TY  - JOUR
A1  - Teitelbaum, Claire S.
A1  - Converse, Sarah J.
A1  - Fagan, William F.
A1  - Böhning-Gaese, Katrin
A1  - O'Hara, Robert B.
A1  - Lacy, Anne E.
A1  - Mueller, Thomas
T1  - Experience drives innovation of new migration patterns of whooping cranes in response to global change
T2  - Nature Communications
N2  - Anthropogenic changes in climate and land use are driving changes in migration patterns of birds worldwide. Spatial changes in migration have been related to long-term temperature trends, but the intrinsic mechanisms by which migratory species adapt to environmental change remain largely unexplored. We show that, for a long-lived social species, older birds with more experience are critical for innovating new migration behaviours. Groups containing older, more experienced individuals establish new overwintering sites closer to the breeding grounds, leading to a rapid population-level shift in migration patterns. Furthermore, these new overwintering sites are in areas where changes in climate have increased temperatures and where food availability from agriculture is high, creating favourable conditions for overwintering. Our results reveal that the age structure of populations is critical for the behavioural mechanisms that allow species to adapt to global change, particularly for long-lived animals, where changes in behaviour can occur faster than evolution.
KW  - animal migration
KW  - behavioural ecology
KW  - climate-change ecology
KW  - conservation biology
Y1  - 2016
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45140
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-451406
SN  - 2041-1723
N1  - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
VL  - 7
IS  - 12793
PB  - Nature Publishing Group UK
CY  - London
ER  -