@davididiaquez
Behavioural and Evolutionary Ecologist at the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology. Expect science, wildlife pictures and bike stuff (but not in that particular order). davididiaquez.wixsite.com/zurrimicle
🎥📽️🎞️ The two recent EGI-seminars by Alex Bond and Hanna Kokko are both uploaded to the EGI YouTube-channel (@EGI Oxford)! We have quite a few excellent seminars on the channel now, so give it a go!
m.youtube.com/watch?v=QMQ7...
m.youtube.com/watch?v=C15E...
I had the chance to handle some a few years ago and they are awesome
I cannot see a better way to end your day than skimming through this YouTube channel that live streams a nest of a Chaco Eagle (Buteogallus coronatus) somewhere in La Pampa. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiEe...
This week's EGI seminar will be given by Prof Hanna Kokko @kokkonut.bsky.social from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz @unimainz.bsky.social on the role of time in avian trade-offs. All welcome in person in LT1 in LaMB @biology.ox.ac.uk 3.30pm on 6 March. Also live-streamed: details available ⬇️
We already have more than 💯 participants for #ExE2026, but there are still places available.
Once you have registered, you have until April 1 to submit an abstract, so don’t miss out and register now at sites.exeter.ac.uk/exe/registra...
Everything you need to know is 👇 and at evoxeco.uk!
Counting swans and collecting poo.
A comparison of methods to assess selective disappearance and quantify ageing
doi.org/10.32942/X2Q...
Important science here 🦕
This week’s @egioxford.bsky.social seminar at 3.30 on Friday from @ruthedunn.bsky.social on the key role of seabirds in driving energy & nutrient flows. Details below:
Excited to head to Oxford for this on Friday! 🐦
This week's EGI seminar will be give by @ruthedunn.bsky.social from @lancasteruni.bsky.social on Seabird-driven energy and nutrient flows, in person in @biology.ox.ac.uk on Friday 27 Feb at 3.30. All welcome! The seminar will also be live-streamed - joining details available below ⬇️
A very thought-provoking seminar from @thelabandfield.bsky.social this afternoon on the challenges - scientific, societal & personal of studying the increasing problem of macroplastic pollution and its ingestion by seabirds: thanks for coming over Alex!
New paper out in @jevbio.bsky.social
Using 58 years of data, we look at the effect of environmental variation on reproductive trade-offs in great tits.
With @jsmartin.bsky.social, @dzchilds.bsky.social, Ella Cole, @sheldonbirds.bsky.social, @paniw.bsky.social & Arpat Ozgul
doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...
Oxford friends! I'm giving the @egioxford.bsky.social seminar on Friday. Pop along! egioxford.web.ox.ac.uk/event/adrift...
Led by my talented PhD student @justine-armg.bsky.social we’re running a #meta-analysis of #cross-sex-genetic-correlations in fitness components.
If you have unpublished data or know of studies that might not appear in a systematic search, please reach out, we’d love to include them!
Please share!
Excellent to see Daisy presenting this work at a major network conference
A woman standing behind a desk at the front of a lecture hall. The slide behind her reads how does the pattern of node removal, and way network compensates, affect network metrics? In real world animal social networks
A great privilege to give my first conference talk at #NetSciX2026 in Auckland on some ongoing work with Adelaide (Daisy) Abraham on social compensation strategies when individuals are removed from real-world animal social networks.
Daisy also present a poster on the work which inspired this - on her birthday no less! Preprint is in the works on the responses of great tit social networks in response to experimental sex segregation.
Left: Adult and nestling White-throated Dipper (Cinclus cinclus; adult on top, chick below). Right: Microscopy images showing microplastics from nestling faecal samples. Birds were handled under license.
🔈New study!
Microplastics found in 62% of White-throated Dipper broods in Scotland & Basque Country. No body condition effects detected.
Led by @cmartin3.bsky.social
@sbohvm.gla.ac.uk
@aranzadiornito.bsky.social
🔗
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#Ornithology🐦 #Microplastics #Freshwater💧
Register now for the ExE 2026 Conference in Cornwall, UK, focusing on evolutionary ecology. Join exciting sessions and workshops! Spots are limited. More info: https://sites.exeter.ac.uk/exe/ #conference
Great pre-print led by @davididiaquez.bsky.social discussing possible causes of declines in adult and nestling mass. I suggested it be titled "Weapons of mass reduction"
Thanks, Louis! Yes, selective disappearance is a real possibility. Haven’t tested whether the process within cohorts reflect a within individual change, yet ;-)
Finally, this work wouldn't have been possible without the help of the endless number of field assistants, PhD students, postdocs and fieldworkers that obtained the almost 95,000 measures used in this study and without the support of @biology.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk and @egioxford.bsky.social.
This work, as many others using long-term data, highlights the relevance of continuous systematic monitoring of natural populations to increase our understanding of how phenotypic traits respond to environmental change, and of the complex, life-stage-spanning mechanisms that underpin those responses
Overall, our results illustrate the potential for effects mediated early in development to carry-over into long-term phenotypic change at later life history stages, and emphasise the value of considering multiple effects as drivers of phenotypic change in natural populations.
This, added to the fact that adult body mass is negatively associated with the competition levels that adult experienced as a nestling in Wytham, suggests that the temporal trend in adults is a product of a change in the environmental conditions at early-life.
Temporal trends in adult great tit body mass showing a decrease in mass at the population level and an increase in mass with year within each cohort
A more developed analysis of the temporal trends in adults revealed a two level process, akin to Simpson's paradox. While the population level trend is negative, the temporal trends within each tit cohort are positive (likely reflecting an age dependent increase in mass).
The lack of strong associations between adult mass and the environment leave a question open: what does explain the decrease we see in adults?
Association between nestling mass and great (C) and blue tit numbers (D). The line and ribbon represent the trends predicted by the model and the dots and whiskers the mean ± 1 standard deviation of the raw data in bins of 20 pairs. Density plots represent the distribution of number of blue and great tits in each analysis (and hence give information about the sample size).
Adult mass was weakly sensitive to the environmental variation. Nestling mass, however, was negatively associated to competition (by great and blue tits), and given that both the number of great and blue tits has increased in Wytham, we think that this explains the trends in reported in nestlings.
Along that idea, we linked the reported trends to three environmental variables previously recognised as drivers of body mass: temperature, intra- and inter-specific competition and temporal mismatch with a key prey during breeding, winter moth _Operophtera brumata_ caterpillars.
