Laszlo Zsolt Garamszegi

Centre for Ecological Research · Institute of Ecology and Botany

Background The invasive mosquito Aedes albopictus is a major concern for human and animal health given its high potential to spread over large geographical distances, adapt to various habitats and food sources, and act as a vector for pathogens. It is crucial to understand how this species establishes ecological relationships at different locations...

Domestication has long been considered the most powerful evolutionary engine behind dramatic reductions in brain size in several taxa, and the dog (Canis familiaris) is considered as a typical example that shows a substantial decrease in brain size relative to its ancestor, the grey wolf (Canis lupus). However, to make the case for exceptional evol...

Computed tomography (CT) is a non-invasive, three-dimensional imaging tool used in medical imaging, forensic science, industry and engineering, anthropology, and archaeology. The current study used high-resolution medical CT scanning of 431 animal skulls, including 399 dog skulls from 152 breeds, 14 cat skulls from 9 breeds, 14 skulls from 8 wild c...

Background The invasive mosquito Aedes albopictus is a major concern for human and animal health given its high potential to spread over large geographic distances, to adopt to various habitats and food sources and to act as vector for pathogens. It is crucial to understand how this species establishes ecological relationships at different location...

Temporal changes in environmental conditions may play a major role in the year-to-year variation in fitness consequences of behaviours. Identifying environmental drivers of such variation is crucial to understand the evolutionary trajectories of behaviours in natural contexts. However, our understanding of how environmental variation influences beh...

Dirofilaria species are mosquito-borne filarial nematodes, with a high veterinary and public health importance, but growing evidence also indicates their frequent occurrence in wildlife. Wild animals may play an important role in the maintenance , transmission and spread of dirofilariosis, but we have little understanding of the ecological and envi...

Comprehending symbiont abundance among host species is a major ecological endeavour, and the metabolic theory of ecology has been proposed to understand what constrains symbiont populations. We parameterized metabolic theory equations to investigate how bird species' body size and the body size of their feather mites relate to mite abundance accord...

Assessing additive genetic variance is a crucial step in predicting the evolutionary response of a target trait. However, the estimated genetic variance may be sensitive to the methodology used, e.g., the way relatedness is assessed among the individuals, especially in wild populations where social pedigrees can be inaccurate. To investigate this p...

The estimation of heritability is a common practice in the field of ecology and evolution. Heritability of the traits is often estimated using one single measurement per individual, although many traits (especially behavioural and physiological traits) are characterized by large within-individual variance, and ideally a large number of within indiv...

The biological significance of behavioural predictability (environment-independent within-individual behavioural variation) became accepted recently as an important part of an individual's behavioural strategy besides behavioural type (individual mean behaviour). However, we do not know how behavioural type and predictability evolve. Here, we teste...

Cultural diversity and stability of a population affect the adaptiveness and survival of individuals. Besides field studies, cultural diversity and stability have been investigated with the help of different modeling approaches in relatively simple cultures. These theoretical studies helped identify mechanisms that generate cultural diversity throu...

Climate change, intensified tourism and trade activity have resulted in several exotic mosquito species invading the temperate zone, with considerable ecological and economic consequences, as well as threats to human health, due to the pathogen‐transmitting role of these organisms. Accordingly, three invasive mosquito species (Aedes albopictus, Ae....

Background Urbanization can be a significant contributor to the spread of invasive mosquito vector species, and the diseases they carry, as urbanized habitats provide access to a great density of food resources (humans and domestic animals) and offer abundant breeding sites for these vectors. Although anthropogenic landscapes are often associated w...

Aim The increasing spread of vector‐borne diseases has resulted in severe health concerns for humans, domestic animals and wildlife, with changes in land use and the introduction of invasive species being among the main possible causes for this increase. We explored several ecological drivers potentially affecting the local prevalence and richness...

Domestication is a well-known example of the relaxation of environmentally-based cognitive selection that leads to reductions in brain size. However, little is known about how brain size evolves after domestication and whether subsequent directional/artificial selection can compensate for domestication effects. The first animal to be domesticated w...

Comprehending symbiont abundance among host species is a major ecological endeavour, and the metabolic theory of ecology has been proposed to understand what constraints symbiont populations. We parameterized metabolic theory equations to predict how bird species’ body size and the body size of their feather mites relate to mite abundance according...

The alteration of the timing of biological events is one of the best documented effects of climate change, with overwhelming evidence across taxa. Many studies have investigated the phenology of consumers, especially birds. However, most of these studies have focused on specific phenophases, whereas a global analysis of avian phenological trends du...

