Baldwin Justin W, Garcia-Porta Joan, Botero Carlos A
Department of Biology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
Ecol Lett. 2022 Apr;25(4):939-947. doi: 10.1111/ele.13971. Epub 2022 Feb 9.
Anthropogenic climate change is rapidly altering local environments and threatening biodiversity throughout the world. Although many wildlife responses to this phenomenon appear largely idiosyncratic, a wealth of basic research on this topic is enabling the identification of general patterns across taxa. Here, we expand those efforts by investigating how avian responses to climate change are affected by the ability to cope with ecological variation through behavioural flexibility (as measured by relative brain size). After accounting for the effects of phylogenetic uncertainty and interspecific variation in adaptive potential, we confirm that although climate warming is generally correlated with major body size reductions in North American migrants, these responses are significantly weaker in species with larger relative brain sizes. Our findings suggest that cognition can play an important role in organismal responses to global change by actively buffering individuals from the environmental effects of warming temperatures.
人为气候变化正在迅速改变当地环境，并威胁着全球的生物多样性。尽管许多野生动物对这一现象的反应在很大程度上似乎是独特的，但关于这一主题的大量基础研究使得能够识别不同分类群之间的一般模式。在这里，我们通过研究鸟类对气候变化的反应如何受到通过行为灵活性（以相对脑大小衡量）应对生态变化的能力的影响，来扩展这些研究工作。在考虑了系统发育不确定性和适应性潜力的种间变异的影响之后，我们证实，尽管气候变暖通常与北美候鸟的主要体型缩小相关，但在相对脑大小较大的物种中，这些反应明显较弱。我们的研究结果表明，认知可以通过积极缓冲个体免受气温上升的环境影响，在生物体对全球变化的反应中发挥重要作用。
