Danielle June Whittaker

Oregon State University | OSU · Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX)

Introduction Avian preen oil, secreted by the uropygial gland, is an important source of volatile compounds that convey information about the sender’s identity and quality, making preen oil useful for the recognition and assessment of potential mates and rivals. Although intrinsic factors such as hormone levels, genetic background, and diet can aff...

Aim: Comprehensive, global information on species' occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species' only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroeco...

Much of the growing interest in avian chemical signals has focused on the role of kin recognition or mate attraction, often with an emphasis on males, with uropygial gland secretions perhaps providing information about an individual’s identity and quality. Yet, data collected to date suggest sexual dimorphism in uropygial glands and secretions are...

The hologenome concept of evolution posits that animals and their symbiotic microbes are emergent individuals, or holobionts, exhibiting synergistic phenotypes that are subject to evolutionary forces. Its premises are that interactions between animals and their microbes affect the fitness of holobionts, in both beneficial and deleterious ways, and...

This edited research monograph brings together contributions from computer scientists, biologists, and engineers who are engaged with the study of evolution and how it may be applied to solve real-world problems. It also serves as a Festschrift dedicated to Erik D. Goodman, the founding director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Ac...

Symbiotic microbes that inhabit animal scent glands can produce volatile compounds used as chemical signals by the host animal. Though several studies have demonstrated correlations between scent gland bacterial community structure and host animal odour profiles, none have systematically demonstrated a causal relationship. In birds, volatile compou...

Many lekking systems exhibit highly skewed male reproductive success, but traits preferred by females are not always evident. In the lance-tailed manakin, Chiroxiphia lanceolata, male reproductive success is correlated with age, experience and heterozygosity, but mechanisms by which females might detect these qualities are unknown. Avian chemical s...

Chemical signals can provide useful information to potential mates and rivals. The production mechanisms of these signals are poorly understood in birds, despite emerging evidence that volatile compounds from preen oil may serve as chemosignals. Steroid hormones, including testosterone (T), may influence the production of these signals, yet variati...

Sexual signals contain information on individual quality or motivation, and most explanations for their reliability are based on signal costs. A recent suggestion is that signaling mistakes, defined as deviations from typical signal design, provide cues on individual quality, contributing to reliable communication even when signal design is not cos...

Chemical signaling is an underappreciated means of communication among birds, as may be the potential contributions of symbiotic microbes to animal chemical communication in general. The dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis) produces and detects volatile compounds that may be important in reproductive behavior. These compounds are found in preen oil sec...

Bill-wiping, or the scraping by a bird of its bill along a substrate, has been observed in social contexts and cited as an irrelevant displacement activity. However, several behaviors once categorized as displacement behaviors have since been shown to serve adaptive functions. Here, we hypothesize that bill-wiping may function in social interaction...

Climate change, habitat alteration, range expansions, and biological invasions are all predicted to require rapid shifts in multiple traits including behavior and life history, both for initial population establishment and subsequent adaptation. Hormonal mechanisms likely play a key role in facilitating or constraining plastic and genetic responses...

Intraspecific chemical communication may play a significant role in avian behavior. Preen oil secreted by the uropygial gland emits volatile compounds that vary with many aspects of bird biology, and may figure prominently in mate choice. Many of these compounds are known end products of bacterial metabolism in other environments. The fermentation...

Although the importance of chemical communication in birds has long been overlooked or doubted, volatile compounds in avian preen secretions have been shown to covary with traits including species, sex and breeding condition, and thus may be useful mate recognition cues. Here we demonstrate for the first time that these compounds may reliably predi...

Novel or changing environments expose animals to diverse stressors that likely require coordinated hormonal and behavioral adaptations. Predicted adaptations to urban environments include attenuated physiological responses to stressors and bolder exploratory behaviors, but few studies to date have evaluated the impact of urban life on codivergence...

Some species of songbirds elevate testosterone in response to territorial intrusions while others do not. The search for a general explanation for this interspecific variation in hormonal response to social challenges has been impeded by methodological differences among studies. We asked whether song playback alone is sufficient to bring about elev...

