The Daily Wildcat • 17
Science • October 14-15, 2015
This Week Hawks protect AZ hummingbirds in Science by Kimberlie wang The Daily Wildcat
BY Emily HEdges
The Daily Wildcat
Mission to Mars NASA released a report Thursday outlining the agency’s plans for sending humans to Mars. The report, titled “NASA’s Journey to Mars: Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration,” outlines NASA’s three-part plan to land humans on Mars by the 2030s. The recent announcement of water on Mars combined with the release of the movie “The Martian” has increased public interest in the red planet. “In the next few decades, NASA will takes steps toward establishing a sustainable human presence beyond Earth,” the report reads. According to the report, the first part of the plan entails research on the International Space Station and further development of a rocket called the Space Launch System. Research being done on the ISS can help NASA understand the effects that living in space for long periods of time have on humans. The second part of the plan includes testing in cislunar space, the area of space between the moon and the Earth, according to the report. Here, NASA will run experiments on deep space habitats for humans. According to the report, the final stage of the plan before landing on Mars involves sending astronauts to orbit Mars and possibly landing on one of Mars’ moons. This phase will allow astronauts to practice a sustained living presence on a planet other than Earth before landing on Mars. Tiny particles win big prize The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded Oct. 6 to Dr. Arthur McDonald, Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for his work on
This Week in science, 19
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Nesting in the trees of the Chiricahua Mountains in Southeast Arizona, the blackchinned hummingbirds have found a solution to keeping their eggs safe. UA researchers have found that the hummingbirds coexist alongside Mexican Jays and hawks in a trait-mediated trophic cascade, an interconnection where the behavior of the top-level predator directly impacts the behavior of those below it. For the blackchinned hummingbird, that means using the hawk as their winged protector. Harold Greeney, a UA School of Natural Resources post-doctoral researcher, led a study that was published recently in Science Advances. The researchers were aware that the hummingbirds would cluster their nests near the hawks, but they did not know why. “The hummingbirds are clustering their nests right beneath the nests of these predatory hawks, and it seemed counter-intuitive because these hawks specialize in eating birds,” Greeney said. The scientists knew the hawks were not agile enough to catch the hummingbirds, and the amount of energy they would spend trying to reach the hummingbird was not worth the calories. The hawks do, however, prey on the Mexican Jay, a pigeon-sized bird that enjoys feeding on the nests of other birds, including the black-chinned hummingbird. “What we found was that the hawks swoop down to eat the jays, so the jays don’t want to forage at low levels because they don’t want to be beneath the hawks and get eaten,” Greeney said. The jays have reacted to this by
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A black-chinned hummingbird perches on a branch in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, on May 25. A post-doctoral researcher at the UA found that black-chinned hummingbirds are protected by hawks in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona.
foraging higher above the ground, where they are safer from the hawks. The hawks have created a “cone of safety” for hummingbirds to build their nests in, where they will not be hassled by the jays, according to Greeney. “The hummingbirds gather around the hawks to get inside the ‘cone of safety,’ ” Greeney said. “So the whole interaction between these two species that don’t pay any attention to one another is mediated by this middle man: the jays.” Greeney and his team were able to test their hypothesis through the intervention of coatis, a Central American version of a raccoon. Over a course of two days, the coatis came and consumed hawk eggs out of their nests. With their nests destroyed, the hawks left the area. Greeney continued monitoring the hummingbirds and jays during this time, and within two weeks,
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he said hundreds of hummingbird nests had been eaten. “This was the crowning jewel of the whole story because we now had our proof,” Greeney said. “We showed the spatial change, how the jays behaved and where in the space hummingbirds did well and didn’t. We had all the pieces except what happens when the hawks aren’t there, but now we have that test and that really bumped the whole thing to being so much more exciting.” Researchers are still unsure of how the hummingbirds know to nest near the hawks. According to Greeney, the hummingbirds may be choosing locations based on the presence of current successful nests. He said he hopes to observe the female hummingbirds to gain insight on how they choose their nesting site. Lee Dyer, the Director of the Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology Graduate
Program for the University of Nevada, Reno, and a co-author of the study, is excited about the potential impact the study results will have. “I hope that this work encourages other ecologists to have greater respect for quality natural history observations and also to consider trait-mediated effects at multiple scales,” Dyer said. “Too many ecologists these days have a disdain for natural history and do not spend enough time crashing through the bushes, crawling through the mud, climbing trees or staring into the canopy to see how birds, insects, plants or other organisms are interacting. Harold Greeney does all of these things, and that is how he makes important ecological discoveries that enable him to collect rigorous data.” — Follow Kimberlie Wang @kw_sciwildcat