Orsolya Vincze

Centre for Ecological Research · Institute of Aquatic Ecology

Brain size relative to body size is smaller in migratory than in non-migratory birds. Two mutually non-exclusive hypotheses had been proposed to explain this association. On the one hand, the ‘energetic trade-off hypothesis’ claims that migratory species were selected to have smaller brains because of the interplay between neural tissue volume and...

Aim Parental care improves offspring survival and therefore has a major impact on reproductive success. Whilst the influence of ambient environment on parental care is increasingly recognised, the impacts of environmental fluctuations remain largely unexplored. Assessing the impacts of environmental stochasticity, however, is essential for understa...

Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes are among the most polymorphic in the vertebrate genome. The high allele diversity is believed to be maintained primarily by sexual and pathogen-mediated balancing selection. The number of MHC loci also varies greatly across vertebrates, most notably across birds. MHC proteins play key roles in presentin...

Cancer is a ubiquitous disease of metazoans, predicted to disproportionately affect larger, long-lived organisms owing to their greater number of cell divisions, and thus increased probability of somatic mutations1,2. While elevated cancer risk with larger body size and/or longevity has been documented within species3,4,5, Peto’s paradox indicates...

Sex-specific physiology is commonly reported in animals, often indicating lower immune indices and higher oxidative stress in males than in females. Sexual selection is argued to explain these differences, but empirical evidence is limited. Here, we explore sex differences in immunity, oxidative physiology and packed cell volume of wild, adult, bre...

Cancer is pervasive across multicellular species. Are there any patterns that can explain differences in cancer prevalence across species? Using 16,049 necropsy records for 292 species spanning three clades (amphibians, sauropsids and mammals) we found that neoplasia and malignancy prevalence increases with adult weight and decreases with gestation...

Cancer is a disease that affects nearly all multicellular life, including birds. However, little is known about what factors explain the variance in cancer prevalence among species. Litter size is positively correlated with cancer prevalence in managed species of mammals, and larger body size, but not incubation or nestling period, is linked to tum...

Parasite and pathogen surveillance is crucial for understanding trends in their distributions and host spectra, as well as to document changes in their population dynamics. Nevertheless, continuous surveillance is time-consuming, underfunded due to the non-charismatic nature of parasites/pathogens, and research infrastructure is usually limited to...

Migratory waterfowl are important endozoochory vectors for a range of plants lacking fleshy fruits. Our aim was to study the critical question of how endozoochory rates change throughout the annual cycle, and how this relates to plant life‐form and phenology. Lake Velence, Hungary. 2017–2018. Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), Angiospermae, Charophyta....

Poplar monocultures are some of the most common short-rotation coppices. While they are most often considered of low environmental value, they have recently gained recognition for their multifaceted role in ecological engineering, such as carbon sinks, soil remediators or green energy producers. Nonetheless, the biodiversity of poplar plantations r...

Supplementary Table S1. – Numbering, year of observation, location, altitude, orchid and poplar taxa, soil parameters, diameters and distances of trunks in the 232 plantations studied. Localities are listed alphabetically, first by country, then by settlement.

The mechanistic link between avian oxidative physiology and plumage coloration has attracted considerable attention in past decades. Hence, multiple proximal hypotheses were proposed to explain how oxidative state might covary with the production of melanin and carotenoid pigments. Some hypotheses underscore that these pigments (or their precursors...

Reproduction is one of the most energetically demanding life-history stages. As a result, breeding individuals often experience trade-offs, where energy is diverted away from maintenance (cell repair, immune function) toward reproduction. While it is increasingly acknowledged that oncogenic processes are omnipresent, evolving and opportunistic enti...

Mercury contamination is a major threat to the global environment, and is still increasing in some regions despite international regulations. The methylated form of mercury is hazardous to biota, yet its sublethal effects are difficult to detect in wildlife. Body condition can vary in response to stressors, but previous studies have shown mixed eff...

The expansion of alien plant species is of global concern, yet our understanding of their dispersal mechanisms is limited, especially regarding the role of migratory birds. We hypothesize that invasiveness of alien wetland plants might depend on specific adaptations that ensure high seed survival in the digestive tract of waterfowl, ensuring their...

Road management practices, such as winter de-icing create ideal habitats and competitive advantage for salt-tolerant species. We aimed to map the occurrences of halophytes along roads in Hungary. Furthermore, we tested factors that might play a role in the roadside occurrences of five chosen native halophytes from rare to common, we encountered dur...

Adult survival is a key component of population dynamics, and understanding variation in and the drivers of adult survival rates and longevity is critical for ecological and evolutionary studies, as well as for conservation biology and practice. Tropical species of landbirds are often selected to have higher adult survival due to high nest predatio...

The spread of alien species with the expansion of road networks and increasing traffic is a well-known phenomenon globally. Besides their corridor effects, road maintenance practices, such as the use of de-icing salts during winter facilitate the spread of halophyte (salt tolerant) species along roads. A good example is Plantago coronopus, a mainly...

Our understanding on how widespread reproductive senescence is in the wild and how the onset and rate of reproductive senescence vary among species in relation to life histories and lifestyles is currently limited. More specifically, whether the species-specific degree of sociality is linked to the occurrence, onset and rate of reproductive senesce...

