolute humidity levels, exceed those of previous heat tolerance investigations (e.g. dew points

Larger murres were more vulnerable to heat stress as a result of higher RMRs and lower rates of EWL. Foraging strategies of murres vary with body size, with larger murres spending the most time at deeper and colder depths (Orben et al., 2015). While a larger body size may convey an advantage for minimizing heat loss in murres when diving in cold water, it may also result in an increased risk of overheating while sitting on their nesting ledges, as evaporative cooling efficiency and heat tolerance limits both declined with increasing Mb. To our knowledge, this is the first heat tolerance study on a diving seabird, or any large polar bird, and the adaptations for diving in icy waters may conflict with murres' ability to tolerate heat. In contrast, heat tolerance limits increased with Mb in Australian passerines (McKechnie et al., 2017), but there was no clear relationship in Sonoran passerines (Smith et al., 2017). Body mass was the most important predictor of EWL across 174 bird species, with higher EWL rates in larger birds (Song and Beissinger, 2020); however, smaller passerines experience higher rates of mass-specific EWL rates and have a greater risk of dehydration than larger birds (Albright et al., 2017; McKechnie and Wolf, 2010). Larger murres demonstrated steeper increases in RMR and shallower increases in EWL, which clearly influenced EHL/MHP. In contrast, maximum EHL/MHP increased with increasing Mb in Australian passerines (McKechnie et al., 2017); however, other studies have not found a clear relationship between Mb and EHL/MHP (Smith et al., 2017; Whitfield et al., 2015).

Although physiological traits and phenology are thought to be evolved traits, they often show marked variation within populations, which may be related to extrinsic factors. For example, trace elements such as mercury (Hg) and lead (Pb) alter biochemical processes within wildlife that may affect migration and breeding. While there is a growing understanding of how contaminants may influence wildlife physiology, studies addressing these interactions in free-living species are still limited. We examined how four non-essential trace elements (cadmium, Hg, Pb and selenium) interacted with physiological and breeding measures known to influence breeding in a free-living population of common eider ducks (Somateria mollissima). We collected blood from female eiders as they arrived at a breeding colony in northern Canada. Blood was subsequently assessed for baseline corticosterone (CORT), immunoglobulin Y (IgY), and the four trace elements. We used model selection to identify which elements varied most with CORT, IgY, arrival condition, and arrival timing. We then used path analysis to assess how the top two elements from the model selection process (Hg and Pb) varied with metrics known to influence reproduction. We found that arrival date, blood Hg, CORT, and IgY showed significant inter-annual variation. While blood Pb concentrations were low, blood Pb levels significantly increased with later arrival date of the birds, and varied negatively with eider body condition, suggesting that even at low blood concentrations, Pb may be related to lower investment in reproduction in eiders. In contrast, blood Hg concentrations were positively correlated with eider body condition, indicating that fatter birds also had higher Hg burdens. Overall, our results suggest that although blood Hg and Pb concentrations were below no-effect levels, these low level concentrations of known toxic metals show significant relationships with breeding onset and condition in female eider ducks, factors that could influence reproductive success in this species. 041b061a72