Experimental reintroduction revealed novel reproductive variation in Crested Ibis Nipponia nippon
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Conservation Biology, Zoology
- Keywords
- Adult sex ratio, Reproduction, Aggregated nesting, Crested Ibis, Nipponia nippon, Polyandry, Phenotypic plasticity, Reintroduction, Mating system flexibility
- Copyright
- © 2015 Liu et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Experimental reintroduction revealed novel reproductive variation in Crested Ibis Nipponia nippon . PeerJ PrePrints 3:e817v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.817v1
Abstract
The Crested Ibis Nipponia Nippon formerly occurred throughout East Asia, but since 1981 its unique population has been confined to a narrow area in Central China. During 2004-2005, 23 Crested Ibises were experimentally reintroduced to an isolated basin in Qinling Mountains, where they and their offspring exhibited variation in reproduction never observed in wild population. Crested Ibis has been considered to be a monogamous species, and breeding pair is solitary and territorial in breeding season. However, 3.4% of breeding females exhibited polyandry and 43.1% of nests were observed in colony in the reintroduced population during 2006-2014. The mating system flexibility is likely related to male-biased sex ratio in the small isolated reintroduced population, due to greater dispersal capacity by female. The colonial nesting is attributed to the availability of large nest trees and abundant food supply. First nest failure in reintroduced population occurred much earlier than that in wild, which resulted in significantly higher probability of renesting. The phenotypic plasticity in Crested Ibis may play important role in the restoration of this critical endangered species under a changing environment, and future reintroductions provide opportunity to further understand the degree and cost of adaptive phenotypic plasticity in Crested Ibis.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.