The migration of birds is one of the most fascinating natural phenomena. It is estimated that about one-fifth of the world's 10,000 existing bird species are migratory birds, and billions of migratory birds move between breeding and wintering grounds each year around the world, with bird migration routes spanning almost the entire globe. However, how have these routes evolved? How are they currently maintained? How might they change in the face of future climate change? Human find that we know little about the formation, maintenance, and future of the migration routes of Arctic birds and the genetic determinants of migratory distance.
On March 3rd, Prof. ZHAN Xiangjiang’s laboratory at Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, published their article entitled “Climate-driven flyway changes and memory-based long-distance migration” online in Nature, Prof. ZHAN is a PhD supervisor at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS). In this work researchers established a continental-scale migration system that used satellite tracking to follow 56 peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) from 6 populations that breed in the Eurasian Arctic, and resequenced 35 genomes from 4 of these populations. The breeding populations used five migration routes across Eurasia, which were probably formed by longitudinal and latitudinal shifts in their breeding grounds during the transition from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene epoch. Contemporary environmental divergence between the routes appears to maintain their distinctiveness. The study found that the gene ADCY8 is associated with population-level differences in migratory distance. Researchers investigated the regulatory mechanism of this gene, and found that long-term memory was the most likely selective agent for divergence in ADCY8 among the peregrine populations. Global warming is predicted to influence migration strategies and diminish the breeding ranges of peregrine populations of the Eurasian Arctic. Harnessing ecological interactions and evolutionary processes to study climate-driven changes in migration can facilitate the conservation of migratory birds.
△ Fig. 1: Migration system
△ Fig. 2: Change of migration routes of Arctic peregrine falcons and genetic basis for long-distance migration
Editor: GAO Yuan
