Geographic variation in bird survival

How life-history traits vary across longitude is studied in birds in the Amazonas in the Early View article “Variation in tropical bird survival across longitudes and guilds: a case study of the Amazone” by Jared D Wolfe and co-workers. Below is Jared’s summary of the paper:

Measuring the annual survival of birds, or the probability of a bird living from year-to-year, has fueled theory regarding life history strategy in temperate and tropical birds. For example, because tropical birds have fewer young over the course of a year relative to their northerly counterparts, scientists have often expected tropical birds to exhibit higher survival than temperate birds as part of a ‘trade-off’ in life-history strategy. In our paper we examined variation in annual survival among birds across the Amazon. We used a decade of bird capture data from the central Amazon to estimate the annual survival of 31 bird species and compared our results with those from western and eastern Amazonian forests. We also examined differences in annual survival between bird species that differ in mass, foraging and nesting behavior at our study site in the central Amazon. In general, community-wide annual survival was remarkably similar across the Amazon, but several species did exhibit dramatic differences in survival estimates. The most striking variation in estimates of survival was exhibited by the White-plumed Antbird (Pithys albifrons), for which survival estimates were nearly twice as high in eastern than the western Amazon, but intermediate in the central Amazon. We also found that nest architecture moderately influenced annual survival of birds at our study site in the central Amazon. Our results suggest that geographic variation in survival may be significant for widespread Amazonian species.