Skip to ContentSkip to Navigation
About us Latest news News News articles

Shrinking shorebird pays the bill for rapid Arctic warming while wintering in the tropics

13 May 2016
Red knot (c) Jan van de Kam

Red knots migrate between their breeding grounds in the Arctic and their wintering grounds in West Africa. Chicks currently born under rapidly warming conditions attain smaller sizes before migration starts, because they miss the insect peak. If they reach their wintering grounds in the tropics, they are faced with a second disadvantage: their shorter bills cannot reach their favourite shellfish food. This results in an evolutionary force towards smaller-sized birds with large bills.

These findings will be published Friday 13 May 2016 in Science by an international team of researchers from the Netherlands (NIOZ and Univ. Groningen), Australia, France, Poland and Russia.

Source: Press Release NIOZ Royal Netherlands Istitute for Sea Research

Last modified:13 March 2020 02.09 a.m.
View this page in: Nederlands

More news

  • 05 September 2024

    ERC Starting Grants for two UG researchers

    Two UG researches, both working at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant: Jingxiu Xie and Gosia Wlodarczyk-Biegun. The European Research Council's (ERC) Starting Grants consist of €1.5 million each, for a...

  • 23 July 2024

    The chips of the future

    Our computers use an unnecessarily large amount of energy, and we are reaching the limits of our current technology. That is why CogniGron is working on new materials that mimic the way the brain computes, and Professor Tamalika Banerjee will...

  • 18 July 2024

    Smart robots to make smaller chips

    A robotic arm in a factory that repeatedly executes the same movement: that’s a thing of the past, states Ming Cao. Researchers of the University of Groningen are collaborating with high-tech companies to make production processes more autonomous.