​(1) Breeding vs feeding: How does the design of surveys impact ecological differences among burying beetles? – Burying beetle surveys identify where and when species come in to feed on carrion, but do not test where and when species reproduce – arguably the most challenging event in a burying beetle's life. The goal of this project is to resurvey the burying beetles of the QUBS properties following the same methods as surveys in 2017, with one key difference: you will survey reproducing beetles. The work will involve long hours in the field, hiking (and sometimes canoeing) to remote locations, handling dead mice, carrying nest boxes and plastic buckets, and, of course, identifying awesome beetles. We predict that differences in habitat and phenology identified in earlier surveys will be accentuated when we restrict surveys to breeding beetles, with implications for both ecological partitioning in nature and the design of surveys. The student conducting this project would collaborate and work with the student in Project 2.

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​(2) Comparative size of breeding burying beetle species – Larger beetles win carcasses for breeding across most, perhaps all, burying beetle species. And yet, the size of burying beetles is extremely variable. For example, the largest Nicrophorus orbicollis at our field site are over 12 times the size of the smallest. The goal of this project is to measure the size of reproducing pairs of beetles across the intensive resurveys of QUBS (Project 1), testing the hypotheses that the mean size of breeders is larger than the mean size in the population, that male and female breeders consistently differ in size, that species consistently differ in size, and that species show seasonal changes in size when breeding. The student conducting this project would collaborate and work with the student in Project 1.

 

(3) Does resource type promote ecological partitioning in Nicrophorus beetles? — Nicrophorus burying beetles are generally thought to use any small vertebrate carcass for breeding because carcasses from different vertebrate classes are similar in composition, and suitable carcasses are so rare that a beetle would be crazy to turn one down. Nonetheless, few studies have tested whether Nicrophorus prefer carcasses of specific vertebrate classes (e.g., mammal vs fish), and if different Nicrophorus species partition carcasses based on vertebrate class. This work would present wild beetles at the Queen's University Biological Station with small (20-30g) vertebrate carcasses of birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles and fish, and record which species of Nicrophorus use which carcasses for reproduction.

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(4) Are climatic limits maintained by species in their introduced ranges? — Recent evidence suggests that most introduced species conserve their climatic niche breadth in their non-native range; however, our understanding of the role of climate in directly or indirectly limiting the distributions of species is poor for most species. Community science data provide some of the most detailed and geographically extensive information on relative abundance of species across both native and introduced ranges, allowing us to test ideas of climatic limits on the distributions of species, and how these climatic limits differ across native and introduced ranges. The project would use geographically explicit data on the relative abundance of 107 species of non-migratory birds coupled with detailed climate data to test if the geographic limits of species coincide with their climatic limits, and if these same relationships are mirrored in their native and introduced ranges.

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​(5) What ecological traits covary with behavioural dominance of species? — Previous work in our lab (Freshwater et al. 2014, Ecology) was the first to describe repeated patterns of trait divergence that depended upon the position of a species within a social dominance hierarchy. Specifically, subordinate species of birds arrived earlier on their breeding sites, initiated breeding earlier, had lower annual adult survivorship, laid larger eggs for their weight, and migrated greater distances, than closely-related, dominant species. These patterns were exciting because they suggested that important traits related to phenology, life history, and migration are influenced by where a species sits within a social hierarchy of other species. The work was based on an analysis of 65 closely-related species pairs of North American birds – all of the data on dominance interactions among congeners that was available at the time. Today, we have dominance data for ~200 species pairs of birds from around the world. Are the patterns of trait divergence evident in North American dominance hierarchies representative of birds from around the world? Are other patterns of trait divergence (e.g., geographic range size, distribution) evident among dominant and subordinate species when addressed with a larger sample? This project would revisit some of the questions addressed by Freshwater et al. (2014) using a larger, more powerful, global dataset on dominance relationships among birds.