Brian G Palestis

Wagner College · Department of Biological Sciences

Common Tern Sterna hirundo populations have declined in the southern portion of their breeding range along the Atlantic coast of the United States. The Barnegat Bay (New Jersey, USA) population has been declining, with sea-level rise increasing the frequency of flooding of salt marsh islands believed to be a contributory factor. Productivity is typ...

The role that physical attractiveness and fluctuating asymmetry (FA), a measure of developmental instability, play in self-perception and peer associations were explored in a well-studied cohort of Jamaican children using a novel research paradigm where subjects were already known to each other for extensive periods of time. The results showed that...

Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) chicks are highly mobile, as they are semi-precocial. However, they generally stay in the territories near their nests until soon after fledging. In the salt marsh-breeding population in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey, USA, Common Tern chicks were recorded far from their nests before fledging. Movements from the nest were qua...

Although most conservation effort and research on terns has focused on breeding colonies, there is increasing awareness of the importance of staging, stopover and wintering areas. Cape Cod (Massachusetts, USA) is well known as a critically important staging area for the endangered Northwest Atlantic population of Roseate Terns (Sterna dougallii). L...

It has been suggested that intergroup conflict has played an important role in the evolution of human cooperation—aggression against out-groups and cooperation with in-groups may be linked in humans. Previous research suggests that religion may help to facilitate this effect, such that those who view religion as a way to achieve non-religious goals...

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA), random deviation from perfect bilateral symmetry, is an indicator of developmental stability. Examining the ontogeny of FA can illustrate whether symmetry is actively maintained as the organism grows or breaks down as perturbations accumulate with age. Previous studies of changes in human FA with age have been cross-sect...

Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) typically nest above ground on structures, but occasional ground-nesting may occur on islands free of mammalian predators. In 2013 and 2014 a pair of Ospreys nested on the ground in the middle of the Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) colony on Pettit Island, in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey USA. This island is very small (0.3 ha)...

The population of Common Terns (Sterna hirundo) in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey, USA, has recently experienced poor productivity with complete or near-complete breeding failure at multiple colonies, and the number of breeding pairs has declined. Adult Common Terns were captured and banded at Pettit Island from 2010 through 2014 and at four additional i...

Handedness is controlled by many genetic variants, some of which are in sex-dependent genes that also influence body asymmetry. One such asymmetry may be in foot length. Levy and Levy (1978) reported that right-handed males have longer right feet than left and left-handed males have longer left feet than right, while this trend was found to be reve...

In a study of degree of lower body symmetry in 73 elite Jamaican track and field athletes we show that both their knees and ankles (but not their feet) are-on average-significantly more symmetrical than those of 116 similarly aged controls from the rural Jamaican countryside. Within the elite athletes, events ranged from the 100 to the 800 m, and k...

Natal and breeding site fidelity are usually assumed to be high among Common Terns (Sterna hirundo) and other colonial seabirds. I summarize banding data from Pettit Island and other small saltmarsh islands in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey, USA, and review estimates of philopatry and dispersal at other Common Tern colonies in North America and Europe. A...

The zebrafish (Danio rerio) has become a well-established model organism in many areas of biology. The Wagner Plan for the Practical Liberal Arts requires all students to have a senior experience, and the biology department requires this experience to involve empirical research leading to a senior thesis. Zebrafish provide an affordable and tractab...

Behavioral research has long had an important role in the conservation of terns (Aves: Sternidae). Habitat management and restoration of breeding colony sites depends on knowledge of the cues used to select colony and nest sites. For example, conspecific attraction with playback and decoys is commonly used to bring terns to suitable colony sites an...

A reanalysis of “Dance reveals symmetry especially in young men” (Brown et al. (2005) Nature, 438, 1148-1150.) failed to support most of the results of the paper, which was recently retracted. We briefly review this case and draw attention to a monograph that describes the evidence for scientific misconduct in considerable detail.

Feather sampling is often assumed to be harmless, but this assumption has not been tested. From 2008-2012 we recorded the behavior of 340 Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) chicks following the removal of a pinch of body feathers. Only 11.2% of these chicks ran after sampling and 69.4% showed no visible reaction to sampling. The probability of a chick ru...

Jamaican athletes are prominent in sprint running but the reasons for their success are not clear. Here we consider the possibility that symmetry, particularly symmetry of the legs, in Jamaican children is linked to high sprinting speed in adults. Our study population was a cohort of 288 rural children, mean age 8.2 (±1 SD = 1.7) years in 1996. Sym...

Both male and female Roseate Terns (Sterna dougallii) have unusually long outer tail feathers, and males tend to have longer tails than females. We examined whether these tail streamers may have evolved as a result of sexual selection, using data from a 15-year study at Bird Island, Massachusetts, USA. Data on tail length were analyzed for 2,515 te...

Little is known about the intestinal microflora of Common Terns (Sterna hirundo) and their capacity to disseminate human gastrointestinal pathogens along migratory flyways. Common Tern chicks on Pettit Island in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey, USA, were evaluated for carriage of bacterial and protozoan pathogens. Oropharyngeal and cloacal swabs were take...

A difficulty in the study of monomorphic species is the inability of observers to visually distinguish females from males. Based on a sample of 745 known-sex birds nesting at Bird Island, MA, USA, a discriminant function analysis (DFA) was used to sex Roseate Terns (Sterna dougallii) of the Northwest Atlantic population using morphological measurem...

We analyze the prevalence of B chromosomes in 1,601 species of orthopteran insects where chromosome number and shape are known. B chromosomes have been reported in 191 of these species. Bs are not uniformly distributed among orthopteran superfamilies, with evident hotspots in the Pyrgomorphoidea (32.3% of species carrying Bs), Grylloidea (14.9%), A...