Heritable genetic variation is a prerequisite for adaptive evolution; however, our knowledge about the heritability of plastic traits, such as behaviors, is scarce, especially in wild populations. In this study, we investigated the heritability of song traits in the collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis), a small oscine passerine with complex so...

Many vocalisations of songbirds are sexually selected and socially learnt behavioural traits that are subject to cultural evolution. For cultural inheritance, it is required that individuals imitate the song elements and build them into their repertoire, but little is known about how such learning mechanisms take place in natural populations of bir...

Urbanization is one of the most severe forms of environmental alteration, in which increasing human settlement leads to an unprecedented loss of natural areas, thereby threatening global biodiversity and associated ecosystem functions. Consequently, the evidence base needs to be strengthened in order to understand how this man-made alteration affec...

Individual animals can react to the changes in their environment by exhibiting behaviors in an individual‐specific way leading to individual differences in phenotypic plasticity. However, the effect of multiple environmental factors on multiple traits is rarely tested. Such a complex approach is necessary to assess the generality of plasticity and...

Behavior is central to interactions with the environment and thus has significant consequences for individual fitness. Sexual selection and demographic processes have been shown to independently shape behavioral evolution. However, while some studies have tested the simultaneous effects of these forces, no studies have investigated their interplay...

Behavioural variation in courtship has become a central theme in the study of sexual selection. Courtship behaviour can vary consistently between males (between-individual variation) due to inherent characteristics of individuals, but males may also plastically adjust their courtship (within-individual variation) in response to the characteristics...

Mating system theory predicts that social polygyny—when one male forms pair bonds with two females—may evolve by female choice in species with biparental care. Females will accept a polygynous male if the benefit of mating with a male providing high quality genes or rearing resources outweighs the cost of sharing mate assistance in parental care. B...

To understand the evolutionary ecology of disease dynamics, it is crucial to identify the environmental factors that mediate the spread and abundance of parasites and their vectors. However, human-mediated changes in the biotic and abiotic environment and intervention programs are intensifying in the past 30-40 years at a rate that masks the causal...

Urban animals often show bolder behaviour towards humans than their nonurban conspecifics. However, it is unclear to what extent this difference is due to consistent individual characteristics or to plasticity such as habituation. To address this question, we investigated parental risk-taking behaviour in 371 female great tits in urban and forest p...

Összefoglaló. Az eddigi összes világjárványt olyan zoonotikus kórokozók, vírusok vagy baktériumok okozták, amelyek könnyen tudnak emberről emberre is terjedni. Minden egyes felbukkanó fertőzés egészségügyi, társadalmi és gazdasági költségeket von maga után. Az országhatárok nem tudják hatékonyan korlátozni a betegségek terjedését. Az eddigi trendek...

Animal signals should consistently differ among individuals to convey distinguishable information about the signalers. However, behavioral display signals, such as bird song are also loaded with considerable within-individual variance with mostly unknown function. We hypothesized that the immediate social environment may play a role in mediating su...

The trade-off between current and future reproduction is a cornerstone of life history theory, but the role of within-individual plasticity on life history decisions and its connections with overall fitness and behaviour remains largely unknown. By manipulating available resources for oviposition at the beginning of the reproductive period, we expe...

Prey animals may react differently to predators, which can thus raise plasticity in risk-taking behaviour. We assessed the behavioural responses of nestling-feeding collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) parents towards different avian predator species (Eurasian sparrowhawk, long-eared owl) and a non-threatening songbird (song thrush) by measuri...

The study of the diversity of animal signals on within‐ and among‐species levels is the key to uncover mechanisms that shape the evolution of communication systems. However, the methods used to quantify acoustic diversity (like repertoire size) lack to grasp several aspects of acoustic diversity. Here, we propose a new framework for the study of an...

Animal ecologists often collect hierarchically structured data and analyse these with linear mixed‐effects models. Specific complications arise when the effect sizes of covariates vary on multiple levels (e.g. within vs. among subjects). Mean centring of covariates within subjects offers a useful approach in such situations, but is not without prob...

Many vocalizing animals produce the discrete elements of their acoustic signals in a specific sequential order, but we know little about the biological relevance of this ordering. For that, we must characterize the degree by which individuals differ in how they organize their signals sequentially and relate these differences to variation in quality...

