Centre for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter, Penryn, UK.
J Anim Ecol. 2022 Oct;91(10):1961-1974. doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.13800. Epub 2022 Sep 5.
Animal migrations represent the regular movements of trillions of individuals. The scale of these movements has inspired human intrigue for millennia and has been intensively studied by biologists. This research has highlighted the diversity of migratory strategies seen across and within migratory taxa: while some migrants temporarily express phenotypes dedicated to travel, others show little or no phenotypic flexibility in association with migration. However, a vocabulary for describing these contrasting solutions to the performance trade-offs inherent to the highly dynamic lifestyle of migrants (and strategies intermediate between these two extremes) is currently missing. We propose a taxon-independent organising framework based on energetics, distinguishing between migrants that forage as they travel (income migrants) and those that fuel migration using energy acquired before departure (capital migrants). Not only does our capital:income continuum of migratory energetics account for the variable extent of phenotypic flexibility within and across migrant populations, but it also aligns with theoreticians' treatment of migration and clarifies how migration impacts other phases of the life cycle. As such, it provides a unifying scale and common vacabulary for comparing the migratory strategies of divergent taxa.
动物迁徙代表着数十亿个体的定期移动。这些迁徙的规模引起了人类几千年来的好奇，并被生物学家进行了深入研究。这项研究突出了不同迁徙类群之间以及内部所表现出的迁徙策略的多样性：有些迁徙者会暂时表现出专门用于迁徙的表型，而其他迁徙者在与迁徙相关的表现型上几乎没有或没有任何灵活性。然而，目前还缺乏一个词汇来描述这些与高度动态的迁徙者生活方式（以及这两个极端之间的策略）相关的固有性能权衡的对比解决方案。我们提出了一个基于能量学的与分类无关的组织框架，区分那些在迁徙过程中觅食的迁徙者（收入迁徙者）和那些利用出发前获得的能量来支持迁徙的迁徙者（资本迁徙者）。我们的迁徙能量的资本：收入连续体不仅解释了迁徙种群内部和之间表型灵活性的变化程度，而且还与理论家对迁徙的处理方式一致，并阐明了迁徙如何影响生命周期的其他阶段。因此，它为比较不同分类群的迁徙策略提供了一个统一的尺度和通用词汇。
