Publications by authors named "T Mazgajski"
Body condition is increasingly used to assess the status of populations and as a proxy for individual fitness. A common, quick and non-invasive approach is to estimate condition from the relation between body length and mass. Among the methods developed for this purpose, the Scaled Mass Index (SMI) appears best suited for comparisons among populations.
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- Climate change significantly impacts wildlife, prompting potential rapid evolutionary changes due to strong selective pressures.
- Most research has concentrated on how climate affects the timing of events in nature, but there’s a gap in studies examining how climate influences physical traits in wild populations.
- Our study of grass snakes from 1981-2013 found that the prevalence of black morphs was negatively impacted by rising spring temperatures and increased winter severity, suggesting that climate variables play a crucial role in the survival and traits of these populations.
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- * The SPI-Birds Network and Database was established to connect researchers and data on long-term studies of individually marked birds, currently housing data on nearly 1.5 million birds across 80 populations.
- * SPI-Birds promotes data sharing, prevents data loss, and enhances collaboration through community-developed standards and a decentralized approach that allows research groups to maintain control over their data.
It is postulated that melanism in ectotherms is adaptive by enhancing thermoregulation, subsequent resource acquisition, and growth. Such effects may differ between the sexes as a result of the differential costs of self-maintenance and reproduction, but empirical support for the sex-specific consequences of melanism remains inconsistent. We studied the effects of melanism on body size and sex ratio in a population of the European grass snake (Natrix natrix) in SE Poland and also carried out a systematic review of the literature on the consequences of melanism in terrestrial snakes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCoexistence between great tits Parus major and blue tits Cyanistes caeruleus, but also other hole-nesting taxa, constitutes a classic example of species co-occurrence resulting in potential interference and exploitation competition for food and for breeding and roosting sites. However, the spatial and temporal variations in coexistence and its consequences for competition remain poorly understood. We used an extensive database on reproduction in nest boxes by great and blue tits based on 87 study plots across Europe and Northern Africa during 1957-2012 for a total of 19,075 great tit and 16,729 blue tit clutches to assess correlative evidence for a relationship between laying date and clutch size, respectively, and density consistent with effects of intraspecific and interspecific competition.
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