Animal Migration: Behavioral Syndromes and Their Ecological Outcomes

Abstract: Migration is an extraordinary behavior of often astonishing performance that has evolved repeatedly. It is defined by its behavioral and physiological characteristics including preemptive departure from deteriorating conditions and inhibition of responses that ordinarily end movement so that migration continues unabated. Data from organisms as diverse as aphids, salmon, and birds illustrate the defining characteristics of migratory behavior.

Migration further involves syndromes of traits correlated with movement. These correlated traits may include seemingly unrelated morphology and aspects of life history characters such as reproductive timing and properties relating to fecundity. We are beginning to understand the genetic architecture that underlies these migratory syndromes and the action of natural selection in shaping that architecture, including the influences of climate, seasonality, and resource characteristics. Migration can be described (although not defined) by its ecological outcomes such as the pathways traveled and the impact of migrants on the environments they enter or traverse. These outcomes in turn feed back on migration to shape the evolution of migratory behavior itself.

Bio: Hugh Dingle received a Bachelor’s Degree from Cornell University in 1958 and his Ph. D. from the University of Michigan in 1962. He began his studies of migration while on an NSF postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. J. S. Kennedy, FRS at Cambridge University, U.K. in 1962-63. Following another postdoctoral year at Michigan, he joined the Zoology faculty at the University of Iowa. In 1982 he moved to the Entomology Department and the Center for Population Biology at the University of California, Davis where he is currently Professor Emeritus. From 2003-2010 he served as an Honorary Research Consultant at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. 

Honors include an Alexander v. Humboldt Senior Scientist Award at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany in 1992 and the Presidency of the Animal Behavior Society in 1994-95. Prof. Dingle is a Fellow of the AAAS and the Animal Behavior Society. He and his students and postdocs have studied migration in insects, birds, and fish in North America, the Caribbean, Thailand, Kenya, and most recently in Australia. His book Migration: the Biology of Life on the Move was published by Oxford University Press in 1996 and a sequel is currently in preparation.