General Meeting – Sleuthing into the secret lives of wood ducks by Dr. John Eadie

Biologists have studied the charismatic wood duck for well over a century. What more could we possibly learn? As it turns out, quite a bit. New technology is revealing a rich and complex social underworld that is proving to be quite astonishing. We are employing automatic logging devices (passive integrated transponders, or PIT tags) that record every nest site a female visits, and population-wide genetic analyses of all breeding females and their offspring to follow the breeding behavior and entire life histories of wood ducks on several sites in California. We are focusing on a particularly curious nesting behavior whereby females lay eggs in the nests of other females in the same population (termed conspecific brood parasitism or CBP). Females in a wide variety of bird species lay their eggs in the nests of other conspecifics but despite its widespread occurrence the factors that promote parasitic nesting behavior remain poorly understood, in part because the sneaky parasitic females are rarely identified, but also because the information needed to assess the possible benefits of this behavior are often lacking. Are these females friends or foe? Does this behavior add or detract from the survival of females and their young, or the sustainability of the population? Our studies are providing some new insights and, in some cases, surprising us with the wide range of behavioral interactions among females in this enigmatic species of cavity-nesting duck.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. John Eadie is a Professor and the Dennis G. Raveling Waterfowl Chair in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology, University of California Davis. He joined the faculty at UC Davis in 1995 from Zoology University of British Columbia, where he completed by PhD degree. His research interests include the ecology, conservation and management of waterfowl and wetlands. His current work focuses on the management and conservation of wetland habitats, breeding waterfowl (mallards and wood ducks) in California, and linking ecological theory to wildlife management and conservation. He uses a combination of experimental and observational field studies, molecular genetic techniques in the lab, and population modeling approaches in his research.