Asian Black-tailed Godwits as new players in comparative approaches to morphology, sexual size dimorphism and flyway ecology
Shorebirds travel great distances between their breeding and non-breeding grounds each year. They are capable of adapting to various environments during their annual cycle, and this adaptation differs between species and populations. Understanding their adaptability can provide insights into the evo...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
University of Groningen
2023
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/11370/b422d61d-1a56-44ba-afbb-f18a3bbae3c1 https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/b422d61d-1a56-44ba-afbb-f18a3bbae3c1 https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.674237368 https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/674237370/Complete_thesis.pdf https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/674237372/Propositions.pdf |
| Summary: | Shorebirds travel great distances between their breeding and non-breeding grounds each year. They are capable of adapting to various environments during their annual cycle, and this adaptation differs between species and populations. Understanding their adaptability can provide insights into the evolutionary process, species diversity, and how they function and interact. Additionally, shorebirds are sentinels of nature and the ideal indicators of environmental health and the changing world. Research on shorebirds can reveal and forecast ecosystem issues. Lying between China and the Korean Peninsula, the Yellow and Bohai Sea regions are seen as a bottleneck of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF). It is one of the most extensive intertidal ecosystems in the world, and every year, approximately three million shorebirds stop at this region during north and southward migrations. However, the region's socioeconomic development and rapid human population growth have severely devastated natural resources and the ecosystem, caused a dramatic decline in the intertidal area, seriously constraining the survival of shorebirds. The Black-tailed Godwit is a globally near-threatened species with only one subspecies documented in the EAAF, Limosa limosa melanuroides. Over the last decade, field observations of godwits similar in size to limosa along the Yellow and Bohai regions have challenged this traditional knowledge. One explanation for these different-sized godwits could be that they are two separate geographical populations of the Asian subspecies. Another possibility might be that these large-sized godwits in the Yellow and Bohai Sea regions belong to another subspecies, either the eastern limosa that occurs outside its known distribution or a novel and undescribed subspecies of Black-tailed Godwit. To solve this puzzle, we conducted a series of studies to first analyse body size and shape differences between known subspecies in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, we compared the large-bodied Bohai population with the known ... |
|---|