When the colony was initially discovered in , nearly fifty birds were present. Museums, desiring the skins of the auk for preservation and display, quickly began collecting birds from the colony. Your young nature-lover will get the perfect blend of personalized instruction and social interaction, at an affordable cost.
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Register Today. Spread the word. The Reviewing Editor has consolidated the reviewers' feedback and drafted this decision letter, to help you prepare a revised submission. The reviewers noted that some aspects of the study inevitably remained quite speculative, and felt that this should be better acknowledged throughout. Therefore, please state explicitly the assumptions, and degree of certainty, for all results and conclusions; all key information should be contained in the main text, and not just the online supplement.
There was broad agreement that this was one of the weaker aspects of the study. Specifically, it is not clear whether currents can be reliably mapped with just two capsules, and whether it is possible to use these data to make robust inferences about currents thousands of years ago. Furthermore, are currents assumed to be stable throughout the year? Adult Great Auks would presumably have only moved at certain times of the year, and because they were almost certainly philopatric, the map's uni-directional arrows raise the question of how they returned to their colonies.
Please tone down the inferences drawn from the drift capsule dataset, highlight ocean current modelling as a challenge for future work, and provide better justification for this line of enquiry the Great Auk was a flightless bird and therefore may have relied on, or at least been affected by, ocean currents. The reviewers have raised several issues about the genomic analyses that need addressing.
Were there any partial mtDNA data from the other 8 samples from Spain that could be used to explore this further? Are there no additional historical museum samples, or feather specimens, available that might yield more and better quality sequence data than the old subfossil bones?
Such lack of structure is usually explained either by high dispersal or a relatively recent bottleneck, followed by range expansion. Since the Great Auk was a flightless bird, it would be very interesting if you could add a comparison to the phylogeographic structure or lack thereof found in penguins e. The manuscript does not appear to cite any papers that analysed genetic changes across the time scales explored here i.
Perhaps the human-caused decline in the Great Auk was even more rapid than the declines that have been observed in many species during the last century? Do you have enough samples i. The reason for this is partly that there is currently no easily accessible information in the main text on how the samples are temporally distributed, which is important for context. The reviewers generally found the population viability analyses PVA well implemented, but highlighted a few points that need addressing.
Furthermore, it seems that Vortex was run with harvest rate set as a constant percentage of population size please clarify in the revision whether this was actually the case, as it was hard to tell from either the manuscript or the Vortex documentation , even though it is conceivable that humans may have continued harvesting a constant number at least for a while , as it would have been relatively easy to find the birds on their nesting colonies.
Please consider exploring a more realistic suite of settings, and provide some further context to justify your PVA approach. Can this be justified, or adjusted? Furthermore, estimates for age of first breeding and adult survival probably need amending. Thank you for this feedback. Where appropriate, we have tried to improve the clarity of our assumptions, the degree of certainty of various results and conclusions. Specifically, we discussed in more detail our conclusions of a rapid population decline and what our data does and does not show first paragraph of the Discussion.
We have also more explicitly identified speculations in the discussion of the GPS data. Finally, we moved the TempNet figure into the main text as requested by the reviewers. We have amended the manuscript in several sections that discuss the GPS capsule data. The changes made are as follows:. A full description of the routes taken by the capsules is provided in Appendix 1. Discussion: We can only speculate what factors may have driven this lack of population structure, but the data collected from the GPS-enabled drifting capsules are consistent with hypotheses put forward by a number of authors.
We hope that this now makes it clear that although the data has been included in the Discussion and used in supporting some of our conclusions, it is from a small, preliminary dataset and should therefore be viewed that way. Thank you for this observation. We have explored this further as good as possible with limited data see below. Our results suggest that there is no evidence for a refugial population in Spain. Samples from Spain are similarly spread across the tree as samples from other regions.
Below, we have summarized the additional analyses we have conducted. However, as they do not show any pattern that is unobserved in the data we use for this publication, we would prefer to leave this section out of the manuscript.
We feel that it would impact the flow and clarity of the manuscript without adding any crucial information. We are of course open to including this section, for example in the appendix, if the editor sees this fit. These samples were characterized by poor coverage average coverage ranged from 0. The percentage of replicate trees in which the associated taxa clustered together in the bootstrap test replicates are shown next to the branches [Felsenstein, ].