At the westernmost distribution of the steppe herbaceous plant, Galatella villosa, in Hungary, Serbia and Ukraine, we recently observed intermediate specimens between this species and its close relative, G. linosyris.We were able to demonstrate the hybrid origin of these individuals by sequencing the biparentally inherited nuclear ribosomal interna...

Our understanding on how widespread reproductive senescence is in the wild and how the onset and rate of reproductive senescence vary among species in relation to life histories and lifestyles is currently limited. More specifically, whether the species-specific degree of sociality is linked to the occurrence, onset and rate of reproductive senesce...

Our understanding on how widespread reproductive senescence is in the wild and how the onset and rate of reproductive senescence vary among species in relation to life histories and lifestyles is currently limited. More specifically, whether the species-specific degree of sociality is linked to the occurrence, onset and rate of reproductive senesce...

Seminatural habitats are declining throughout the world; thus, the role of small an-thropogenic habitats in the preservation of plants is becoming increasingly appreciated. Here, we surveyed the orchid flora of roadside verges in five Central European countries (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) and tested how the surrounding lands...

Variation in rachis (central shaft) morphology in individual remiges (flight feathers) within and among species reflects adaptations to requirements imposed by aerodynamic forces, but the fine-scale variation of feather morphology across remiges is not well known. Here we describe how the shape of the rachis, expressed by the height/width ratio, ch...

Strong and ongoing artificial selection in domestic animals has resulted in amazing phenotypic responses that benefit humans, but often at a cost to an animal’s health, and problems related to inbreeding depression, including a higher incidence of cancer. Despite high rates of cancer in domesticated species, little attention has been devoted to exp...

Down feathers are the first feather types that appear in both the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic history of birds. Although it is widely acknowledged that the primary function of downy elements is insulation, little is known about the interspecific variability in the structural morphology of these feathers, and the environmental factors that have...

Fish have somehow colonized isolated water bodies all over the world without human assistance. It has long been speculated that these colonization events are assisted by waterbirds, transporting fish eggs attached to their feet and feathers, yet empirical support for this is lacking. Recently, it was suggested that endozoochory (i.e., internal tran...

Avian plumage colors and ornaments are excellent models to study the endocrine mechanisms linking sexually selected traits and individual parameters of quality and condition. Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) is an evolutionarily highly conserved peptide hormone. Its regulatory role in cell proliferation and differentiation and its high sensitiv...

Fen pondweed (Potamogeton coloratus) is a characteristic species of oligotrophicwaters, therefore, one of the rarest and most endangered aquatic plants in Europe because of habitat loss and population decline all over the continent. In Hungary, all of its populations disappeared during the 1950s and 1960s and then dramatically recovered in recent y...

Field studies have shown that waterbirds, especially members of the Anatidae family, are major vectors of dispersal by endozoochory for a broad range of plants lacking a fleshy fruit, yet whose propagules can survive gut passage. Widely adopted dispersal syndromes ignore this dispersal mechanism, and we currently have little understanding of what t...

Epipactis tallosii is considered as one of the highly threatened European orchid species due to its local distribution and small isolated populations that are characterized by decreasing trends. The species is now enlisted in the endangered (EN) category of the Red List. Nevertheless, during the last decade, multiple new populations of the species...

Electronic supplement to: Süveges K., Löki V., Lovas-Kiss Á., Ljubka T., Fekete R., Takács A., Vincze O., Lukács B. A. & Molnár V. A. 2019: From European priority species to characteristic apophyte: Epipactis tallosii (Orchidaceae).-Willdenowia 49: 401-409. doi: https://doi.org/10.3372/wi.49.49310 Appendix 1. Locations, main characteristics and or...

Variation in intensity and targets of sexual selection on multiple traits has been suggested to play a major role in promoting phenotypic differentiation between populations , although the divergence in selection may depend on year, local conditions or age. In this study, we quantified sexual selection for two putative sexual signals across two Cen...

1.Evidence for actuarial senescence (i.e. the decrease in survival with increasing age) is now widespread across the tree of life. However, demographic senescence patterns are highly variable both between and within species. To understand these variations, there is an urgent need to go beyond aggregated mortality rates and to investigate how age‐sp...

The origin and subsequent maintenance of sex and recombination are among the most elusive and controversial problems in evolutionary biology. Here, we propose a novel hypothesis, suggesting that sexual reproduction not only evolved to reduce the negative effects of the accumulation of deleterious mutations and processes associated with pathogen and...

Avian plumage colors and ornaments are ideal models to study the endocrine mechanisms linking sexually selected traits and individual parameters of quality and condition. The insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), an evolutionarily highly conserved peptide hormone, represents a link between body condition and the individual capacity to grow elaborat...

Several important habitats have become threatened in the last few centuries in the Mediterranean Basin due to major changes adopted in land‐use practices. The consequent loss of natural and seminatural orchid habitats leads to the appreciation of small anthropogenic habitats, such as cemeteries and roadside verges. Colonization of cemeteries and ro...

