Chemical profiles of Leach's storm-petrel (Oceanodroma leucorhoa) feathers collected on Bon Portage Island, Nova Scotia, Canada
Avian chemical communication, once largely overlooked, is a growing field that has revealed the important role that olfaction plays in the social lives of some birds. Leach's storm-petrels (Oceanodroma leucorhoa) have a remarkable sense of smell and a strong, musky scent. This long-lived, monog...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | unknown |
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2020
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| Online Access: | https://zenodo.org/record/3999122 https://doi.org/10.25338/B8WS5C |
| Summary: | Avian chemical communication, once largely overlooked, is a growing field that has revealed the important role that olfaction plays in the social lives of some birds. Leach's storm-petrels (Oceanodroma leucorhoa) have a remarkable sense of smell and a strong, musky scent. This long-lived, monogamous seabird relies on olfaction for nest relocation and foraging, but whether they use scent for communication is less well studied. They are nocturnally active at the breeding colony and yet successfully reunite with their mate despite poor night-vision, indicating an important role for non-visual communication. We investigated the chemical profiles of Leach's storm-petrels to determine whether there is socially relevant information encoded in their plumage odor. To capture the compounds comprising their strong scent, we developed a method to study the compounds present in the air surrounding their feathers using headspace stir bar sorptive extraction coupled with gas-chromatography mass-spectrometry. We collected feathers from Leach's storm-petrels breeding on Bon Portage Island in Nova Scotia, Canada in both 2015 and 2016. Our method detected 142 commonly occurring compounds. We found interannual differences in chemical profiles between the two sampling years. Males and females had similar chemical profiles, while individuals had distinct chemical signatures across the two years. These findings suggest that the scent of the Leach's storm-petrel provides sociochemical information that could facilitate olfactory recognition of individuals and may inform mate choice decisions. There are two files included in this dataset: Jennings_Ebeler_2020_chemicalprofiles_30birds.csv This file lists the abundance of 127 compounds for 180 feather samples analyzed from 30 Leach's storm-petrels across two sampling years, 2015 and 2016. Jennings_Ebeler_chemicalprofiles_modelvalidationsamples.csv This file lists the abundance of 127 compounds for additional feathers analyzed from a subset of 9 individuals where we obtained and analyzed ... |
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