Abstract: Dispersal represents a key life-history trait with several implications for the fitness of organisms, population dynamics and resilience, local adaptation, meta-population dynamics, range shifting, and biological invasions. Plastic and evolutionary changes of dispersal traits have been intensively studied over the past decades in entomology, in particular in wing-dimorphic insects for which literature reviews are available. Importantly, dispersal polymorphism also exists in wing-monomorphic and wingless insects, and except for butterflies, fewer syntheses are available. In this perspective, by integrating the very latest research in the fast moving field of insect dispersal ecology, this review article provides an overview of our current knowledge of dispersal polymorphism in insects. In a first part, some of the most often used experimental methodologies for the separation of dispersers and residents in wing-monomorphic and wingless insects are presented. Then, the existing knowledge on the morphological and life-history trait differences between resident and disperser phenotypes is synthetized. In a last part, the effects of range expansion on dispersal traits and performance is examined, in particular for insects from range edges and invasion fronts. Finally, some research perspectives are proposed in the last part of the review.

Abstract: Première mention de la Glaréole à ailes noires Glareola nordmanni pour l’Île Amsterdam, Océan Indien. Une Glaréole à ailes noires Glareola nordmanni de premier hiver à été observée sur l’Île Amsterdam, dans le sud de l’Océan indien, les 12–16 novembre 2013. Il s’agît de la première donnée de cette espèce paléarctique pour l’île. Les mentions antérieures les plus proches proviennent de l’île d’Alphonse, aux Seychelles, à environ 4.200 km de l’Île Amsterdam.

Abstract: One of the fundamental principles of life history trait theory is the existence of trade-offs. The amount of energy available to living beings is a limited resource that must be shared among different biological functions. The combination of traits best suited to ecological constraints will be selected.
Growth is a crucial phase during which the future phenotype of the adult is established. This period between birth and the acquisition of independence from parents is characterized by very fast stature and weight growth and tissue maturation, particularly in bone and muscle. This phenomenon is marked by sustained parental nutrition. On an intraspecific scale, variations in individual chick growth may reflect the quality/experience of the parents. In some species, parental dietary intake may, regardless of quality, show wide seasonal fluctuations due to environmental changes and for developing individuals the quantity and quality of nutrients ingested and metabolized may be a limiting factor in growth. There is little information to understand the trade-offs in energy allocation that will be established to ensure survival and growth of the young in the case of inadequate dietary intakes.
The king penguin chick is an atypical animal model for the study of these strategies. This seabird has an unusually long one-year development cycle for a bird and its growth is interrupted by a period of severe food restriction during the 4 months of the southern winter. In addition, exceptionally with a penguin, the period of initiation of reproduction is asynchronous and extends over several months. A direct consequence is a shorter time of accumulation of energy reserves in late-born chicks. We aim to determine whether the particularly long cycle of this chick and the environmental constraints to which it is subjected result in particular adaptations in terms of the relative development of the two muscle belts, pelvic and pectoral, and whether this growth compromise is expressed in the same way in early and late born chicks.

Abstract: We employed a global high-resolution inverse model to optimize the CH4 emission using Greenhouse gas Observing Satellite (GOSAT) and surface observation data for a period from 2011–2017 for the two main source categories of anthropogenic and natural emissions. We used the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR v4.3.2) for anthropogenic methane emission and scaled them by country to match the national inventories reported to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Wetland and soil sink prior fluxes were simulated using the Vegetation Integrative Simulator of Trace gases (VISIT) model. Biomass burning prior fluxes were provided by the Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS). We estimated a global total anthropogenic and natural methane emissions of 340.9 Tg CH4 yr−1 and 232.5 Tg CH4 yr−1, respectively. Country-scale analysis of the estimated anthropogenic emissions showed that all the top-emitting countries showed differences with their respective inventories to be within the uncertainty range of the inventories, confirming that the posterior anthropogenic emissions did not deviate from nationally reported values. Large countries, such as China, Russia, and the United States, had the mean estimated emission of 45.7 ± 8.6, 31.9 ± 7.8, and 29.8 ± 7.8 Tg CH4 yr−1, respectively. For natural wetland emissions, we estimated large emissions for Brazil (39.8 ± 12.4 Tg CH4 yr−1), the United States (25.9 ± 8.3 Tg CH4 yr−1), Russia (13.2 ± 9.3 Tg CH4 yr−1), India (12.3 ± 6.4 Tg CH4 yr−1), and Canada (12.2 ± 5.1 Tg CH4 yr−1). In both emission categories, the major emitting countries all had the model corrections to emissions within the uncertainty range of inventories. The advantages of the approach used in this study were: (1) use of high-resolution transport, useful for simulations near emission hotspots, (2) prior anthropogenic emissions adjusted to the UNFCCC reports, (3) combining surface and satellite observations, which improves the estimation of both natural and anthropogenic methane emissions over spatial scale of countries.

Abstract: Life-history theory predicts that, to optimize their fitness, individuals should increase their reproductive effort as their residual reproductive value decreases. Accordingly, several studies have shown that individuals downregulate their glucocorticoid stress response (a proxy of reproductive investment in vertebrates) as they age, and as the subsequent reproductive value decreases. However, and surprisingly, results appear inconsistent, suggesting that the environmental context or the individual state may affect the relationship between age and reproductive effort. Here, we tested for the first time this hypothesis, and more specifically, whether this attenuation of the corticosterone stress response with advancing age depends on the energetic status of individuals. We compared the influence of age on the corticosterone stress response between fasting and non-fasting breeding snow petrels (Pagodroma nivea), an extremely long-lived bird. As expected, we found that the corticosterone stress response was attenuated in old petrels, but only when they were not fasting. Interestingly, this pattern was not apparent in fasting petrels, suggesting that old birds downregulate their corticosterone stress response and increase their parental investment only when they are in good body condition. At the ultimate level, old individuals may maintain a strong corticosterone stress response when fasting because the survival costs of increased stress resistance and parental effort might then outweigh their reproductive benefits.