Birds worldwide make strategic decisions about how they live based on their environmental conditions.
Birds worldwide make strategic decisions about how they live based on their environmental conditions. Some live fast, die young, and leave as many chicks as possible. Others live long and prosper by not breeding.
A new study of non-migratory birds provides clues about how climate change may affect the long-standing evolutionary strategies of feathered friends. The work is reported in this week’s Ecology Letters and was led by Michigan State University postdoctoral fellows of the MSU Institute for Biodiversity, Ecology, Evolution, and Macrosystems (IBEEM).
The group synthesized global data about nearly 7,500 bird species to better understand the link between the variability of a bird’s environment and the strategies birds choose to best hit the evolutionary jackpot by producing future generations and not going extinct.
Read more at Michigan State University
Image: A male and female cardinal in Michigan represent birds who chose a shorter life filled with offspring to maximize their evolutionary impact. (Credit: Thomas Getty, Michigan State University)
