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Data from: Persistent species relationships characterize migrating bird communities across stopover sites and seasons

DeSimone, Joely1; DeGroote, Luke2; MacKenzie, Stuart3; Owen, Jen4; Patterson, Andrea5; Cohen, Emily1

Published Feb 03, 2025 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3xsj3txqp

Data files

Abstract

Global migrations of diverse animal species often converge along the same routes, bringing together seasonal assemblages of animals that may compete, prey on each other, and share information or pathogens. These interspecific interactions, when energetic demands are high and time to complete journeys is short, may influence survival, migratory success, stopover ecology, and migratory routes. Numerous accounts suggest interspecific co-migrations are globally distributed in aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial systems, although the study of migration to date has rarely investigated species interactions among migrating animals. Here we test the hypothesis that migrating animals are communities engaged in networks of ecological interactions. We leverage over half a million records of 50 bird species from five bird banding sites collected over 8-23 years to test for species associations using social network analyses. We find strong support for persistent species relationships across sites and between spring and fall migration. These relationships may be ecologically meaningful: they are often stronger among phylogenetically related species with similar foraging behaviors and non-breeding ranges even after accounting for the non-social contributions to associations, including overlap in migration timing and habitat use. While interspecific interactions could result in costly competition or beneficial information exchange, we find relationships are largely positive, suggesting limited competitive exclusion at the scale of a banding station during migratory stopovers. Our findings support an understanding of animal migrations that consist of networked communities rather than random assemblages of independently migrating species, encouraging future studies of the nature and consequences of co-migrant interactions.