News and Events Relevant to the Lab
Come join us in Seville next year to present on or listen to a great line up of speakers presenting on heat exchange with the environment.
When the call for abstracts come out, please consider submitting a topic that we might be able to feature in the symposium.
And by the end of our session, you should be able to put this type of image into context!
Alas, my co-organiser, Dr. Dom McCafferty is 5-6 hours ahead of me and has already posted this!
Congrats to Philip Bartel for successfully and impressively defending his 4th year honours thesis today.
The title of his thesis was:
Philip will be missed from the lab, but we wish him the best and will welcome him back anytime.
One of the pleasures of academia is the “seminar invite”. I just returned from a visit to the University of Pittsburgh Pyamunting Laboratory of Ecology. Only a 3 hour drive from my house:
Many thanks to Dr. Corinne Zawacki for the invitation and for hosting me and showing me around the field station. This truly is an impressive place for doing field research. Hopefully we can collaborate in the future.
Thanks also to my supportive grad students (who put up with disappearances) and the unwitting co-authors (Ray Danner, Jaime Chaves, Danielle Levesque). I was speaking about our research on Darwin’s finches….
I’ve often thought that I wait too long to post anything about research until it has been completed. However, in this case I make an exception. We were able to get our flight mill working today with a male carpenter bee! Video evidence below:
Full credit to the two fantastic high school mentorship students (Hailin Wang and Sam Langdon) who built the flight mill with the assistance of Brock University’s Electronic’s Shop and Machine Shop, and to Miriam Richards, my colleague in all matters related to bees.
Now, we simply have to put the final touches and hopefully Lyndon Duff (Miriam’s PhD student) will be flying bees this summer.
I just found this really cool blog post about the lab’s work on avian thermal windows!
Thank you Núria!
The lab has recently had the pleasure of hosting a Post-Doctoral Fellow visitor to the lab (funded by an Aharon Ephraim Katzir Study Grant – Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Dr. Vlad Demartsev, from Tel Aviv University, has been spending the past 4 weeks in the cold of Canada (mostly indoors) learning the ins and outs of infrared thermal imaging, video analysis, and open-source data extraction methods we have been developing, and will be taking his skills back home where he plans to incorporate this with his research into animal communication (here is a link to his recent paper on male Hyrax singing).
Here he is at the Toronto Zoo doing his best impression of a meerkat (many thanks to the African mammal keepers at the Toronto Zoo for allowing us the chance to visit!).
It was a great pleasure to have Vlad visit. I only wish I had more time to spare to interact with him and his family. I guess the solution will be to visit him in Israel or South Africa! Stay tuned to this space…
Dear package maintainer,
>
> this notification has been generated automatically.
> Your package Thermimage_3.1.0.tar.gz has been built for Windows and
> will be published within 24 hours in the corresponding CRAN directory.
> R version 3.4.2 (2017-09-28)
>
> All the best,
> (Maintainer of binary packages for Windows)
Here is the link: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=Thermimage
Our article just came out in the Journal of Experimental Biology! A few months ago, I was invited by Kathryn Knight of the JEB, to write a classic article highlighting a piece of work by Bob Boutilier that might be considered “classic”. Bob was my PhD supervisor, who passed away far too young. Choosing an article that would be deemed a “classic” was initially daunting, since, by definition, a classic might be the “most influential” or “most cited”. I decided to go with my gut, and choose one of Bob’s papers that was crucial to my own training in comparative physiology, and invited Warren Burggren to help pen a thoughtful tribute to Bob. Here is the link to the article:
http://jeb.biologists.org/content/220/22/4084
An article we wrote (with Leite, Milsom, Sanders, Andrade, Abe, and Cadena) has been recommended on @F1000Prime http://f1000.com/prime/730235759?key=6H8E8TOzD6P62gZ
I am writing this blog post to accompany a manuscript of ours that has just been accepted in Functional Ecology. The link to the article is here. The final proofs are not yet ready, as of Sept 24, 2017, but the accepted manuscript is available, so I think it is safe to blog about it.
Darwin’s finches have been the focus of much intense study demonstrating how climatic fluctuations coupled with resource competition drive the evolution of a variety of bill sizes and shapes. Darwin’s finches are only found on the Galápagos Islands, located ~1000 km west of Ecuador in the middle of the Pacific ocean, pretty much along the equator. Climatically, these islands are typically considered warm to hot throughout the year, but also experience a relatively dry climate (<300 mm/year).
Darwin’s finches have been well studied with regard to the role of the bill in resource acquisition (i.e., searching for food, acquiring and crushing seeds etc.). Here is a young Geospiza searching for seeds in the relatively barren ground surface:
Bird bills are not dead structures, however. Bird bills are well vascularized (i.e. blood vessels are right below the beak keratin), while their limbs have specialized vasculature that promote heat loss or heat conservation, depending on the ambient conditions. In other words, these body surfaces (bill and legs especially) are “thermoregulatory windows“, which is a term used to refer to the fact that they can be “opened” and “closed” accordingly to dump or save body heat.
