Subventions et des contributions :

Subvention ou bourse octroyée s'appliquant à plus d'un exercice financier. (2017-2018 à 2019-2020)

For my next granting cycle, I am requesting support for only two years , not five, in order to phase out my research program that NSERC has supported since 1981. The program has had two main branches: field and experimental work on a multi-species opportunistic avian assemblage in Barbados and comparative analyses on a global database of feeding innovations . In both cases, the goal is to examine the relationship between opportunistic foraging, ecology, cognition and neurobiology . The field/experimental approach and the comparative phylogenetic approach are complimentary.
The major part of the field project that needs to be finished over the next two years is the analysis of the molecular neurobiology database gathered by my PhD student Jean-Nicolas Audet. Field work and behavioral experiments on two sister species from Barbados, the innovative Loxigilla barbadensis and the conservative Tiaris bicolor , are now done and reveal strong cognitive differences between the two sister species. Audet has characterized the brain RNA-seq expression in 20 individuals from the two species and tested for candidate neurotransmitter receptor expression levels with in situ hybridization . One more year of support is required for Audet to finish the bioinformatic analysis of the transcriptome, looking in particular at gene networks. The other part of the Barbados project, the field and experimental work of postdoc Marine Battesti, is also done, but she will need a few months' support to finish her analysis of individual and social pathways of novel foraging information in L. barbadensis and the four avian species it forages with.
In the next two years, the second, comparative, branch of my Discovery program will involve an extension of the global innovation database that is my most cited contribution to the ecology and evolution of cognition (feeding innovations are novel foods or foraging techniques seen in the wild). Our latest published paper (March 2016) using this database involved 2608 reports in 1018 species. I will extend this global database to presently uncovered parts of the world (East Asia, Africa) and update areas covered previously (Australasia, the Nearctic and Palearctic zones) since our last survey (2002). Once finished, the database should include over 1500 species worldwide and it will be made available in detailed form to the research community. In the next two years, the extended database will be used in comparative analyses performed with my postdoc Simon Ducatez, in collaboration with Daniel Sol of the Ecology Research Center (CREAF) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, to examine the role of behavioural flexibility in buffering birds against conservation threats . Simon Ducatez has expertise in 'big data' collection and will use the IUCN database on different types of conservation threats to test the idea that innovative birds are better able to resist some (but not all) types of threats.