Taxon:
Anas platyrhynchos

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Scientific Name
Anas platyrhynchos
Common Name
Mallard
Taxa Group
Anatidae
Environment
Move Mode

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2013 - 20182
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Author: van Toor, Mariëlle L. ×

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    Data from: As the duck flies: estimating the dispersal of low-pathogenic avian influenza viruses by migrating mallards
    (2018-11-26) van Toor, Mariëlle L.; Ottosson, Ulf; van der Meer, Tim; van Hoorn, Sita; Waldenström, Jonas
    Many pathogens rely on the mobility of their hosts for dispersal. In order to understand and predict how a disease can rapidly sweep across entire continents, illuminating the contributions of host movements to disease spread is pivotal. While elegant proposals have been made to elucidate the spread of human infectious diseases, the direct observation of long-distance dispersal events of animal pathogens is challenging. Pathogens like avian influenza A viruses, causing only short disease in their animal hosts, have proven exceptionally hard to study. Here, we integrate comprehensive data on population and disease dynamics for low-pathogenic avian influenza viruses in one of their main hosts, the mallard, with a novel movement model trained from empirical, high-resolution tracks of mallard migrations. This allowed us to simulate individual mallard migrations from a key stopover site in the Baltic Sea for the entire population and link these movements to infection simulations. Using this novel approach, we were able to estimate the dispersal of low-pathogenic avian influenza viruses by migrating mallards throughout several autumn migratory seasons and predicted areas that are at risk of importing these viruses. We found that mallards are competent vectors and on average dispersed viruses over distances of 160 km in just three hours. Surprisingly, our simulations suggest that such dispersal events are rare even throughout the entire autumn migratory season. Our approach directly combines simulated population-level movements with local infection dynamics and offers a potential converging point for movement and disease ecology.
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    Data package
    Data from: Flexibility of continental navigation and migration in European mallards
    (2013-10-11) Matthes, Doris; Latorre-Margalef, Neus; Schmidt, Andreas; Waldenström, Jonas; Wikelski, Martin; van Toor, Mariëlle L.
    The ontogeny of continent-wide navigation mechanisms of the individual organism, despite being crucial for the understanding of animal movement and migration, is still poorly understood. Several previous studies, mainly conducted on passerines, indicate that inexperienced, juvenile birds may not generally correct for displacement during fall migration. Waterbirds such as the mallard (Anas platyrhynchos, Linnaeus 1758) are more flexible in their migration behavior than most migratory songbirds, but previous experiments with waterbirds have not yet allowed clear conclusions about their navigation abilities. Here we tested whether immature mallard ducks correct for latitudinal displacement during fall migration within Europe. During two consecutive fall migration periods, we caught immature females on a stopover site in southeast Sweden, and translocated a group of them ca. 1,000 km to southern Germany. We followed the movements of the ducks via satellite GPS-tracking and observed their migration decisions during the fall and consecutive spring migration. The control animals released in Ottenby behaved as expected from banding recoveries: they continued migration during the winter and in spring returned to the population’s breeding grounds in the Baltics and Northwest Russia. Contrary to the control animals, the translocated mallards did not continue migration and stayed at Lake Constance. In spring, three types of movement tactics could be observed: 61.5% of the ducks (16 of 26) stayed around Lake Constance, 27% (7 of 26) migrated in a northerly direction towards Sweden and 11.5% of the individuals (3 of 26) headed east for ca. 1,000 km and then north. We suggest that young female mallards flexibly adjust their migration tactics and develop a navigational map that allows them to return to their natal breeding area.