With this in mind, we hypothesized that Darwin’s finch bills have evolved in part for their role in thermoregulation, possibly co-opted, following adaptation for other functions. We predicted that bills of Darwin’s finches are effective thermoregulatory windows, and that species differences in morphology, along with physiology and behavior, lead to differences in thermoregulatory function.
To shed light on these hypotheses, we conducted a field study to assess heat exchange and microclimate use differences in three ground finch species and sympatric cactus finch (Geospiza). We collected thermal images of free-living birds during a hot and dry season and recorded microclimate data for each observation. We used individual thermographic data to model the contribution of bills, legs, and bodies to overall heat balance and compared surface temperatures to those from dead birds to test physiological control of heat loss from these surfaces. We derived and compared species-specific threshold environmental temperatures, which are indicative of a species’ thermally neutral temperature.
We could not formally test the question of adaptation in this study, but what this study represents is our initial observations of surface temperatures in four species of birds living within the same habitat. Conceptually, then, if they truly experience the same heat load and thermal regime (a null hypothesis), we would not observe differences in surface temperatures of bills, limbs, or feathers.
In all species, the bill surface was an effective heat dissipater during naturally occurring warm temperatures. We found that finches controlled surface temperatures through physiology (i.e. body surfaces exhibited different responses to changing heat loads) and that young birds had higher surface temperatures than adults. Larger bills contributed proportionally more to overall heat loss than smaller bills.
We demonstrate here that related, sympatric species with different bill sizes exhibit different patterns in the use of these thermoregulatory structures, supporting a role for thermoregulation in the evolution and ecology of Darwin’s finch morphology.
More work is to come, however. This study is still very much scratching the surface, and we hope to publish more on this topic in the months and years to come.
Below, I have attached some photos from our field work, and some summary data on the microhabitat patterns observed in the study:
Summary of the observed microhabitat differences from our field thermography:
Mean (± 95% CI) values of key environmental variables (ambient temperature, solar radiation, water vapour pressure, and wind speed) obtained during one month of thermal image acquisition in the field grouped according to species of Darwin’s finch. Sample size for each species are the numbers depicted beneath the points. (Names below are abbreviations of the species: Geospiza fuliginosa, Geospiza fortis, Geospiza magnirostris, and Geospiza scandens). This figure is derived from data in our study, but was not included in the final version for reasons of conciseness.
Field based thermography
In addition to the discoveries listed above, we think that this study will prove useful for others considering a non-invasive, but quantitative approach to assessing thermoregulatory responses in the field. Infrared thermography is a camera based approach to capturing surface temperatures of objects. Bird surface temperatures are a function of the bird’s own internal heat production as well as their balance with solar heat gain and environmental heat exchange. We have tried to provide a detailed materials and methods in this paper’s supplementary in order to assist others who might be considering this approach in their field work.
How did it all happen?
We really need to thank and acknowledge Dr. Russell Greenberg for initiating and facilitating many of the ideas presented in this study, and who sadly passed away before the manuscript was written. In 2009, following my publication in Science, and a follow-up review paper in American Naturalist, I received an email from Russ, asking for my opinion a study about bill size dimorphism he had recently published on. In his study, he observed bill size differences amongst subspecies of sparrows and had just read my paper and wondered if some of his observations could be based on thermoregulatory constraints and the role of the bill in heat exchange. This discussion eventually led to one of my students, Viviana Cadena, going to work with Russ Greenberg and Ray Danner at the Smithsonian Institute and led to publication in 2012 in PLoS.
During this time, Russ and I opined about going to Galápagos to test our hypotheses in Darwin’s Finches. We put together a proposal and submitted it to the National Geographic Society, and received news of the positive outcome of the funding in October 2012. This good news was met with sad news, however, as Russ had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We did, however, get to work together in the field. In April/May of 2013, Russ, Ray, and myself travelled to Galápagos, where we met up with Jaime Chaves, and conducted the study now published in Functional Ecology. We might have been slower at writing up our work than you were, Russ, but we finally did it!
Citation
Tattersall, G. J., Chaves, J. A. and Danner, R. M. (2017/2018), Thermoregulatory windows in Darwin’s Finches. Funct Ecol. Accepted Author Manuscript. doi:10.1111/1365-2435.12990
Funding
Research funding for this study was kindly provided by the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, the Galápagos Institute for the Arts and Sciences-Universidad San Francisco de Quito Grant, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2014-05814). Logistical support was kindly provided by the Charles Darwin Research Station and the Galápagos National Park. Permits to conduct research were provided by the Galápagos National Park Service (Authorization No. PC-05-13).
Data Accessibility
Data will be made available on Data Dryad: Dryad entry doi:10.5061/dryad.t4k41.
