Glaciation as a migratory switch.

ABSTRACT: Migratory behavior in birds is evolutionarily plastic, but it is unclear how this behavior responded during glacial cycles. One view is that at glacial maxima, species simply shifted their breeding ranges south of glacial ice and remained migratory. To test this hypothesis, we constructed ecological niche models for breeding and wintering ranges of 56 species, finding that 70% of currently long-distance North American migrant species likely lacked suitable breeding habitat in North America at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), and we hypothesized that they reverted to the ancestral state of being tropical sedentary residents. A smaller percentage of short-distance migrants (27%) experienced altered migratory behavior at the LGM, although the ranges of all species were shifted southward, as tr

SUBMITTER: Zink RM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5606702 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature