Allee effects play an important role in the dynamics of many populations and can increase the risk of local extinction. However, some authors have questioned the weight of evidence for Allee effects in wild populations. We therefore exploited a natural experiment provided by two adjacent breeding colonies of contrasting density to investigate the potential for Allee effects in an Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella) population that is declining in response to climate-change induced reductions in...

Die Professorin Dr. med. Claudia Hornberg ist nicht nur Gründungsdekanin an der Uni Bielefeld, sondern auch die erste Dekanin der nordrhein-westfälischen Hochschulmedizin überhaupt. Auch Professorin Dr. med. Sabine Oertelt-Prigione ist eine Pionierin, da sie auf ihrem Fachgebiet der „Geschlechtersensiblen Medizin“ nicht nur die Ausbildung der Studierenden, sondern obendrein die Forschung modernisiert. Nach knapp vierjähriger Aufbauarbeit ist die neue Medizinische Fakultät OWL mit den ersten Studierenden ins Wintersemester 2021/2022 gestartet – aus diesem Anlass fragt Beate...

The acknowledgment of the functional role of hesitations in speech has increased the research interest in investigating and modeling their occurrence in discourse. This study explores hesitation combinations and distribution in Italian discourse. Though clusters represent less frequent occurrences than standalone hesitations, it is still worth examining their composition, distribution, and context of occurrence for a better understanding of hesitations' role in discourse. Also, the emerging patterns may provide interesting findings for technological applications, such...

Genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) have long been linked to odor signaling and recently researchers’ attention has focused on MHC structuring of microbial communities and how this may in turn impact odor. However, understanding of the mechanisms through which the MHC could affect the microbiota to produce a chemical signal that is both reliable and strong enough to ensure unambiguous transmission of behaviorally important information remains poor. This is largely because empirical studies...

Understanding physical mechanisms underlying seabird foraging is fundamental to predict responses to coastal change. For instance, turbulence in the water arising from natural or anthropogenic structures can affect foraging opportunities in tidal seas. Yet, identifying ecologically important localised turbulence features (e.g. upwellings ~10-100 m) is limited by observational scale and this knowledge gap is magnified in volatile predators. Here, using a drone-based approach, we present the tracking of surface-foraging terns (143 trajectories belonging to three...

This Dataset supports the article "Inbreeding in a dioecious plant has sex- and population origin-specific effects on its interactions with pollinators", which is published in eLife. The study addresses the combined effects of inbreeding, plant sex and plant population origin on interactions among plants and their specialised pollinators. It contains data on various floral traits (spatial flower traits, flower colour traits, floral scent traits (floral VOC), floral rewards) as well as pollinator visitation rates. The...

We present a crosslinguistic study on the interplay of hesitation silences and fillers in conversation. The research questions have been addressed for English in a previous DiSS workshop paper (Betz & Kosmala, 2019) and this study extends the analysis to German, Italian and French. The research questions are: 1) Does the type of the filler influence following silence duration 2) Does the duration of the filler correlate with silence duration 3) Does silence duration vary...

Intergenerational effects, also known as parental effects in which the offspring phenotype is influenced by the parental phenotype, can occur in response to factors that occur not only in early but also in late parental life. However, little is known about how these parental life stage-specific environments interact with each other and with the offspring environment to influence offspring phenotypes, particularly in organisms that realize distinct niches across ontogeny. We examined the effects of parental...

Geographic variation of sexual selected male traits is common in animals. Female choice also varies geographically and several studies found female preference for local males, which is assumed to lead to local adaptation and therefore increases fitness. As females are the non-dispersing sex in most mammalian taxa, this preference for local males might be explained by learning of male characteristics. Studies on preference of females in female-dispersing species are lacking so far. To find out...

Telomere length and telomere shortening predict survival in many organisms. This raises the question of the contribution of genetic and environmental effects to variation in these traits, which is still poorly known, particularly for telomere shortening. We used experimental (cross-fostering) and statistical (quantitative genetic ‘animal’ models) means to disentangle and estimate genetic and environmental contributions to telomere length variation in pedigreed free-living jackdaws (Corvus monedula). Telomere length was measured twice in nestlings, at ages 4...

For detailed information concerning data collection please see Gonzalez-Voyer et al. Sex roles in birds: phylogenetic analyses of the influence of climate, life histories and social environment. Ecology Letters. Briefly, data on ecology, life histories and behaviour of birds were extracted from published literature. If several data were available for a given species, we included the ones that were extracted from breeding individuals or had larger sample sizes. The details regarding data processing are provided...

DEMOKON – Research Paper ; 2

Natural history collections are leading successful large-scale projects of specimen digitization (images, metadata, DNA barcodes), transforming taxonomy into a big data science. Yet, little effort has been directed towards safeguarding and subsequently mobilizing the considerable amount of original data generated during the process of naming 15–20,000 species every year. From the perspective of alpha-taxonomists, we provide a review of the properties and diversity of taxonomic data, assess their volume and use, and establish criteria for...

Adult survival is a key component of population dynamics and understanding variation in and the drivers of adult survival rates and longevity is critical for ecological and evolutionary studies, as well as for conservation biology and practice. Tropical species of landbirds are often selected to have higher adult survival due to high nest predation rates, but it is unclear if the same patterns occur in other avian lineages with different life history strategies. Here, we...

Das vorliegende Forschungsvorhaben beschäftigt sich mit dem Projekt „Kleine BegInNa“ zur Bestimmung und Förderung naturwissenschaftlicher Kompetenzen im Kita-Alter als ganzheitlicher Ansatz, welches sich sowohl an Kinder als auch Fachkräfte in Kindertagesstätten richtet. Gemäß des Design-Based Research Modells nach Shavelson et al. (2003) werden auf Grundlage des erhobenen Forschungsstandes in einem weiteren Schritt unterschiedliche Interventionsmaßnahmen entwickelt und didaktische Konzepte abgeleitet, die in mehrfachen Erprobungen stetig evaluiert und weiterentwickelt werden sollen.

Throughout their lifetime, insects face multiple environmental challenges that influence their performance. Gregarines are prevalent endoparasites in most invertebrates that affect the fitness of their hosts, but are often overlooked in ecological studies. Next to such biotic factors, a current common challenge is anthropogenic pollution with pesticides, which causes a major threat to non-target organisms that are readily exposed to lethal or sublethal concentrations. In a laboratory study, we investigated whether the presence of gregarines...

Die ORCID iD hat sich zum internationalen De-facto-Standard für die eindeutige und persistente Identifikation sämtlicher an Forschungs- und Publikationsprozessen beteiligten Personen in der Wissenschaftscommunity etabliert. Die international agierende Non-Profit-Organisation ORCID Inc. vernetzt weltweit über 12 Millionen ORCID iDs mit ihren Forschenden. Um ORCID in Deutschland zu fördern, wurde das Projektvorhaben ORCID DE initiiert. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird der Dienst ORCID und seine Implementierungsmöglichkeiten anhand von praktischen Beispielen aus Wissenschaftsorganisationen in Deutschland beschrieben und die Notwendigkeit...

During June and July of 2017, wild bees were collected using color traps (blue, yellow and white pans) in small water bodies called kettle holes embedded in agricultural landscapes in the north of Germany. After all wild bees were identified to species level, from a subset of samples we measured the Intertegular distance ITD (distance between the wings) as body size and searched for functional traits regarding sociality (solitary, eusocial, parasitic) nesting type (below- or...