Ethanol (EtOH) often has stimulatory effects at low doses and inhibitory effects at high doses, affecting behavior and physiology of many organisms in a non-linear manner suggestive of hormesis. Zebrafish (Danio rerio) shoaling was studied in adult fish exposed to one of five different EtOH concentrations (v/v): 0.0% control, 0.125%, 0.25%, 0.5%, a...

Shoals of fish are often composed of individuals similar in body size or other characteristics. This study tested for the assortment by sex (controlled for body size) in a species with a low degree of sexual dimorphism. Zebrafish (Danio rerio) shoaling was studied in the laboratory using four different experiments utilizing two different methodolog...

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA), small random deviation from bilateral symmetry, often increases with stress during development. Common Terns (Sterna hirundo) typically lay two to three eggs that hatch asynchronously. I predicted that C-chicks (last of three) should have greater FA than A- and B-chicks at hatching and that FA should be higher in chicks...

The Ultimatum Game (UG) measures cooperative tendencies in humans. A proposer offers to split a given sum of money between self and a responder, who may accept or reject the offer. If accepted, each receives the proposed split; if rejected, nobody receives anything. We studied the effect of the putative responder’s degree of facial symmetry (fluctu...

Terns and skimmers nesting on saltmarsh islands often suffer large nest losses due to tidal and storm flooding. Nests located near the center of an island and on wrack (matsof dead vegetation, mostly eelgrass Zostera) are less susceptible to flooding than those near the edge of an island and those on bare soil or in saltmarsh cordgrass (Spartina al...

A thorough reanalysis of Brown et al. (2005) “Dance reveals symmetry especially in young men” shows that all of the major results appear to be based on hidden procedures designed to produce the results later derived. These procedures include the pre-selection of animations of Jamaicans dancing, apparently based on preliminary evaluation in New Jers...

It has been predicted that fish should prefer to shoal (school) with similar individuals, as an adaptation versus predators via the “confusion effect”. Zebrafish (Danio rerio) shoaling was studied through observations of twenty groups of four fish, divided by body size and/or sex. Observations were recorded every two minutes on a camera connected t...

We determined whether supernumerary B chromosomes were nonrandomly distributed among major angiosperm lineages and among lineages within families, as well as the identity of lineages with unusually high B-chromosome frequencies (hot spots). The incidence of B chromosomes for each taxon was gathered from databases showing species with and without th...

Several hypotheses predict that nest defense should increase as the nesting cycle progresses, but the predicted pattern of increase differs. Previous studies of nest defense in gulls and terns have given conflicting results. Most of these have treated colonies as a unit, thus breeding asynchrony may have obscured temporal patterns. Common Tern (Ste...

The chromosomes of mammals tend to be either mostly acrocentric (having one long arm) or mostly bi-armed, with few species having intermediate karyotypes. The theory of centromeric drive suggests that this observation reflects a bias during female meiosis, favouring either more centromeres or fewer, and that the direction of this bias changes frequ...

B chromosomes are extra chromosomes found in some, but not all, individuals within a species, often maintained by giving themselves an advantage in transmission, i.e. they drive. Here we show that the presence of B chromosomes correlates to and varies strongly and positively with total genome size (excluding the Bs and corrected for ploidy) both at...

In this review we look at the broad picture of how B chromosomes are distributed across a wide range of species. We review recent studies of the factors associated with the presence of Bs across species, and provide new analyses with updated data and additional variables. The major obstacle facing comparative studies of B chromosome distribution is...

We review studies of drive and the phenotypic effects of B chromosomes, focusing on the sex in which drive and phenotypic effects occur. We found information on drive and/or effects of Bs in 172 species, using R.N. Jones’ database of B research through 1994, updated by computer searches through 2003. Most species show drive (n=81) in contrast to dr...

Studies of kin recognition in birds have rarely tested its adaptive value. We tested whether sibling recognition helps Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) chicks find their nests. The ability to discriminate the natal nest from neighboring nests is critical to survival in chicks of ground-nesting, colonial birds, such as the Common Tern. We temporarily mo...

Sibling recognition may be an important factor in the survival of young colonial birds, because it helps chicks to locate their nest sites within colonies. We examined the development of sibling recognition in common tern (Sterna hirundo) chicks using choice experiments conducted in the field. Chicks older than 3 days of age showed a significant pr...

I studied recognition of siblings and nest sites by common tern (Sterna hirundo) chicks and recognition of nest predators by adult common terns, using a combination of field experiments, laboratory experiments and observations. I first examined the mechanisms and development of sibling recognition. Chicks discriminated nestmates (‘siblings’) from n...

Studies of kin recognition in birds have usually examined parent-offspring recognition, while studies of sibling recognition are relatively rare. Using choice experiments, we studied the development of sibling recognition among common tern, Sterna hirundo, chicks and tested the cues used for recognition. We collected newly hatched common tern chick...

Social facilitation of reproductive behaviour has been studied extensively in gulls and terns, but social facilitation of preening has been reported only anecdotally, and has not been previously quantified. We studied a common tern, Sterna hirundo, colony during the summers of 1996 and 1997 to test for socially facilitated preening. Scan sampling p...

Differential responses of common terns (Sterna hirundo) to predatory and nonpredatory birds were studied in a salt marsh island colony during the summers of 1996 and 1997. Terns responded to known nest predators with upflights and aggressive antipredator behavior, and largely ignored other species. A pair of great black-backed gulls (Larus marinus)...

Multimale harems have become much more common among the Shackleford Banks feral horse (Equus caballus) population since 1986, when livestock were removed from the island. The sex ratio has become less biased toward females, and thus mate competition among males has increased. With increased intruder pressure on harem Stallions and decreased reprodu...