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Zoology

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Survival

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Resource Selection, Survival, And Departure Of Adult Female Mallards From The Lake St. Clair Region During Autumn And Winter, Matthew Palumbo Dec 2017

Resource Selection, Survival, And Departure Of Adult Female Mallards From The Lake St. Clair Region During Autumn And Winter, Matthew Palumbo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

During autumn and winter, mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) maximize fitness through their spatiotemporal distribution to avoid mortality risks while balancing trade-offs to access foods to undergo migration and maintain homeostasis. Thousands of mallards use Lake St. Clair as it is an important, but threatened, migratory staging area in the Great Lakes. My goal was to understand how mallards were selecting resources in the region and potential relationships of selection strategies. My objectives were to estimate resource selection of adult female mallards, in relation to perceived risk of hunting mortality, and determine if selection strategies were related to survival and …


Fear Of Predators Compromises Parental Care And Juvenile Survival In A Songbird, Philip Blair Dudeck Dec 2015

Fear Of Predators Compromises Parental Care And Juvenile Survival In A Songbird, Philip Blair Dudeck

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Predators kill, but the risk of being killed is also a powerful force affecting survival because scared prey eat less, thereby increasing the likelihood of starvation. Young of most animals are extremely vulnerable to predators and may alter their behaviour to limit detection. I investigated the previously unexplored effects that predation risk has on the behaviour of newly fledged offspring and their parents, and the impact this has on offspring survival. I manipulated predation risk using sound and found that parent song sparrows reduced their feedings, providing 60% less food overall. Critically, not only did this parental response estimate survival …