Amusing Web: Atlantic puffins 'scout out' their own migration routes rather than relying on genetic 'programming'

Friday, July 22, 2011

Atlantic puffins 'scout out' their own migration routes rather than relying on genetic 'programming'

Last updated at 8:26 PM on 21st July 2011

Birds of a feather are famed for sticking together.

But that may not exactly be the case for the independent Atlantic puffin - who is now believed to work out its migration routes without any help from its parents or genetic instincts.

Scientists tracking 18 birds found they followed a wide range of different flight paths, suggesting their movements were not genetically pre-determined.

Free as a bird: Atlantic puffins are now believed to work out their migration routes without any help from their parents or genetic instincts

They also discovered that young puffins leave their colonies at night, alone, long before their parents - rendering unlikely the theory they may learn a route directly from their elders.

Oxford University and Microsoft Research Cambridge teamed up for the study, published this week in PLoS ONE, in which they used BAS geolocater tags to track the migration movements of 18 birds.

Eight of the animals, belonging to a sub-colony at The Isthmus on Skomer Island, Wales, were tracked for two consecutive years.

Professor Tim Guilford, of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, co-led the project and believes the type of 'scouting' for good migration routes could also be used by other species of birds.

He said: 'We think it's likely that, before they start breeding, young puffins explore the resources the ocean has to offer and come up with their own individual, often radically different, migration routes.

'This tendency to explore may enable them to develop a route which exploits all the best food sources in a particular area wherever these might happen to be.'

Movers: The circles show average position of each puffin during three months outside the breeding season - August (red), October (green), February (blue) - with lines joining each bird's successive positions but not the exact path it travelled