Scientists used GPS tracking and statistical modeling to better understand the birds' routes
An adult white-naped crane affixed with unique color bands to identify the individual in Mongolia. CREDIT: Wildlife Science and Conservation Center of Mongoliainvestigates that and also looks into the “where,” “when,” and “why” of avian travel. They found that birds flock to drastically different environmental conditions that meetResearchers affixed GPS tracking devices to the legs of 104 cranes in Africa, Asia, and Europe.
“Animals have to satisfy their own needs with what they can get from their environment, but both of these are changing constantly,” Scott Yanco, first author on the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, said in press release. “This creates an intriguing optimization problem that we wanted to know if cranes were solving through long-distance migration.”
Changes in temperature and the presence of food and water played a large effect on the travel of the four crane species the researchers tracked. The researchers suspect that the birds have different biological needs during different times of the year. For example, common cranes favored farmland during the late summer — a time when they are raising their young and preparing for fall migration.
“This type of shifting emphasis depending on what cranes need at any given time is what we were expecting to see,” Ivan Pokrovsky, a postdoctoral researcher at MPI-AB and the last author on the study, said in a press release. “But we were blown away by how well the cranes used movement to resolve trade-offs among competing needs and to access certain environments during key periods of the year.
“When we know how animals use certain environmental conditions, we can make better predictions about how species might respond to human-caused global change and develop more effective interventions that ensure we preserve the conditions species need to survive,” Pokrovsky said in a statement.
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