Ding, P.; Song, Z.; Liu, Y.; Székely, T.; Shi, L.; Turghan, M.A. Variations in the Reproductive Strategies of Different Charadrius alexandrinus Populations in Xinjiang, China. Animals2023, 13, 2260.
Ding, P.; Song, Z.; Liu, Y.; Székely, T.; Shi, L.; Turghan, M.A. Variations in the Reproductive Strategies of Different Charadrius alexandrinus Populations in Xinjiang, China. Animals 2023, 13, 2260.
Ding, P.; Song, Z.; Liu, Y.; Székely, T.; Shi, L.; Turghan, M.A. Variations in the Reproductive Strategies of Different Charadrius alexandrinus Populations in Xinjiang, China. Animals2023, 13, 2260.
Ding, P.; Song, Z.; Liu, Y.; Székely, T.; Shi, L.; Turghan, M.A. Variations in the Reproductive Strategies of Different Charadrius alexandrinus Populations in Xinjiang, China. Animals 2023, 13, 2260.
Abstract
Due to the influence of bio-geographical and environmental factors, as well as anthropogenic landscape features, organism shows different reproductive strategies among different populations. There is lack of detailed information on the reproductive biology of Kentish plover Charadrius al-exandrinus in arid lands in Central Asia. In this study, we summarized the characteristics of the reproductive biology of three geographically distinct plover populations in Aibi Lake in the Northwestern Xinjiang, Taitema Lake in the Southern Xinjiang and artificial reservoirs around Urumqi City in Northern Xinjiang respectively, based on 440 eggs of 158 nests observed and ana-lyzed from April to July of 2019 and 2020. We find that there is no significant difference in clutch size among the three populations. However, the egg size of Taitema Lake population is signifi-cantly larger than those of the other two populations, whilst egg volume and clutch volume of ar-tificial reservoirs population are significantly larger than that of Aibi Lake. With the postpone-ment of laying date, the northern and northwestern populations respectively show the character-istics of small clutch size and relatively small egg size, and decrease of reproductive outputs. The heavier female plovers in Taitema Lake lays eggs earlier, and there was significantly positive cor-relation between the female body mass and the clutch size and egg size. The tarsometatarsus length of the female plovers was significantly positively correlated with the reproductive output in all three populations. The model selection results show that female body size and ambient tem-perature restrict the egg size and reproductive output of Kentish plovers, which is consistent with the upper limit hypothesis of the maternal condition and the maternal constraint. Our data sup-port that Kentish plover show distinct flexibility in breeding strategies to cope with the harsh nat-ural environment in arid lands of Xinjiang, China. The results of relatively high average clutch size and average egg size imply that saline wetlands in Western China are important breeding habitats for Kentish plover.
Keywords
Kentish plover; life-history; reproductive output; breeding behavior; inland arid area
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Life Sciences
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
