Paul BéziersMcGill University | McGill · Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
Paul Béziers
PhD
Swiss NSF Postdoctoral Fellow (SNSF)
About
24
Publications
6,138
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266
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2018 - July 2019
February 2012 - present
Publications
Publications (24)
The age at first reproduction can significantly impact fitness. We investigated the possible source of variation in the age at first reproduction (‘sexual maturity') and its consequences for lifetime reproductive success in a wild population of barn owls. This raptor is sexually dimorphic for two melanin‐based plumage traits shown to covary with se...
Bird nests are specialized habitats because of their particular composition including nest detritus and bird droppings. In consequence, they attract a specialized arthropod community considered as nidicolous, which includes species only found in bird nests (strictly nidicolous) or sometimes found in bird nests (facultatively nidicolous). Because th...
Glucocorticoid hormones, such as corticosterone, are crucial in regulating daily life metabolism and energy expenditure, as well as promoting short-term physiological and behavioural responses to unpredictable environmental challenges. Therefore, glucocorticoids are considered to mediate trade-offs between survival and reproduction. Relatively litt...
The Moon cycle exposes nocturnal life to variation in environmental light. However, whether moonlight shapes the fitness of nocturnal species with distinct colour variants remains unknown. Combining data from long-term monitoring, high-resolution global positioning system tracking and experiments using prey, we show that barn owls (Tyto alba) with...
Glucocorticoid hormones are important intermediates between an organism and its environment. They enable an organism to adjust its behavioural and physiological processes in response to environmental changes by binding to mineralocorticoid receptors (MR) and glucocorticoid receptors (GR) expressed in many tissues, including the integument. The regu...
The hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis is responsible for the regulation of corticosterone, a hormone that is essential in the mediation of energy allocation and physiological stress. As a continuous source of challenge and stress for organisms, the environment has promoted the evolution of physiological adaptations and led to a great variat...
In biparental species, reproductive success depends not only on the quality of the parents, the care they each provide and many environmental factors such as territory quality and food availability, but also on the ability of the parents to collaborate and divide reproductive tasks. Because hormones, such as corticosterone (CORT), modulate physiolo...
Glucocorticoid hormones, such as corticosterone, are important intermediates between an organism and its environment. They enable an organism to adjust his behavioural and physiological processes in response to environmental changes by binding to mineralocorticoid receptors (MR) and glucocorticoid receptors (GR) expressed in many tissues, including...
Temporal variation in physical activity is mainly
determined by the day–night cycle. While this may be true
for diurnal species whose vision at night is often poor, the
situation might be more complex in nocturnal animals as
many such species can see both in the dark and in the
daylight. We examined in Barn Owl (Tyto alba) nestlings
whether tempora...
Knowledge of how and why secondary sexual characters are associated with sex hormones is important to understand their signalling function. Such a link can occur if testosterone participates in the elaboration of sex-traits, if the display of an ornament triggers behavioural response in conspecifics that induce a rise in testosterone or if genes im...
Endothermic animals vary in their physiological ability to maintain a constant body temperature. Since melanin-based coloration is related to thermoregulation and energy homeostasis, we predict that dark and pale melanic individuals adopt different behaviours to regulate their body temperature. Young animals are particularly sensitive to a decrease...
Many bird species produce two annual broods during a single breeding season. However, not all individuals reproduce twice in the same year suggesting that double brooding is condition-dependent. In contrast to most raptors and owls, the barn owl (Tyto alba) produces two annual clutches in most worldwide distributed populations. Nevertheless, the de...
Human activities can have a suite of positive and negative effects on animals and thus can affect various life history parameters. Human presence and agricultural practice can be perceived as stressors to which animals react with the secretion of glucocorticoids. The acute short-term secretion of glucocorticoids is considered beneficial and helps a...
Variants of the melanocortin-1 receptor (MC1R) gene results in abrupt, naturally selected color morphs. These genetic variants may differentially affect sexual dimorphism if one morph is naturally selected in the two sexes but another morph is naturally or sexually selected only in one of the two sexes (e.g., to confer camouflage in reproductive fe...
A simple way to quickly optimize microsatellites in non-model organisms is to re-use loci available in closely related taxa; however, this approach can be limited by the stochastic and low cross-amplification success experienced in some groups (e.g. amphibians). An efficient alternative is to develop loci from transcriptome sequences. Transcriptomi...
Projects
Project (1)
With this project, we aim at discovering how genetic variation maps to (co)variation in different plumage colour traits (phaeomelan-based plumage redness and eumelan-based black spot size and number) in barn owls. This is a necessary first step to better understand why these melanin-based colour traits evolve and particularly, become associated with physiological, behavioural, and morphological traits in this cosmopolitan species.
