Biology subjects

Derryberry, E. P.

Publications and source records attributed to Derryberry, E. P..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Divergent climate impacts despite similar response to temperature in a widespread aerial insectivore

Climate change is shifting when animals breed1,2, but it is still not clear why some populations keep pace with warming while others fall behind3,4. Differences could arise from variation in sensitivity to temperature3 or constraints on the ability to respond to temperature. Without knowing whether populations differ in sensitivity--or in their ability to act on that sensitivity--we cannot identify which are most at risk. Using 1,555 population-years from 123 populations of tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor), we show that populations have similar sensitivity to local temperature, advancing breeding by about one day per degree of warming. However, northern populations face tighter time constraints and greater exposure to recent warming. Northern populations have advanced laying dates the most, but still experience stronger selection for earlier breeding, especially in warm years; they have also declined most in breeding abundance. These findings show that vulnerability to climate change can arise not just from different sensitivity to warming, but from when and where populations can respond effectively. By disentangling sensitivity from timing constraints, our results support a general mechanism by which even uniformly responsive species can show uneven impacts of climate change across their ranges.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Song complexity in suboscine birds: evolutionary drivers and ecological constraints

Acoustic signal complexity varies widely in the animal kingdom for reasons that remain unclear. In birds, it is widely proposed that vocal complexity evolves as an honest signal of individual quality driven by sexual selection. Other hypotheses related to social interactions include competition for ecological resources (social selection) and intra-group communication in group- living animals, both of which may favour signal complexity. However, these hypotheses are rarely explored at macroevolutionary scales, particularly in the context of constraints on sound production, transmission and detection, leading to ongoing uncertainty about the evolutionary origins of complex vocal signals. Using Bayesian phylogenetic models, we test whether different forms of social communication and ecological constraints predict the temporal and spectral complexity of songs in 1,288 species of suboscine passerine birds. We found that song complexity was reduced by sexual selection, along with other limiting factors including large body size and dense vegetation. Conversely, territoriality boosted the temporal complexity of songs. These findings challenge the common assumption that sexual selection is the main driver of increased signal complexity, and instead highlight the role of social selection as a key component of multiple inter-related drivers and constraints.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2025

Efficient Inference of Macrophylogenies: Insights from the Avian Tree of Life

The exponential growth of molecular sequence data over the past decade has enabled the construction of numerous clade-specific phylogenies encompassing hundreds or thousands of taxa. These independent studies often include overlapping data, presenting a unique opportunity to build macrophylogenies (phylogenies sampling > 1,000 taxa) for entire classes across the Tree of Life. However, the inference of large trees remains constrained by logistical, computational, and methodological challenges. The Avian Tree of Life provides an ideal model for evaluating strategies to robustly infer macrophylogenies from intersecting datasets derived from smaller studies. In this study, we leveraged a comprehensive resource of sequence capture datasets to evaluate the phylogenetic accuracy and computational costs of four methodological approaches: (1) supermatrix approaches using concatenation, including the "fast" maximum likelihood (ML) methods, (2) filtering datasets to reduce heterogeneity, (3) supertree estimation based on published phylogenomic trees, and (4) a "divide-and-conquer" strategy, wherein smaller ML trees were estimated and subsequently combined using a supertree approach. Additionally, we examined the impact of these methods on divergence time estimation using a dataset that includes newly vetted fossil calibrations for the Avian Tree of Life. Our findings highlight that recently developed fast tree search approaches offer a reasonable compromise between computational efficiency and phylogenetic accuracy, facilitating inference of macrophylogenies.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2019

Species and sex divergence in vocalizations between hybridizing role-reversed shorebirds, Northern Jacana (Jacana spinosa) and Wattled Jacana (Jacana jacana)

Species-specific vocalizations can act as a reproductive isolating mechanism between closely related populations. We analyzed vocal divergence between two hybridizing species of sex-role reversed polyandrous shorebirds, the Northern Jacana (Jacana spinosa) and Wattled Jacana (Jacana jacana). We found that J. spinosa calls have higher peak frequency and fundamental frequency than J. jacana calls. We also compared calls between males and females, as both jacana species are sex-role reversed and females compete for male mates. Males produce calls with a higher peak frequency, exhibit shorter note lengths and emit a greater number of notes within a calling bout than females, which could relate to mate attraction. These results suggest that vocal divergence could act as a behavioral barrier to limit hybridization between the species and vocalizations may function differently between male and female jacanas.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2019

Systematics, biogeography and diversification of Scytalopus tapaculos (Rhinocryptidae), an enigmatic radiation of Neotropical montane birds

We studied the phylogeny, biogeography and diversification of suboscine birds in the genus Scytalopus (Rhinocryptidae), a widespread, speciose, and taxonomically challenging group of Neotropical birds. We analyzed nuclear (exons, regions flanking ultraconserved elements) and mitochondrial (ND2) DNA sequence data for a taxonomically and geographically comprehensive sample of specimens collected from Costa Rica to Patagonia and eastern Brazil. We found that Scytalopus is a monophyletic group sister to Eugralla, and consists of three main clades roughly distributed in (1) the Southern Andes, (2) eastern Brazil, and (3) the Tropical Andes and Central America. The clades from the Southern Andes and Eastern Brazil are sister to each other. Despite their confusing overall uniformity in plumage coloration, body shape and overall appearance, rates of species accumulation through time in Scytalopus since the origin of the clade in the Late Miocene are unusually high compared to those of other birds, suggesting rapid non-adaptive diversification in the group which we attribute to their limited dispersal abilities making them speciation-prone and their occurrence in a complex landscape with numerous barriers promoting allopatric differentiation. Divergence times among species and downturns in species accumulation rates in recent times suggest that most speciation events in Scytalopus predate climatic oscillations of the Pleistocene. Our analyses identified various cases of strong genetic structure within species and lack of monophyly of taxa, flagging populations which likely merit additional study to establish their taxonomic status. In particular, detailed analyses of species limits are due in S. parvirostris, S. latrans, S. speluncae, the S. atratus complex, and the Southern Andes clade.

evolutionary biology↗