The evolutionary distances were computed using the p-distance method [Nei and Kumar, ] and are in the units of the number of base differences per site. We agree that it is unfortunate that the Funk Island samples do not have date information, however, sadly that is the nature of the sample from this site which is essentially a mass grave yard of great auks, with hundreds of bones from the period of intense hunting.
It would certainly be interesting future work to be able to carbon date some of the samples from Funk Island to add this information to the data set. However, for now we have added all undated samples to the tree and added it to the supplement as requested New Appendix—figure 5. This study was part of a PhD project that was completed in , therefore, unfortunately, funding and personnel to facilitate further sampling is no longer available.
During the project extensive sampling was carried out, sourcing samples that represented individuals from as much of the former great auk range as possible, and over as great a period as possible. Samples were collected from number of museums, worldwide. As we wanted to include samples in the dataset which had as much information as possible, we chose not to include many mounted museum specimens as the vast majority of these do not have sample date or sample location information.
Thank you for the suggestion to compare our result to the penguins. It helps to put our findings from the great auk in context and shows that while the lack of population structure in great auks is surprising, it does not actually appear to be unusual in flightless seabirds. This was indeed an obvious omission in our Discussion. We have now added a section to the first paragraph of the Discussion which discussed this point as follows:.
Mitochondrial DNA studies of New Zealand moa found no evidence of a population declines prior to extinction Allentoft et al. We have added a higher-resolution image of the TempNet figure and moved this to the main text Figure 2. We hope that the resolution of the image now meets your requirements. These simulations yield a sustainable harvest rate of approximately 40, birds a year without any egg harvest.
This is likely an underestimation, as the razorbill does have a higher reproductive rate than the great auk, and can therefore tolerate a higher mortality. This simulation and its results are now introduced and discussed in appropriate sections throughout the manuscript. Sorry, this was not well described in our manuscript. We actually did use constant numbers rather than a constant percentage. We have now clarified this where appropriate throughout the manuscript.
The reasoning behind the somewhat odd distribution of mortality rates was that we wanted a rigorous way to decide on rates in the absence of biological information. And the lowest rates we could find for the year timeframe are lower than those for the later time frames. We could have increased the values, but it would have been arbitrary, so we decided against it. However, we have now also included analyses with the complete razorbill set of mortality rates and higher standard variations to provide a comparison how our simulations would look with less conservative, but still species derived settings.
We have also added a further explanation of our reasoning behind the conservative values into the manuscript which reads Appendix 7 :. For example, our year hatchling mortality is lower than our years juvenile mortality. For comparison, we added a simulation based on known mortality rates of the razorbill, which have a more biological realistic distribution of mortality rates, albeit perhaps somewhat too high for the great auk see Discussion and Supplementary file 2B. Unfortunately, we could not find such information despite extensive literature searches.
This was in fact the main reason why we decided on running the analyses with unrealistically conservative settings. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication. We are very grateful to the archaeological site directors, sample collectors, curators, and institutions that provided samples for this project.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. Article citation count generated by polling the highest count across the following sources: PubMed Central , Crossref , Scopus.
However, the ecological response of insects—the most diverse group of organisms on Earth—to the EPME remains poorly understood. Here, we analyse beetle evolutionary history based on taxonomic diversity, morphological disparity, phylogeny, and ecological shifts from the Early Permian to Middle Triassic, using a comprehensive new dataset.
Permian beetles were dominated by xylophagous stem groups with high diversity and disparity, which probably played an underappreciated role in the Permian carbon cycle. Our suite of analyses shows that Permian xylophagous beetles suffered a severe extinction during the EPME largely due to the collapse of forest ecosystems, resulting in an Early Triassic gap of xylophagous beetles.
New xylophagous beetles appeared widely in the early Middle Triassic, which is consistent with the restoration of forest ecosystems. Our results highlight the ecological significance of insects in deep-time terrestrial ecosystems. How neural networks evolved to generate the diversity of species-specific communication signals is unknown.
For receivers of the signals one hypothesis is that novel recognition phenotypes arise from parameter variation in computationally flexible feature detection networks. We test this hypothesis in crickets, where males generate and females recognize the mating songs with a species-specific pulse pattern, by investigating whether the song recognition network in the cricket brain has the computational flexibility to recognize different temporal features. Using electrophysiological recordings from the network that recognizes crucial properties of the pulse pattern on the short timescale in the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus, we built a computational model that reproduces the neuronal and behavioral tuning of that species.
