Long-distance migrants must optimise their timing of breeding to capitalise on resources at both breeding and over-wintering sites. In species with protracted breeding seasons, departing earlier on migration might be advantageous, but is constrained by the ongoing breeding attempt. Here we investigated how breeding timing affects migratory strategies in the Manx shearwater (Puffinus puffinus), a trans-hemispheric migratory seabird with large temporal variation in the onset of breeding.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding storm impacts on marine vertebrate demography requires detailed meteorological data in tandem with long-term population monitoring. Yet most studies use storm proxies such as the North Atlantic Oscillation Index (NAOI), potentially obfuscating a mechanistic understanding of current and future risk. Here, we investigate the impact of extratropical cyclones by extracting north Atlantic winter storm characteristics (storm number, intensity, clustering and wave conditions) and relating these with long-term overwinter adult survival of three long-lived sympatric seabirds which winter at sea-common guillemot Uria aalge, Atlantic puffin Fratercula arctica and razorbill Alca torda.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLarge-scale climatic fluctuations, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, can have dramatic effects on ocean ecosystem productivity. Many mobile species breeding in temperate or higher latitudes escape the extremes of seasonal climate variation through long-distance, even trans-global migration, but how they deal with, or are affected by, such longer phased climate fluctuations is less understood. To investigate how a long-lived migratory species might respond to such periodic environmental change we collected and analysed a 13 year biologging dataset for a trans-equatorial migrant, the Manx shearwater ().
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) is an enzyme that plays a pivotal role in peripheral inflammation and pain via the prostaglandin pathway. In the central nervous system (CNS), COX-2 is implicated in neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders as a potential therapeutic target and biomarker. However, clinical studies with COX-2 have yielded inconsistent results, partly due to limited mechanistic understanding of how COX-2 activity relates to CNS pathology.
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