Flexibility of habitat use in novel environments: insights from a translocation experiment with lesser black-backed gulls.

ABSTRACT: Being faced with unknown environments is a concomitant challenge of species' range expansions. Strategies to cope with this challenge include the adaptation to local conditions and a flexibility in resource exploitation. The gulls of the Larus argentatus-fuscus-cachinnans group form a system in which ecological flexibility might have enabled them to expand their range considerably, and to colonize urban environments. However, on a population level both flexibility and local adaptation lead to signatures of differential habitat use in different environments, and these processes are not easily distinguished. Using the lesser black-backed gull (Larus fuscus) as a system, we put both flexibility and local adaptation to a test. We compare habitat use between two spatially separate

SUBMITTER: van Toor ML 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5319309 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature