【12-13】Prof.Eben Goodale: Mixed-species bird flocks: behavior, community ecology and conservation

发布时间:2019-12-06

 讲座题目:Mixed-species bird flocks: behavior, community ecology and conservation
 主 讲 人:Eben Goodale(教授)
 主 持 人:斯幸峰(研究员)
 开始时间:12月13日(周五)上午10:00
 讲座地址:闵行校区 生科辅楼119室
 主办单位:生态与环境科学学院、科技处

 报告人简介:
    Eben Goodale is Professor, PI of a group focusing on animal ecology and  conservation at Guangxi University. He is interested in the connection  between three fields of ecology: behavioral ecology, community ecology  and conservation biology. His research focuses on how behavior,  particularly communication, affects the interactions between species,  and how knowledge about such interactions can be integrated into  conservation and management plans. He received his bachelor’s from  Harvard College (1997), his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts,  Amherst (2005), and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Massachusetts  Institute for Technology, the National Science Foundation (USA) and the  University of California, San Diego / University of San Diego. Much of  his work has been done on birds and in Sri Lanka, but he has also  conducted bird research in India, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and now China,  and has also worked on communication in bees. He is the first author of  “Mixed-species Animal Groups” (Academic Press, 2017), the only book on  this topic, and is an author on more than 75 peer-reviewed articles  including publications in peer-reviewed journals. He has taught  undergraduate and graduate courses in introductory biology,  biodiversity, ecology, and experimental design and statistics in the  United States, Sri Lanka, PNG and China. He lives with his wife, the  ecologist Uromi Manage Goodale, and son in Nanning.

 报告内容简介:
    Mixed-species bird flocks (MSFs) are an important subsection of the  avian community in many different habitats, but are particularly common  and well-studied in forests. Two projects about communication in MSFs of  Sri Lanka illustrate the complexity of behaviors that occur in them. A  project on alarm calls described a mutualistic system. One gregarious  leader species makes the most and the quickest alarm calls, but is  unreliable, requiring other species to emphasize true threats. In  contrast, a project on vocal mimicry showed the potential for  manipulation. Here a drongo contextually mimics other species, with  mimicry attracting other species towards it, reforming MSFs, and  influencing other species’ behaviors in ways that benefit the calling  drongo. This background about the diversity of species interactions in  MSF can serve as a foundation to investigate the structure of these  communities. MSFs usually include insectivorous, non-terrestrial  species, and are led by gregarious species that are information  providers. Following species prefer to join flocks in which the majority  of other species, and especially leaders, are similar to them in body  size and other characteristics. What implications, then, does this  knowledge about MSF systems have for conservation? Two large-scale  sampling projects, one in Sri Lanka and India, and one in southwest  China, have shown that MSF metrics decline from forest to buffer areas  to agriculture. The same conclusion is reached by a global  meta-analysis, with MSF in the most disturbed areas having 1/4 fewer  species and 1/3 fewer individuals, and MSFs being in general more  sensitive to anthropogenic disturbance than the overall avifauna. Some  of this effect is direct: habitat transformation changes the foraging  ecology of birds and predation risk, which are major drivers of  flocking. But there are also indirect effects, by which disturbance  affects leading species, and the absence of these species leads to  changes for other participants. Indeed, MSF leaders can be targets of  management efforts to achieve community-wide conservation.