Data from: High flight costs, but low dive costs, in auks support the biomechanical hypothesis for flightlessness in penguins ...

• Main Authors: Elliott, Kyle H., Ricklefs, Robert E., Gaston, Anthony J., Hatch, Scott A., Speakman, John R., Davoren, Gail K.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2013
• Subjects: time-depth recorder; Uria lomvia; Phalacrocorax pelagicus; wing-propelled diver; accelerometer; triaxial acceleration; foot-propelled diver; Dee; uria
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.23td2; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.23td2

Flight is a key adaptive trait. Despite its advantages, flight has been lost in several groups of birds, notably among seabirds, where flightlessness has evolved independently in at least five lineages. One hypothesis for the loss of flight among seabirds is that animals moving between different media face tradeoffs between maximizing function in one medium relative to the other. In particular, biomechanical models of energy costs during flying and diving suggest that a wing designed for optimal diving performance should lead to enormous energy costs when flying in air. Costs of flying and diving have been measured in free-living animals that use their wings to fly or to propel their dives, but not both. Animals that both fly and dive might approach the functional boundary between flight and nonflight. We show that flight costs for thick-billed murres (Uria lomvia), which are wing-propelled divers, and pelagic cormorants (Phalacrocorax pelagicus) (foot-propelled divers), are the highest recorded for ... : Doubly-labelled water data and energetics comparison used to generate figuresIncludes several worksheets: (1) "Background" are the background deuterium and oxygen-18 measuremetns from thick-billed mures in 2006. (2) "DEE calculations" provides the raw ppm data and calculations made to estimate daily enegy expenditure in thick-billed murres. Each band number (ID) can be cross-referenced with the time-activity file. (3) "Activity costs" represents the average body mass, mass loss and activity budgets and total energy expenditure (from Part (2)) used to calculate activity-specific costs. (4) "Interspecies comparison" data used to generate figures in the paper. (5) "Morphological comparison" database used to generate the figures in the paper. (6) "PECO ppm and DEE": Pelagic cormorant ppm data and calculations used to estimate daily energy expenditure. (7) "PECOactivity": Pelagic cormorant activity budgets (derived from accelerometer files) and daily energy expenditure (from 6), along with mass and mass loss ...