How do birds regulate body fat as a fuel for long distance migration?
Starlings at the new Advanced Facility for Avian Research take a test flight in the world’s only hypobaric climatic wind tunnel.
How does eating affect their flight performance?
How do the aerodynamics and physiology of bird flight change as they fly at higher altitudes?
With the opening this week of the world’s first hypobaric climatic wind tunnel for bird flight, The University of Western Ontario’s Advanced Facility for Avian Research (AFAR) is ready to seek the answers to these and similar questions essential to our understanding of the increasingly fragile world of birds.
Funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Research Fund and private partners, the $9.2-million facility allows researchers to assess birds’ abilities to adapt to their environment. The magic of the facility is its ability to mimic real-life conditions in a laboratory.
In turn, researchers hope to gain insights into conservation efforts, ecosystem health, disease and how birds respond to climate change.
While there are two other bird tunnels in the world – located in Europe – AFAR is the only one that can simulate altitude, up to seven kilometres or more.
“Birds are an important group of organisms deserving of study,” says AFAR principal investigator Scott MacDougall-Shackleton. “Studies of birds have been critical in both ecology and evolutionary biology, as well as at the forefront of conservation biology. Research on birds is central to many theoretical and empirical advances in science.”
With studies of at least a dozen species at any given point, a lot of attention is being paid to ensuring the birds live in comfortable and realistic semi-natural environments.
Special chambers allow researchers to reflect seasonal changes by varying light and the temperature from 2 to 40 degrees, which is particularly significant to studies of breeding patterns.
“Making the birds comfortable and happy is one of our number one priorities,” he says.
The 13,000-square-foot facility and its hypobaric climatic wind tunnel will allow for study not only of the aerodynamics of bird flight in high altitude conditions, but also how changes in the environment affect birds’ neural and physiological systems, and their reproduction and migration patterns. Researchers can also study flight while altering air pressure, moisture and humidity.
In combination with specialized indoor and outdoor holding rooms and cutting edge experimental and analytical facilities, AFAR becomes a leading centre for the study of avian behaviour.
Western has assembled one of the largest groups of integrative avian biologists in Canada.
“This represents a world-first and a world-leading facility for interdisciplinary study of birds,” says Ted Hewitt, Vice-President (Research and International Relations).
“It provides us with an opportunity at Western to build on our strengths in other areas such as environmental sustainability, wind engineering and neuroscience.”
Selected research topics include all aspects of birds’ annual cycles including reproduction, migration and wintering. This research will help us understand how birds migrate over long distances, how they handle environmental stresses such as habitat change, disease and climate change, and how avian reproduction is affected by changing environmental conditions.
MacDougall-Shackleton notes birds and humans affect each other in positive and negative ways. Habitat disturbance and climate change present challenges to bird reproduction and migration, and their high mobility makes them carriers of disease and parasites.
Studies of birds have led to fundamental discoveries with long-term benefits in biomedicine and agriculture and birds are among the best model systems to study the neurobiology of vocal learning and adult neurogenesis. Conservation and population biology depend critically on birds as biomarkers and birds’ global movements have important implications for human and ecosystem health.
“Our objective here at AFAR is to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines – from ecology, psychology, neuroscience, physiology, molecular genetics and engineering – all having a different perspective and working on the same organism.”
https://birds.uwo.ca/AFAR/Welcome.html