Though genomic-level data are becoming widely available, many of the metazoan species sequenced are laboratory systems whose natural history is not well documented. In contrast, the wide array of species with very well-characterized natural history have, until recently, lacked genomics tools. It is now possible to address significant evolutionary g...

List of isogroups and singletons (rows) with their corresponding annotations (from various sources of evidence) and expression support (columns).

Contains statistics and a brief description of our attempt to develop a reference assembly using the zebra finch genome [71-75].

SNPs identified in the assembled transcriptome, including both unique and redundant (i.e., the same SNP call in multiple isotigs of the same isogroup) SNP calls.

We examined variation at MHC Class IIB genes in a recently established population of dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) in a coastal urban environment in southern California, USA relative to an ancestral-range population from a nearby species-typical montane environment. The founding population is estimated to have been quite small, but we predicted...

Songbird preen oil contains volatile and semivolatile compounds that may contain information about species, sex, individual identity, and season. We examined the relationship between testosterone (T) and the amounts of preen oil volatile and semivolatile compounds in wild and captive dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis). In wild males and females, we...

Most birds possess a uropygial gland that produces a secretion, preen oil, that contains volatile compounds that may transmit information about individual attributes. However, the ability of passerine songbirds to discriminate among the odors of different individuals has not yet been demonstrated. We tested whether dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis)...

The study of animal communication has been dominated by a focus on signal types that are easily recognized and quantified by human observers. This approach has inevitably limited our ability to identify cryptic signals such as low-amplitude vocalizations and signals that transmit beyond the range of our sensory system, such as most olfactory signal...

Because of their role in mediating life-history trade-offs, hormones are expected to be strongly associated with components of fitness; however, few studies have examined how natural selection acts on hormonal variation in the wild. In a songbird, the dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis), field experiments have shown that exogenous testosterone alters...

Chemical signaling has been documented in many animals, but its potential importance in avian species, particularly songbirds, has received far less attention. We tested whether volatile compounds in the preen oil of a songbird (Junco hyemalis) contain reliable information about individual identity, sex, or population of origin by repeated sampling...

Several studies have suggested a greater role for olfactory cues in avian social interactions than previously recognized, but few have explicitly investigated the effect of odor on parental behavior. We present results from a preliminary study in which we applied hetero- and conspecific preen gland secretions, which are known to contain volatile co...

The Mentawai Islands – off the west coast of central Sumatra – are known to support four endemic primates, one each of the genera Hylobates, Macaca, Presbytis and Simias. Two distinct subspecies have been described for each of these endemic Mentawai primates, except for Kloss's gibbon (Hylobates klossii) for which no subspecies are recognized. In e...

Gibbons of the genus Hylobates likely speciated very rapidly following isolation by rising sea levels during the Pleistocene. We sequenced the hypervariable region I (HV-I) of the mitochondrial D-loop to reconstruct the phylogeny of this group. Although the results clearly supported monophyly of each of the six species, the relationships among them...

The simakobu (Simias concolor), or pig-tailed snub-nosed langur, is one of four endemic primate species on the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, and is currently considered a monotypic genus (Brandon-Jones et al., 2004; Miller, 1903). This species, like many other colobines, is a specialized folivore found in tropical rainf...

In this Conservation Action Plan, I evaluate the status of and make conservation recommendations for the four endemic primates of the Mentawai Islands: Kloss's gibbon (Hylobates klossii), the simakobu monkey (Simias concolor), the Mentawai langur (Presbytis potenziani), and the Mentawai macaque (Macaca pagensis). There are two subspecies of each of...

The Vulnerable endemic Kloss's gibbon was surveyed throughout the Mentawai Islands, Sumatra, Indonesia, using a call-based method. Populations were estimated by extrapolating from local densities using recent assessments of remaining forest cover. About 20,000-25,000 Kloss's gibbons remain in nearly 3,000 km(2) of forest (about 40% of the islands'...

The Vulnerable endemic Kloss's gibbon was surveyed throughout the Mentawai Islands, Sumatra, Indonesia, using a call-based method. Populations were estimated by extrapolating from local densities using recent assessments of remaining forest cover. About 20,000-25,000 Kloss's gibbons remain in nearly 3,000 km 2 of forest (about 40% of the islands' t...