An analysis of the model's parameter space reveals that the network can provide all recognition phenotypes for pulse duration and pause known in crickets and even other insects.
Phenotypic diversity in the model is consistent with known preference types in crickets and other insects, and arise from computations that likely evolved to increase energy efficiency and robustness of pattern recognition. The model's parameter to phenotype mapping is degenerate-different network parameters can create similar changes in the phenotype-which likely supports evolutionary plasticity. Our study suggests that computationally flexible networks underlie the diverse pattern recognition phenotypes and we reveal network properties that constrain and support behavioral diversity.
Olfactory receptor repertoires exhibit remarkable functional diversity, but how these proteins have evolved is poorly understood. Through analysis of extant and ancestrally reconstructed drosophilid olfactory receptors from the Ionotropic receptor Ir family, we investigated evolution of two organic acid-sensing receptors, Ir75a and Ir75b.
Moreover, we show that odor specificity is refined by changes in additional, receptor-specific sites, including those outside the ligand-binding pocket. Our work reveals how a core, common determinant of ligand-tuning acts within epistatic and allosteric networks of substitutions to lead to functional evolution of olfactory receptors. Cited 3 Views 7, Annotations Open annotations. The current annotation count on this page is being calculated. Cite this article as: eLife ;8:e doi: Figure 1.
Download asset Open asset. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Table 1. Figure 5. Appendix 1—figure 1. Appendix 1—figure 2.
Appendix 3—figure 1. Appendix 4—figure 1. Appendix 6—table 1. Target gene regions for hybridisation capture enrichment were selected using the following filters: Paralog genes were excluded from the capture by using UniProtIDs and EnsemblIDs in the razorbill Alca torda annotation Feng et al.
Appendix 9—table 1. Appendix 9—table 2. Appendix 9—figure 1. Appendix 10—figure 1. The following data sets were generated. Pinguinus impennis mitochondrion, partial genome. Pinguinus impennis mitochondrion, complete genome. Bengtson S-A Breeding ecology and extinction of the great auk Pinguinus impennis : Anecdotal evidence and conjectures The Auk :1— BioTechniques 56 — Best J Mulville J A bird in the hand: data collation and novel analysis of avian remains from South Uist, outer hebrides International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 24 — Best J Mulville J Birds from the water: reconstructing avian resource use and contribution to diet in prehistoric scottish island environments Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 6 — In: Nettleship D.
N, Birkhead T. R, editors. The Atlantic Alcidae. London: Academic Press. In: Ralph J. F, John C. Ecology and Conservation of the Marbled Murrelet. Department of Agriculture. Felsenstein J Confidence limits on phylogenies: an approach using the bootstrap Evolution 39 — In: Soule M. E, Wilcox B. A, editors. Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, Mass. Gouy M Guindon S Gascuel O SeaView version 4: a multiplatform graphical user interface for sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree building Molecular Biology and Evolution 27 — Version In: Dupont C, Marchand G, editors.
Meldgaard M The great auk, Pinguinus impennis L. Meyer M Kircher M Illumina sequencing library preparation for highly multiplexed target capture and sequencing Cold Spring Harbor Protocols :pdb. BMC Evolutionary Biology 18 Ibis 3 — Rambaut A Estimating the rate of molecular evolution: incorporating non-contemporaneous sequences into maximum likelihood phylogenies Bioinformatics 16 — Saitou N Nei M The neighbor-joining method: a new method for reconstructing phylogenetic trees Molecular Biology and Evolution 4 — Serjeantson D The great auk and the gannet: a prehistoric perspective on the extinction of the great auk International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 11 — Stamatakis A RAxML version 8: a tool for phylogenetic analysis and post-analysis of large phylogenies Bioinformatics 30 — Ian T Baldwin.
Christian Rutz. Paul Wade. Essential revisions: 1 Study assumptions: The reviewers noted that some aspects of the study inevitably remained quite speculative, and felt that this should be better acknowledged throughout.
Additional analyses Spanish samples. Author response image 1. Malaysia's last known Sumatran rhino dies. Image source, Science Photo Library. Storybook seabird. The songbird obsession that became an extinction crisis A third of tropical plants face extinction Five ways to climate proof the world. Puffins are living relatives of great auks and are still hunted for their meat.
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