Item

Abstract

What makes animals special is that they can actively move at a geographic scale, which allows them to relocate themselves from an adverse environment to other places in more favourable conditions to survive and reproduce. Seasonal migration is a type of animal movement typically between breeding and wintering sites with regularity in timing and orientation. Seasonal migration is both ecologically and evolutionarily important, because it is a behavioural adaptation to seasonal changes in environment, and it defines the distribution of animals when they mate and reproduce. Since the dawn of ethology, mechanism, development, ecological function and evolution of seasonal migration have been heavily studied in birds In this thesis, I address how seasonal migration evolves at a microevolutionary time scale by combining population genomics and epigenomics.