Human-directed play behaviour is a distinct behavioural feature of domestic dogs. But the role that artificial selection for contemporary dog breeds has played for human-directed play behaviour remains elusive. Here, we investigate how human-directed play behaviour has evolved in relation to the selection for different functions, considering proces...

Humans profoundly impact landscapes, ecosystems, and animal behavior. In many cases, animals living near humans become tolerant of them and reduce antipredator responses. Yet, we still lack an understanding of the underlying evolutionary dynamics behind these shifts in traits that affect animal survival. Here, we used a phylogenetic meta-analysis t...

Linear mixed‐effects models are powerful tools for analysing complex datasets with repeated or clustered observations, a common data structure in ecology and evolution. Mixed‐effects models involve complex fitting procedures and make several assumptions, in particular about the distribution of residual and random effects. Violations of these assump...

Introduction On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Global Health Emergency of international concern attendant to the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2, nearly two months after the first reported emergence of human cases in Wuhan, China. In the subsequent two months, global, national and local health personnel and infra...

Behaviour shown in a novel environment has important consequences for fitness in many animals. It is widely studied with standard tests by placing the individuals into an unfamiliar experimental area, that is the so‐called open‐field or novel environment test. The biological relevance of traits measured under such artificial conditions is questiona...

The bioacoustic analyses of animal sounds result in an enormous amount of digitized acoustic data, and we need effective automatic processing to extract the information content of the recordings. Our research focuses on the song of Collared Flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) and we are interested in the evolution of acoustic signals. During the last...

Among‐population variance of phenotypic traits is of high relevance for understanding evolutionary mechanisms that operate in relatively short timescales, but various sources of non‐independence, such as common ancestry and gene flow can hamper the interpretations. In this comparative analysis of 138 dog breeds, we demonstrate how such confounders...

Variation in climatic conditions is an important driving force of ecological processes. Populations are under selection to respond to climatic changes with respect to phenology of the annual cycle (e.g. breeding, migration) and life‐history. As teleconnections can reflect climate on a global scale, the responses of terrestrial animals are often inv...

Gratton and Mundry (2019, Animal Behaviour, 000, 000-000) statistically evaluate an approach I had suggested in an earlier paper that relied merely on verbal arguments (Garamszegi, 2016, Animal Behaviour, 120, 223-234). In particular, their simulation study challenges a methodology I proposed to account for pseudoreplication when the identity of in...

Condition-dependence is considered as a dominant mechanism ensuring the fitness benefits of continued mate choice for heritable sexual signal traits, but crucial questions remain concerning the underlying physiological pathways. For example, it is unclear whether condition-dependence is mediated by the different amount of resource obtained, some un...

Individuals of many animal species show consistent differences in ecologically relevant behaviours, and these individual-specific behaviours can correlate with each other. In passerines, aggression during nest-site defence is one of those behaviours that have been steadily found to be repeatable within individuals. Furthermore, in several cases, ag...

The early environment in which an organism grows can have long-lasting impacts on both its phenotype and fitness. However, assessing this environment comprehensively is a formidable task. The relative length of the second to the fourth digit (2D : 4D) is a broadly studied skeletal trait that is fixed for life during ontogeny. 2D : 4D has been shown...

Aggressive behaviour plays a fundamental role in the distribution of limiting resources. Thereby, it is expected to have consequences for fitness. Here, we explored the relationship between aggression and fitness in a long-term database collected in a wild population of the collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis). We quantified the aggression of...

Parasites are a selective force that shape host community structure and dynamics, but host communities can also influence parasitism. Understanding the dual nature from host-parasite interactions can be facilitated by quantifying the variation in parasite prevalence among host species and then comparing that variation to other ecological factors th...

Database used for all the statistical analyses. Plots were also based on this database. (ZIP)

Pairwise distance matrix within new parasite lineages detected in the present study (in bold) and close related parasite lineages according to parasite phylogenetic tree (S1 Fig). (DOCX)

Phylogenetic associations between Plasmodium and Haemoproteus parasites and their avian hosts. (TIFF)

The rove beetle genus Stenus has experienced a tremendous radiation, comprising > 3000 species widely distributed throughout the world. Its evolutionary success can be partly attributed to specific morphological features, two of which will be in the focus of this contribution: (1) the labium, or lower lip, is modified into a prey-capture apparatus...

Most studies on animal personality evaluate individual mean behaviour to describe individual behavioural strategy, while often neglecting behavioural variability on the within-individual level. However, within-individual behavioural plasticity (variation induced by environment) and within-individual residual variation (regulatory behavioural precis...

