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Fighting over food unites the birds of North America in a continental dominance hierarchy

Eliot T. Miller, David N. Bonter, Charles Eldermire, Benjamin G. Freeman, Emma I. Greig, Luke J. Harmon, Curtis Lisle, Wesley M. Hochachka
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/104133
Eliot T. Miller
aCornell Laboratory of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.
bDepartment of Biological Sciences, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844, USA.
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David N. Bonter
aCornell Laboratory of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.
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Charles Eldermire
aCornell Laboratory of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.
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Benjamin G. Freeman
cDepartment of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T1Z4, Canada.
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Emma I. Greig
aCornell Laboratory of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.
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Luke J. Harmon
bDepartment of Biological Sciences, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844, USA.
dInstitute for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies (IBEST), University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844, USA.
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Curtis Lisle
eKnowledgeVis, LLC, 2602 Chinook Trail, Maitland, FL 32751, USA.
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Wesley M. Hochachka
aCornell Laboratory of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.
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ABSTRACT

The study of aggressive interactions between species has, to date, usually been restricted to interactions among small numbers of ecologically close competitors. Nothing is known about interspecific dominance hierarchies that include numerous, ecologically varied species. Such hierarchies are of interest because they could be used to address a variety of research questions, e.g. do similarly ranked species tend to avoid each other in time or space, and what will happen when such species come into contact as climates change? Here, we propose a method for creating a continental-scale hierarchy, and we make initial analyses based on this hierarchy. We quantified the extent to which a dominance hierarchy of feeder birds was linear, as intransitivities can promote local species’ coexistence. Using the existing network of citizen scientists participating in Project FeederWatch, we collected the data with which to create a continent-spanning interspecific dominance hierarchy that included species that do not currently have overlapping geographic distributions. Overall, the hierarchy was nearly linear, and largely predicted by body mass, although there were clade-specific deviations from the average mass–dominance relationship. Most of the small number of intransitive relationships in the hierarchy were based on small samples of observations. Few observations were made of interactions between close relatives and ecological competitors like Melanerpes woodpeckers and chickadees, as such species often have only marginally overlapping geographic distributions. Yet, these species’ ranks—emergent properties of the interaction network—were usually in agreement with published literature on dominance relationships between them. Interspecific dominance hierarchy, aggression, displacement, citizen science

LAY SUMMARY When it comes to fighting over food, bigger is better but woodpeckers are best. The outcome of aggressive encounters between birds frequently determines which individual gains access to contested resources like food, but until now, little was known about such encounters between individuals of different species. We partnered with citizen scientists to record interspecific behavioral interactions at bird feeders around North America, and assembled these interactions into a continental dominance hierarchy.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted January 30, 2017.
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Fighting over food unites the birds of North America in a continental dominance hierarchy
Eliot T. Miller, David N. Bonter, Charles Eldermire, Benjamin G. Freeman, Emma I. Greig, Luke J. Harmon, Curtis Lisle, Wesley M. Hochachka
bioRxiv 104133; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/104133
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Fighting over food unites the birds of North America in a continental dominance hierarchy
Eliot T. Miller, David N. Bonter, Charles Eldermire, Benjamin G. Freeman, Emma I. Greig, Luke J. Harmon, Curtis Lisle, Wesley M. Hochachka
bioRxiv 104133; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/104133

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