The selection pressures that drive flight feather morphology are poorly understood. Using a phylogenetic comparative approach and data from 178 species of birds, we investigated whether both position along the wing length and flight feather length affected vane structure. We found that barb density was lower on distal primaries than on proximal pri...

The selection pressures that drive flight feather morphology are poorly understood. Using a phylogenetic comparative approach and data from 178 species of birds, we investigated whether both position along the wing length and flight feather length affected vane structure. We found that barb density was lower on distal primaries than on proximal pri...

Summary 1. The mechanisms that underpin the evolution of ageing and life histories remain elusive. Oxidative stress, which results in accumulated cellular damages, is one of the mechanisms suggested to play a role. 2. In this paper we set out to test the ‘oxidative stress theory of ageing’ and the ‘oxidative stress hypothesis of life histories’ usi...

Birds often accumulate large fat and protein reserves to fuel long-distance flights. While it is well known that species that fly the longest accumulate the largest amounts of fuel, considerable cross-species variation in fuel load is seen after controlling for overall migration distance. It remains unclear whether this variation can be explained b...

The adult sex ratio (ASR) is a fundamental concept in population biology, sexual selection, and social evolution. However, it remains unclear which demographic processes generate ASR variation and how biases in ASR in turn affect social behaviour. Here, we evaluate the demographic mechanisms shaping ASR and their potential consequences for parental...

Glucocorticoid (GC) hormones are significant regulators of homeostasis. The physiological effects of GCs critically depend on the time of exposure (short vs. long) as well as on their circulating levels (baseline vs. stress-induced). Previous experiments, in which chronic and high elevation of GC levels was induced, indicate that GCs impair both th...

1. Modern literature on plant dispersal by birds focuses mainly on the importance of frugivory and scatter-hoarding, yet recent studies show that endozoochory by migratory waterbirds is an important mechanism of long-distance dispersal for a broad range of plants. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical field studies that identify the plants dis...

Organisms face resource trade-offs to support their parental effort and survival. The life-history oxidative stress hypothesis predicts that an individual’s redox state modulates the trade-off between current and residual fitness, but this has seldom been tested experimentally in non-captive organisms. In this study, we manipulated the brood size i...

The adult sex ratio (ASR) is a fundamental concept in population biology, sexual selection, and social evolution. However, it remains unclear which demographic processes generate ASR variation and how biases in ASR in turn affect social behaviour. Here, we evaluate the demographic mechanisms shaping ASR and their consequences for parental cooperati...

Studies modelling heat transfer of bird plumage design suggest that insulative properties can be attributed to the density and structure of the downy layer, while waterproofing is the result of the outer layer, comprised of contour feathers. In this study, we test how habitat and thermal condition affect feather mass and density of body feathers (c...

Background: Deviation of sex ratios from unity in wild animal populations has recently been demonstrated to be far more prevalent than previously thought. Ectoparasites are prominent examples of this bias, given that their sex ratios vary from strongly female- to strongly male-biased both among hosts and at the metapopulation level. To date our kn...

1. Body feathers ensure both waterproofing and insulation in waterbirds, but how natural variation in the morphological properties of these appendages relates to environmental constraints remains largely unexplored. Here, we test how habitat and thermal condition affect the morphology of body feathers using a phylogenetic comparative analysis of fi...

The behavioural rhythms of organisms are thought to be under strong selection, influenced by the rhythmicity of the environment. Such behavioural rhythms are well studied in isolated individuals under laboratory conditions, but free-living individuals have to temporally synchronize their activities with those of others, including potential mates, c...

The behavioural rhythms of organisms are thought to be under strong selection, influenced by the rhythmicity of the environment1-4. Such behavioural rhythms are well studied in isolated individuals under laboratory conditions1,5, but free-living individuals have to temporally synchronize their activities with those of others, including potential ma...

Large brains (relative to body size) might confer fitness benefits to animals. Although the putative costs of well-developed brains can constrain the majority of species to modest brain sizes, these costs are still poorly understood. Given that the neural tissue is energetically expensive and demands antioxidants, one potential cost of developing a...

Migratory flight performance has direct or carry-over effects on fitness. Therefore, selection is expected to act on minimizing the costs of migratory flight, which increases with the distance covered. Aerodynamic theory predicts how morphological adaptations improve flight performance. These predictions have rarely been tested in comparative analy...

Long-distance migratory birds have relatively smaller brains than short-distance migrants or residents. Here, we test whether reduction in brain size with migration distance can be generalized across the different brain regions suggested to play key roles in orientation during migration. Based on 152 bird species, belonging to 61 avian families fro...

Total body mass (TBM) is known to be related to a number of different osteological features in vertebrates, including limb element measurements and total skeletal mass. The relationship between skeletal mass and TBM in birds has been suggested as a way of estimating the latter in cases where only the skeleton is known (e.g., fossils). This relation...

It was proposed previously that passive dispersal by migratory aquatic birds explain the widespread distribution of many wetland organisms. Several experimental studies have shown that many widespread wetland plant species can be readily dispersed within the guts of Anatidae. However, it is unclear whether plants with a more restricted distribution...