According to our best model, polygynously-mated females had lower survival probability (p= 0.51) than monogamous ones (p= 0.59). In the case of males, we did not found survival costs in relation to their mating status (p Monogamous= Polygynous= 0.54).

Parasites are a selective force that shape host community structure and dynamics, but host communities can also influence parasitism. Understanding the dual nature from host-parasite interactions can be facilitated by quantifying the variation in parasite prevalence (i.e. the proportion of infected host individuals in a population) among host speci...

Qualitative and quantitative assessments of bird song repertoires are important in studies related to song learning, sexual selection and cultural evolution. Despite methods for automatic analysis, it is still necessary to engage in manual cutting, segmenting and clustering of bird song elements in many cases. Here, we describe a program, the Ficed...

At macroevolutionary scales, stress physiology may have consequences for species diversification and subspecies richness. Populations that exploit new resources or undergo range expansion should cope with new environmental challenges, which could favour higher mean stress responses. Within-species variation in the stress response may also play a ro...

Theory predicts that parents adjust the sex ratio of their brood to the sexually selected traits of their mate because the reproductive success of sons may be more dependent on inherited paternal attractiveness than that of daughters. Empirical studies vary in terms of whether they support the theory, and this variation has often been regarded as e...

Animals go through different life history stages such as reproduction, moult, or migration, of which some are more energy-demanding than others. Baseline concentrations of glucocorticoid hormones increase during moderate, predictable challenges and thus are expected to be higher when seasonal energy demands increase, such as during reproduction. By...

Behavioural consistency within and across behaviours (animal personality and behavioural syndrome, respectively) has been vigorously studied in the last decade, leading to the emergence of “animal personality” research. It has been proposed recently that not only mean behaviour (behavioural type), but the environmentally induced behavioural change...

Several hypotheses predict that the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) drives mating preference in females. Olfactory, color or morphological traits are often found as reliable signals of the MHC profile, but the role of avian song mediating MHC‐based female choice remains largely unexplored. We investigated the relationship between several MHC...

Sexually selected colour traits of bird plumage are widely studied. Although the plumage is replaced only at one or two yearly moults, plumage colour has long been shown to change between moults. Nevertheless, most studies measure colour weeks to months after the courtship period, typically at nestling rearing, and it is unclear whether these measu...

Color patterns, such as bars or dots that cover the body surface of animals are generally thought to play roles in signaling and camouflage. In birds, however, the macroscopic aspects of plumage coloration are less well understood, as past studies typically described plumage colorations by using spectrophotometric analyses. To provide insight into...

Despite growing appreciation of the importance of considering a pace-of-life syndrome (POLS) perspective to understand how animals interact with their environment, studies relating behavior to life history under altered environmental conditions are still rare. By means of a comparative analysis of flight initiation distances (i.e., the distance at...

The hypothesis of pace-of-life syndromes (POLS) predicts relationships between traits including life history traits and risk-taking behaviour that can be mediated by the trade-off between current and future reproductive value. However, alternative causal mechanisms may also generate covariance among these traits without trade-offs. We investigated...

The comparison of acoustic complexity across individuals is often essential for understanding the evolution of acoustic signals. In many animal taxa, as a proxy of acoustic complexity, repertoire size is intensively studied; however, its estimation is challenging in species with large repertoires, as this process is time-consuming and may involve c...

Environmental change associated with urbanization is considered one of the major threats to biodiversity. Some species nevertheless seem to thrive in the urban areas, probably associated with selection for phenotypes that match urban habitats. Previous research defined different “copying styles” in distress behavior during the handling of birds. Th...

Understanding the background mechanisms affecting the emergence and maintenance of consistent between-individual variation within population in single (animal personality) or across multiple (behavioural syndrome) behaviours has key importance. State-dependence theory suggests that behaviour is ‘anchored’ to individual state (e.g. body condition, g...

Results of LMMs on activity and risk taking. F statistics (numerator and denominator df in parentheses) and P values are shown. Significant effects are in bold font. SVL = snout to vent length; basking = basking time treatment; food = food treatment. (DOCX)

Results of GLMs on predictability of activity and risk taking in the pooled sample and in the different treatment groups. First, we ran separate GLMs on the pooled sample with all possible interactions for activity predictability and risk-taking predictability. Second, based on the highest order significant interaction for the given behaviour, we r...